One of the other projects I am working on is Deal Lite, where we capture investment data, refine and enrich them, and share with Techcelerate community and subscribers (you can subscribe for £5.32/month). I have been doing this with my wife since May 2018 and we kept it going without interruption for well over a year.

As my work escalated at Techcelerate, our ability to continue and not miss weekly releases became somewhat harder. This got worse in Q1 2020. We lost the subscribers we had expect for three. The initial idea was to generate sufficient subscription revenues to justify the first hire outside Ranaweera family members.

This wasn’t happening, and when Bhanuka Harischandra launched Rooster, I took a chance and advertised for a data entry role. From among the candidates who applied, Safiya Marzook impressed me. Safiya started work immediately and was able to catch up quickly and deliver at a quality I am happy with.

Until Mitesh Madaan came along, every step of the workflow was manual. We collect data from emails and other resources onto a spreadsheet. We refine and enrich the captured data. Then we create sentences manually from that data to be included in the weekly deals newsletter. This simple exercise is time-consuming and adds no real value but fundamental to our simple operation.

SkilledUp Life’s predecessor allowed me to publish an Opportunity requesting voluntary help. Mitesh who was introduced by Bemali Wickramanayake applied and produced a script to automate this manual process. Whilst this may be seen as something small in the world of tech, for our little operation, this saved me significant time spent weekly.

Now having shared the story, where does “a little appreciation goes a long way comes from”?

Most of us lead busy lives. How often do we have time to show our appreciation for another human being for an act they have performed?

I published a post of gratitude on Linkedin. And Mitesh responded to it with his own. And it demonstrated how much an impact the opportunity had and what it meant to him. For me, this is a great outcome, as this is the type of response I want to create from SkilledUp Life.

Thank you Mitesh.