Where to find mentors and mentees?
Hey, I am building a mentoring app and I am currently in the process of growing a community.
My goal currently is to recruit a small number of mentors and some people that would like to learn from them (primarily in the fitness and programming industries which I am also interested in!).
A lot of these people seem to hang around instagram so I started DMing them but I don't have any social proof in terms of followers so I don't think this is my best bet for now.
I have been a reddit user for a while and have seen multiple people that have a lot of knowledge in these industries so I decided it could be a good place for recruiting. This gets me a fair share of responses but it's more time-consuming since I have to do a lot of scouting beforehand.
I spend a lot of time doing mentor scouting so I was wondering if there was a better way to go about finding these kind of people (they don't have to be experts).
For finding mentees I also do scouting on reddit in learning subs and send individual DMs. Also, I have a blog on medium which I share news about my app on twitter and reddit subs but this hasn't generated interest yet.
I wanted to ask what do you think about my approaches and if you know better places to find mentors and mentees.
I can share my landing page for context in the comments if it helps.
Appreciate any help!
Good initiative but why do we need another mentorship platform when there’s hundreds of platforms out there?
Like @8bit mentioned, if you’re not aware of existing mentorship program, are you really in this game?
Sorry I might not have been clear enough. What I am currently doing is not exactly connecting mentors to mentees on a surface level.
I try to combat existing e-learning recourses like online courses, linkedin learning, skillshare where content is most of the time one-way content sharing.
What I try to do is create a highly interactive platform where mentors can share their knowledge with their audience using actual hands on tools optimized for learning.
This came up from some struggles of me and some of my colleagues (I am a developer) where people usually get stuck on "tutorial hell" and resource reading without actually moving forward. What we found out collectively was that working on projects hands on with a bit of guidance was the fastest way for people to learn new concepts.
Hope this makes a bit more sense now.
Not a mistake at all and you don’t have to apologize, it’s a common journey where you will hear a lot of feedback.
Okay.
So, maybe just myself, but I won’t associate mentor to online learning. Yes, there’s an education element, however I seldom use this glossary in this use case.
How about Codementor (or Arc)? Are they not good?
That's quite helpful actually, maybe I should change the glossary to something more common like "coach". We use a very different pricing model from platforms like Codementor.
For example Codementor charges a mentor rate per 15 minutes and provides (from my understanding) exclusively 1-1 sessions.
What we do instead is keep things extremely affordable, starting at $5 / month.
Also we don't focus on 1-1 at all, instead we heavily try to push "team" features. This helps people encourage each other and not feel lonely. It's also a great way for mentors to not manage each person separately which makes the $5 / month pricing very possible and worth the effort.
yeah, this.
MentorCruise by @dqmonn comes to mind.
There are a bunch of mentor companies built by IHers — just got to Products and search "mentor": https://www.indiehackers.com/products?search=mentor
there are many mentorship groups / orgs... have you pinged them?
No I was not aware of those! Do you have any sources which I can look to?
i don't want to google for you yo... i mean.. there are thousands. i'm a mentor in this right now: https://joindayone.com/