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16 Comments

Little Success: Decreased Churn -20%

A big difficulty about running MentorCruise is the fact that churn is quite high. Naturally, Mentorships end at some point. Either with a good outcome after a few months, or with a bad outcome after 1-2 weeks. In rare cases, mentorships stay active for 1 year or more. One of the biggest problems for our growth has been this fact.

I've been continuously tracking the amount of mentorships that are still active after 60 days. When I started doing so, only 30% of mentorships were still active. Today, we broke the 50% mark.

In detail, what we did was:

  1. Allow mentees to have multiple mentors, therefore (1) get a broader coverage of help and (2) have the possibility to try out more.
  2. Create a better notification system for mentors to get rid of #1 cancellation reason (slow response)
  3. Manage expectations that mentors can not reply in a few minutes all the time.
, Founder of Icon for MentorCruise
MentorCruise
on July 18, 2019
  1. 3

    I liked @nlowell 's comment about emailing people about starting a second mentorship in a closely related/higher level situation.

    Another thought is to focus more on referrals. As you said, good mentorships end after a few months. Maybe there's an opportunity to get people who have a had a good experience to refer people to your site.

    Matt

    1. 1

      Appreciate that! I've thought and planned referral strategies for a while, but never ended up with a system that makes sense. I think now slowly I'm in a spot where I could offer mentorship credit if a referral is successful.

  2. 2

    I don't know what your current strategies are at all, so I'm just throwing out some random ideas that might help:
    -Do you send email to people finishing their first mentorship to start a second at either a higher level of the same field or a separate but closely related field?
    -Do you do a lot of email reminders in general?

    Expectations management is really important and sometimes harder than people realize! Best of luck improving yours! Sometimes the only difference between a bad product experience and a good product experience is what the user's expectations were going into it.

    1. 2

      Hey, I really appreciate the input!

      • I don't, that could be a good idea to tap into "inactive" users again.
      • I do! Either during the mentorship (new messages, start of a week, check-ins, ...) as well as to all users. I send out a newsletter with new mentors and features every 3-4 weeks. That usually converts quite well.
      1. 1

        The follow-up email at the end of a mentorship could also be a good opportunity to ask for feedback. The customers should be able to tell you more about what's keeping them around or bothering them more than I can, of course. One more idea I have is that your check-in emails could include some guides or cool blogs related to whatever your user is getting mentored in. It might be a nice way to keep them thinking about the topic and to provide some easy value to them. Depending on how many topics you're offering, it could be a lot of work to compile those resources, but maybe you could ask all the mentors what their favorite blogs and guides are.

        1. 2

          I have a pretty good feedback loop set up, that I really like. I like the idea with regular or semi-regular check-in mails though, seems like a great thing.

          1. 1

            Oh, awesome. The last idea I have that might help the churn is that even in the case where a mentorship ends on a good note, you could ask the mentee if they feel comfortable enough to become a mentor themselves.

            1. 1

              Damn, that's an incredible idea!! Thanks

  3. 1

    It's a very good website and you get 40k page/views per months (according to similarweb, which is not 100% accurate). For this reason I am surprised by the MRR. For me thst says one of two things: 1. The traffic is not relevant to your website 2. The visitors don't find what they were looking for.

    Only you, with the analytics data can answer, but if the problem is the second it means that you need just a pivot in the right direction to have a great business in your hands.

    1. 1

      Ha, no - I wish. My traffic stats are public here on IH, I'm at around 3k users/month right now, with spikes here and there due to content.

      1. 1

        That's strange, usually the numbers are pretty accurate. I thought that the traffic data on IH weren't updated. Still, even with the 3000 unique visitors, you should get at least 100 paying users per month. What's your conversion rate?

        1. 1

          Unfortunately it's not that easy as a marketplace. It's not a SaaS (even though a productized service will be the next step), I only get a cut of the revenue and I'm selling a highly priced service to consumers, so the lifetime isn't super long.

          My conversion rate from visitor to application (intent) is around 6%. Then there's about a 50% dropoff of who gets accepted and rejected from mentors, and about a 20% dropoff to people who don't pull through with the payment.

          1. 1

            6% is good. The 50% dropoff is not, why is that? Don't have enough mentors to cover everybody or they refuse to work with people who don't reach minimum qualifications?

            1. 1

              Wide variety of things, I went through the rejection reasons a while back, and most of it is personal (time-constraints, not confident enough to help reach a high goal, mismatch in skills).

              I think this is getting better since I allowed people to have multiple mentors (2-3 months ago), not sure how that dropoff evolved since then

  4. 1

    MRR still at $570/month? What's the lifetime value of a mentee? What's the highest recorded number of weeks a single mentee has paid for?

    1. 1

      It has been down and up, but yeah - at $570 MRR at the moment. I don't have a firm number on the lifetime value, but the average mentorship costs $26 per week and is 5 weeks long, so a single mentorship has the average value of ~$130, which translates to roughly $20 with the cut that I take as a platform

      The second question is fun, had to look it up... The longest active paid mentorship has been around for 57 weeks :) June of 2018, about 3 months after launch.

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