Reached 100 paying customers
by dqmonnToday is the day, I reached 100 paying customers at the same time on MentorCruise. That might sound small for the common B2B SaaS, but mentorships are finite, the average duration of those is only two months right now, so having 100 people paying at the same time is quite an amazing thing for me.
Over the past two years, close to 900 people found and paid for a mentor on MentorCruise. A key thing towards increasing the revenue of MentorCruise has been to keep more people onboard for a longer period of time.
That has worked out well, with the average duration of mentorship rising from ~30 days in 2018 to close to 60 days today. A lot of different factors played into that:
- Training mentors to provide better services
- Clear expectation beforehand, so future churns don't even happen
- Being super easy about refunds -> more returning customers
- Giving out a trial -> people give it more time
- Creating content with success stories, so mentees know that it's worth to hang in there.
Pretty happy about this milestone. I still remember reaching 10 customers at the same time with super high churn, and wondering whether it would go down to 0 again. Or the heartbreak I felt when 5 customers churned overnight, and I went from 12 to 7 paying customers.
To the next 1,000!
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100 is a nice number! Congrats!
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Thanks for doing your part :P
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Hi, We will be signing up and becoming a customer in the next few days. We are completing our project management MVP and looking to be mentored in sales. Your idea is amazing, hope you guys do great.
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Sounds great, hope you find someone!
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how do u do this "Being super easy about refunds -> more returning customers
" I mean how can mentors accept not getting paid if they work with a mentee for 15 days, but then they give a refund -
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I remember learning about MentorCruise for the first time on the Indie Hackers podcast - congratulations on achieving an awesome milestone!
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Bro! That is awesome!
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Congrats! You mentioned that being easy with refunds led to more returning customers. What is your refund policy and do you know roughly how many returning customers it brought you?
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I don't have numbers on this, sorry. The policy is that you get a refund if you are disappointed by a mentor, either through no-shows, lack of communication, mismatch, things like this. Pretty much anything besides being unreasonable (e.g. had someone asking for refunds for 3 months of mentorship, someone who had three calls within a week and wanted a refund...).
Since it's common for people to try out multiple mentors, it's reasonable for me to give refunds if expectations are not met or if someone has missed the trial period end. Again, no numbers, but it has been maybe a dozen people so far, and I see some of the names still pop up today.
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Congratulations Dom!
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Good to see you here, thanks!
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Congrats! I connected with my mentee tonight (3rd try, the first two didn't show up so I started actually changing instead of offering free)
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Probably a good thing :) Thanks for the feedback... How was your experience doing free mentorship? Heard mixed things and contemplating at least doing a $1/mo charge
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This is a very sexy milestone. I am still working on getting the first customer for https://storycreatorapp.com/
I have a few questions if you're up for it. Would you be interested in hopping on a 5 min call?
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Very, very difficult right now :) But this seems super useful, and I think you should start reaching out to 'casual' video creators first (TikTok, Byte, Facebook). I am not your target audience here
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