MentorCruise

Today is the day. MentorCruise has processed and paid out $1 million to mentors.

Craziest part? At the current pace, we'll have another million processed in just about 10 months 🤯

Indie Marketplaces can succeed 💪🏼

I've spent a good chunk of time in the past two weeks on interacting with Machine Learning experts and soaking up their knowledge. Out of that, I've built this book list: https://mentorcruise.com/books/ml/

Reddit and HackerNews really seemed to like it. I got #1 on /r/MachineLearning and as far as I could tell about #3 on the HN frontpage. At the peak, I've had over 250 people on my site at every time.

It's a vanity of course, and nothing that changes the trajectory of my business, but I got a few new customers out of it and definitely a lot of fun :)

Did the bookkeeping this morning and am super close to breaking the $2k MRR mark (the net revenue was something along of $1,945).

This is super mind-blowing to me, because my revenue was flat for the longest time, and suddenly my app grows by over 200% in two months.

For reference, this is my hockey stick revenue graph :)

I just hooks into my post from earlier this week again.... I wanted to give up six months in at somewhere around $200 MRR. I thought about it again when I had my first revenue drop exactly a year ago (back to $350 MRR). And now this!

Don't give up on your dream if you believe in it. Sounds awfully cheesy, but keep fighting through it!

Just feeling happy and blessed today.

After my last update of breaking $1k MRR, I got a lot of good feedback acknowledging that it was a hard path with a lot of failures to get there, and that people shouldn't get frustrated with taking a little bit longer to get there.

Since then, I have seen a lot more threads on IH about people giving up because they only reached $150 MRR in their first three months, or nobody signed up for their product after their big ProductHunt launch. So, let's sit down for another lesson in learning how to build businesses.

It takes a lot of time, and a lot of patience. This month, 2.5 years into building mentorcruise.com, I have achieved 50% growth for the second consecutive month. How did I do it? I don't really know why it's happening now, and not a year ago. I iterated, I experimented, I talked to a lot of people, and at some point, after 2,500 commits to the codebase, over 100 blogposts and recruiting almost 300 mentors by typing out thousands of emails, I might be a little bit closer to the mysterious Product-Market Fit than a year ago. Close enough that people post about it and tell their friends.

But honestly, MentorCruise is a product that has grown very, very slowly for a long time. It went from $200 MRR to $300 MRR, then to $250 MRR to $350 MRR, back to $200 MRR. Over the years, I learned more about my own business, what works and what doesn't and came to the point where this is actually useful to people.

I understand that it's discouraging to launch your baby on PH, get 10 upvotes, no traffic and no customers. Believe me, been there. But giving up after a few months is no attitude that leads to something. If you believe in the thing, try to nudge it into the right direction.

So, 50% growth this month. How did I do it? I don't know dude. 2.5 years of preparation, patience, disappointments and grit. I'm sure you can get there too.

Just ran the numbers, and I reached the goal that I had set for 2019 with a few months delay – I made over $1k MRR for the first time!

Now, this milestone is always a little bit tricky. For me personally, having people share this always made me a little anxious, and I'm sure there will be one or two other people who share this sentiment now, with this post. Especially when people reached this after 6 months or so, I felt like all I am doing must be wrong.

But don't forget this: It took me over 2 years to get here!

It took me so long because this is a project I started from zero. I had (almost) never made any money on the internet, and certainly didn't build anything with traction before. Plus, I was 18 or 19 when I started, was missing a TON of experience.

Overnight successes are not a thing. A project might reach this milestone in a month, or 6 months, or a year in the making, but it's rarely only that. Behind these products are also people who had dozens of failures and years of experience.

So, let's go into some of the issues that I have made over the past two years, and I hope it can help some of you not to do the same thing and hopefully reach this milestone faster:

• I built an extremely overblown MVP over a 4-5 month period, which slowed me down even after launch and often made no sense to customers
• I believed 'marketing' was plastering my site all over Reddit. I had to find channels that work for me in months of exploration work, produce a lot of content and make a lot of mistakes to find something that works. I am still finding new channels today (the latest one are Facebook groups who appreciate my content!)
• I was too scared to charge more for a long time, when most people didn't mind
• I wasn't ready to take big risks in fear of losing my tiny little MRR. If you don't live from this, take all the risks that you can. I should have experimented with business models, pricing and billing a lot earlier.

And finally, some things that I did right, and hope you will too:

• I didn't give up, even when it didn't grow for a long time
• I built an audience over the course of two years, wrote a ton of blogposts, collected a lot of e-mails, visited a few podcasts
• I always stayed true to the mission, made a lot of friends (your best ambassadors) that way.
• I read a lot, listened to people who went through it all before, avoided common mistakes
• Visited IndieHackers every day :)

Today 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!