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Comment by yunusabd | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the launch! I haven't tried it, but a few questions come to mind:

1. Isn't mentoring more of a long-term thing, where you interact regularly and the mentor is invested in some way in your success? To me it looks more like one-off advice, maybe this could be called "micro-consulting".

2. How do you ensure the quality of the replies? For example, I can imagine mentors giving canned responses without going into the specifics of your individual case.

3. Kind of in the same vein, do you provide pointers for asking a good question? Asking good questions is an art in itself, I can imagine it's difficult for a lot of people and greatly influences the quality of the reply.

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Thanks! These are all great questions. My responses below:

1. A large portion of the purchases are repeat and some of our mentees are more than 50 questions (100+ messages) in with their mentors. It does raise the question of offering bundles vs a subscription bases model for repeat use, which is something we are experimenting with at the moment.

2. The mentees get to rate their mentors after they receive a response and we spend time with each mentor during onboarding to make sure they understand the importance of a personalized experience.

3. This is an extremely good point. We do provide question prompts and bullet point the types of questions each mentor can answer. We are still experimenting with this to find the optimal solution. We track this by looking at the conversion rates and the types of questions that result in actual transactions (users are prompted to type in or record a question in advance).

Just seeing this now, great response! This basically answers all my questions. The only thing I'm left wondering is if somebody has been cheeky enough to list their mentor as an advisor or some kind of endorsement on their website.

Come to think of it, this could be another source of revenue down the road: After x sessions you can request an endorsement, at the mentor's discretion, which you can then use e.g. for marketing or fundraising purposes. Just an idea, I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities once you really get the ball rolling. Good luck!

Very cool idea. There is a fine balance between maintaining the authenticity of these types of endorsements and making them available for anyone to request. I do like the thinking behind this though. Thank you!

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