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This is fascinating work. Love seeing how you’re combining machine learning with practical coaching to support real accent improvement. The concept of an “accent fingerprint” is especially clever, and the visualization of progress in latent space really brings it to life. Excited to see where you take this next!

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!

The fireside chat concept could work well. Especially if the folks in the audience don't have access to these opportunities otherwise and can sigh up individually. Thanks for sharing these ideas Dan!

The duration of the responses will be increased to 9 minutes on the next release. We have received feedback from some of the mentors on this and have observed some mentors sending more than one response to 1 question. That said, the experience is meant convert into as a dialogue, which it often does.

Customized talks for cohorts os users is an excellent idea. What type of talks would you like to see, just out of curiosity? Pre-recorded, customized sessions, and live videos with groups that can send in questions have been discussed.

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).

The conversations/exchange of messages are private between the mentor and mentee. The identity of the mentees and their questions are never shared without prior consent. Mentors and mentees agree to terms that protect their privacy. We ask that mentors accept the terms before onboarding.

Thanks so much! If you want to learn more hit me up and if you know of anyone that would be a fit as a mentor we do have referral program.

We get that comparison quite often because of the asynchronous format. One big difference is that most mentorship experiences are repeat and evolve over time.

Thanks for the feedback. Our observation has been that people primarily seek out mentorship to help them make decisions and offer guidance on topics that affect them on a personal level. We have kept the categories where we see users coming back frequently and dating seems to do that because the advice tends to be personal by nature. I hear you that it is very different that career type of advice, though. Appreciate the input.

Thank you! The widget definitely makes sense--right now, we give each mentor a unique link that directs to their profile page on a browser, which we encourage them to share in social media profile bios etc. The early mentors all came in through our own outreach. Now we are getting about 50% from referrals and inbound requests.

These are great questions. In the fundraising example, the mentor wouldn't watch the pitch in full, but instead answer specific questions around a pitch, for example what valuation cap to set, KPIs to highlight, when to raise and from whom etc. The typical interaction goes beyond just one question and answer. The duration of each response is capped at 3 minutes but a mentor can respond with multiple recorded messages. The biggest reason we haven't started offering live calls yet is because of scheduling challenges; that said the asynchronous format is just a start and we are thinking about other formats and features for future releases.

Thanks Dave! :)

Hey HN community! We are Ben and Rune, founders of Mentorcam (https://mentor.cam/), a marketplace where people can access public figures and high-profile individuals for personalized 1:1 advice. These types of individuals tend to be difficult to access and usually don’t make themselves available for advice to people they don’t know, but often get bombarded with inbound requests. By letting them set their own price to answer questions privately via short, asynchronous video messages on our app, we make it feasible to offer individually tailored advice without having to schedule anything.

For example, one of our mentors is Chris Yeh, a VC and the co-author of Blitzscaling. He uses Mentorcam to give fundraising advice, feedback on pitches, input on GTM strategy, etc. to people that wouldn't have access to him otherwise.

Users have told us that they’ve had the most impactful "conversation" of the their life on Mentorcam and that they’ve found the inspiration to fight through difficult phases of their life through their interaction with their mentor. Our customers have used Mentorcam to do things like get fundraising advice, decide on where to go to college, transition careers, and find a girlfriend. The latter surprised us, but demand for dating advice has turned out to be high, even though it's not the main thing we're focused on.

Happy to answer questions and read comments!