A platform on paper.
A group chat in real life.
You're competent and you're not lost. You're just alone with a decision you've been carrying too long. That's who we built this for, and the friendships were the happy accident.
The Story
How it all started
For years I'd been the growth guy at a hosting company, usually the only person in the room who did what I did. When I got stuck on a real decision, there was no one to think it through with. So I started hiring freelancers off Upwork, not really for the work, but to have someone on the other end of a call who understood the problem.
Those calls did something I didn't expect. Thirty minutes with a person who had already solved the thing I was staring at would unstick a week of spinning. I'd hang up knowing exactly what to do next.
That was the whole idea. Not a course, not a directory of names. Just more of those conversations, with people who had been exactly where you are, available right when you needed them.
GrowthMentor came out of my own loneliness. The mission has stayed the same since: help people grow together by having more chats.
Foti Panagiotakopoulos
Co-Founder and CEO
What we believe
How we think about this
We started with three values in 2018 and still run on them. Rather than list them on a wall, here is what each one looks like in practice.
01 · Humility
We say no to 95% of the people who apply to mentor.
Being good at your job and being good for a stranger at 9pm are two different things. Everyone who wants to become a mentor gets an interview, and it has to be a vibe fit.
02 · Human relationships
Most of our mentors do this for free.
They could charge for their time, and plenty do elsewhere. Here they give first. It's the rule we run on: the Give First Pricing Model.
03 · Active learning
A thirty-minute call beats another course you won't finish.
There's no shortage of content. What moves you forward is one person who has already solved your exact problem, looking at your exact situation, and telling you the truth.
The Friend Factory
Where internet friends
become real friends.
It wasn't on the roadmap. We built a platform. People wanted to meet in person. So we started facilitating it, and we haven't stopped.
The friendships are the part we didn't see coming. People who met on a Tuesday call are now business partners. Mentees who got help six months ago are now mentors themselves. There are co-founder pairs who met here. There are people who've stood at each other's weddings. There's a Slack channel for almost every city you'd care about, and if you show up in one, someone's already there.
You don't have to fly anywhere to feel it. You just have to be in the room (any room) and stay long enough for the relationships to do their thing.
One of our members, building a startup with his co-founder, put it like this:
“It's such a safe space, my co-founder and I don't feel alone in our journey anymore.”
Keerthan Diddige
Co-Founder, Sharp Education
The team
We're a small, international team that has been working on this since 2018. Most of what matters here happens between members, not us.
Our investors
We never raised a round.
Our investors are the people in this grid.
No VC ever wired us a dollar. A few thousand members funded us instead, with a membership, a real question, and thirty honest minutes of their time. The only dividend we pay back is in 1:1 connections that change a company, a career, or a Tuesday.
Hover or tap a face to see what they got back
“I realized that I can achieve the same results as in accelerator, but quicker, and without giving any equity!”
Tamir Levy, Ph.D.
Equitest
Come find people
who get it
