Free usually means a catch. So what’s ours?

Free usually means a catch.

A free puppy comes with ten years of vet bills. A free trial wants your card on file. The free consultation is a sales call in a nicer shirt.

So when people land on GrowthMentor and see hundreds of mentors they can talk to for nothing, the honest first reaction is suspicion. What is the catch, who is paying for this, and how.

You are right to ask. So let me answer it properly.

The question most people land on is whether free mentors are any good. I think that is the wrong question, because it assumes the mentor is doing you a favor.

The better question is what the mentor gets out of giving you an hour. Answer that one honestly and the catch either shows up or it doesn’t.

So we asked them. We sat down with 35 of our mentors, on camera, and asked them straight why they do this for free. What follows is mostly them talking, not me.

What the mentors get out of it

Start with the suspicion underneath all the others. Nobody gives real expertise away for nothing, so there has to be an angle.

There is an angle. It is just not the one you are bracing for.

Zev Asch has been a business coach for over 30 years. When I asked why he gives his GrowthMentor calls away for free, he told me the free part is the point.

"I think we’re having better conversations when the tension of monetary rewards are not there."

Zev Asch · Business coach, 30+ years

Read Zev's story

Once money is on the table, both people start performing. The mentor guards their rate, the mentee worries they are not getting their money’s worth. Take the money out and the call gets honest. Several of them told me that, in different words.

The pattern held across the interviews. The doubt you show up with, and the reason they actually gave, rarely line up.

Free does not mean the B-team

The next worry is that free means second string, that the good ones charge and the free ones are the leftovers.

It runs the other way here. We accept under five percent of the people who apply to mentor, and that bar is the same whether a mentor ever charges a cent. The scarcity is on getting in, not on a price tier.

Plenty of the mentors who could command a high rate give their sessions away anyway. I wrote about why the best ones do that in a separate piece. John Kilmer is one of them.

"GrowthMentor was a place where I could give my time and my skills, my knowledge, but also my failures, my mistakes, and give people an edge where they may not have to go the same path."

John Kilmer · Founder, ValiCor US

Read John's story

What he hands over for free is the expensive part, the failures he already paid for so you do not have to repeat them.

You will not get pitched

The fear that is most justified, honestly, is the pitch. Plenty of free calls in the world are a setup for a close. So we made a rule out of it.

Every mentor agrees up front that GrowthMentor is a no-pitch zone. They are here to help, not to sell you their agency or their course. A mentor who turns calls into sales pitches does not last here, members tell us when it happens and we act on it.

Look at who shows up to these things.

Name tags, drinks, people who travelled to meet mentees and other mentors face to face. None of them are there to close you.

So who is paying for this

Here is the honest part, the one that sounds like a catch until you look at it.

You pay GrowthMentor a flat Pro membership. That funds the platform, the vetting, the meetups, and it gets you access to the mentors.

Mentors can charge if they want to. Once a mentor has earned a few reviews they are allowed to set a rate, and some do, usually when they are short on time. You see the rate before you book, and there is never a pitch on the call nudging you toward it.

Most of them never switch a rate on at all. The large majority keep their sessions free, because for them the free part is where give-first pays back, in the ways they just told you. So the model is honest and plain, you pay for membership, the mentors are mostly free, and the few who charge do it in the open.

If you want the longer version of why this works, it has a name, give first, and I have written about it at length. The short version is that the mentors here get something real out of these calls, and almost none of it is money. They told us what it is, and not one of them needed a catch to keep showing up.

So, is there a catch?

There is one fear I hear more than the rest, that booking a free call is somehow overstepping, taking up too much of a busy person’s time for nothing back.

Vassilena Valchanova hears it too, and she wanted me to pass something along.

"There’s nothing farther from the truth than that. I love following up with people and seeing how the project grows in time and how it develops."

Vassilena Valchanova · Digital strategist, Valchanova.me

Read Vassilena's story

So that is the catch, if you insist on calling it one. The mentor gets a good conversation, a fresh problem to chew on, the small proof that what they learned the hard way still helps someone. You get the hour.

Book the call. The worst case is you take thirty minutes from someone who, it turns out, was hoping you would ask.

Mentors who give first

Still wondering what the catch is?
Book a call and find out there isn’t one.

Browse vetted startup and marketing mentors and book a 1:1 on-demand. Under 5% get in, it’s a no-pitch zone, and most mentors are free. One membership, book as many calls as you like.

Find a mentor