Getting Started

How do I find a mentor through GrowthMentor?

First, you’ll want to visit the “browse mentors” page. You could just start scrolling.

But, since we have more than 700 mentors, you’ll want to narrow down your options first.

Within our mentor search, you can apply filters to search for mentors with specific skills, software expertise, industries, or current and former companies. There are 275 different software areas to filter by, 30 skill areas, 300 industries, and more than 100 mentor companies.

For example, let’s say you’re facing questions about building a team for a SaaS industry company and you want a mentor with experience in both of those areas. All you have to do is check “Team Building” under skills, for 278 mentors:

And then, after a quick search for “SaaS” under “Industries”, check that box to narrow your field down to 107 mentors:

We usually recommend applying no more than 2 filters at a time, as certain filters (such as a mentor’s previous or current company) can pinpoint fairly specific results.

But in some cases, your filters may still yield a fairly large pool of potential mentors, like our 107 SaaS mentors with team building experience above.

To focus your options even more, you can search for specific keywords in our general profile search. Within our “SaaS” and “Team Building” filters, a search for the keyword “app” produces 39 mentor options, a search for “founder” yields 47 options, and a search for “accelerator” produces 15.

From there, it’s just a matter of browsing your options and determining which mentor seems like the best fit for you.

How do I book calls with mentors?

Once you’ve picked a mentor, you’ll hit “request a call,” choose your session duration (either 15, 30, or 60 minutes), pick a call location (Zoom, Google Meet, or our GrowthMentor video rooms), then choose a session time and answer the following questions about your challenge:

Your mentor will confirm the request and the call will take place over video conference like most mentoring platforms.

How do I make sure I choose the right mentors?

Sometimes you’re in the throes of decision fatigue and simply don’t have the time or energy to sort through even five or ten mentor options.

Situations like these are exactly why we built our new AI matching engine:

Simply describe your primary pain-point, add your desired outcome, and in a matter of minutes, you’ll be matched with three different mentors who will be a great fit to help with your challenge.

Then, it’s just a matter of booking your call and asking your questions.

What’s the GrowthMentor Philosophy?

Is it for you?

Who is GrowthMentor a good fit for (and vice versa)

The short answer to this question: founders, marketers, growth practitioners, and product folks.

The long answer to this question:

If you’re a founder or product person, GrowthMentor fulfills a very specific role in helping expand your horizons. We cover 34 different skill areas, including product management, team building, sales, and customer success. You can learn about any of these areas, uncover new skills and get the holistic understanding of how the elements of your company or product work together.

When you understand the whole machine, you can make better decisions to make your company or product work better, faster than you ever thought possible.

If you’re in marketing, you’ve also come to the right place. We specialize in it. Of the 34 skill areas, 11 are marketing focused.

Here’s the breakdown of mentors in our marketing skill categories:

• Growth marketing: 268 mentors list as expertise
• GTM strategy: 198 mentors listed
• Content marketing: 169 mentors listed
• CRO: 157 mentors listed
• PPC: 108 mentors listed
• Email marketing: 102 mentors listed
• SEO: 91 mentors listed
• Marketing automation: 90 mentors listed
• Product marketing: 56 mentors listed
• Social media: 56 mentors listed
• Copywriting: 55 mentors listed

You can get mentorship in almost any area of marketing you can think of, with practical, hands-on advice about your specific problem.

And finally, for the growth folks, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, as the name implies, we focus on growth. 556 of our 700+ mentors mention growth in their profiles, 269 specialize in growth marketing, 136 in growth strategy, and 26 in growth product. You know growth practitioners see the world through a different lens. Don’t you want a platform that will let you talk to plenty of mentors who see things similarly?

Who is GrowthMentor not a good fit for?

• anyone looking for long-term mentorship with a single mentor
• anyone needing assistance with engineering and development related areas like coding.
• anyone that is looking for hands-on help, not just verbal advice.

Best practices

How should I choose my mentors?

We’ll start off by saying there is no magical list of traits that will ensure a mentor is a good fit for you and your startup. Yes, experience in your industry and an understanding of a startup’s needs for your maturity level matter. Yes, soft skills matter.

But, a mentor may have all of those and still not be a good fit.

Ultimately, your relationship with a mentor is no different from any other relationship. It’s going to be based on any number of intangible factors that determine if the two of you “click” or not.

However, there is some homework you can do ahead of time to narrow your search to people you are more likely to click with. Let’s cover some do’s and don’ts.

Here’s what not to do:

DON’T: Get caught up in pursuing a mentor solely because of the companies they worked for. Sure, it can be amazing if someone has worked at a Fortune 500 company or a unicorn that seemed to break out overnight. But what worked for those companies may not work for your startup.

DON’T: Prioritize possible mentors due to their reputation. We know. It’s easy to get starry-eyed if you meet a big name at an event. But just because a potential mentor is well-known doesn’t mean they’re going to be a good mentor for you.

DON’T: Blindly follow every single channel a potential mentor has simply because you’ve heard they’re “the best.” You want to consume a possible mentor’s content critically and see if it really resonates with you.

If that’s what you shouldn’t do, here’s what to do instead:

DO: Look for potential mentors who you admire and whose paths mirror where you’d like to be in the future. This is all about being authentic and really asking yourself what you want for your startup. Becoming a unicorn is a noble goal, but is that really what’s going to make you happy or are you dazzled by the limelight?

We hear about the hyper-growth wunderkind founders all the time. But there are hundreds if not thousands of founders who have built amazing, stable, sustainably growing companies that you’ll rarely see lauded in tech news. So think through what you want and find a potential mentor whose path could serve as a blueprint towards your goals.

DO: Look for potential mentors whose background, skill-sets, industries, and beliefs are similar to yours, but not carbon copies. It’s great to sit down and talk shop with someone who knows your industry and shares the same strengths.

But, you want your mentor to push you a little outside of your comfort zone, without feeling like they’ve shoved you out of it. So just enough similarity, usually along the lines of industry and startup maturity, is the key.

DO: Consider the personality of your potential mentor and whether it works well with your preferences. Mentorship comes in all different styles: straightforward, cheerleading, guiding, even questioning. Most of the time, you’ll have a preference for one or two styles. By engaging with a potential mentor’s content, you’ll usually get a good grasp of their personality and likely mentoring style fairly quickly.

How to have a great first meeting with my mentor?

Staying focused will help you to make sure that your meeting is productive and a worthwhile use of your time. Sessions usually last for 15-60 minutes and so you’ll want to make sure that every second counts.

Have realistic expectations before you start and don’t try to cover too much. Remember that they’re mentors and not magicians and that they won’t be able to solve all of your problems in a single call.

We’ve specifically designed the GrowthMentor session request page to push you to answer the following two mandatory prompts:

Please describe your challenge or pain point: A place for you to brief your mentor on the issue that you’re facing. Try to focus on one key challenge per session and to pick your biggest challenge for the first meeting.

What’s the desired outcome of this call?: Answering this will help your mentor to understand what success looks like to you so that they can reverse engineer a path from where you are now to where you want to be.

Once you’ve selected your mentor, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the contents of their GrowthMentor profile page.

While you’re at it, you can also click through to their LinkedIn profiles and send them a connection request.

Have a look at some of their past work and take notes on the highlights. That way, you can reference it during your call to show that you took the time to understand them and how they can help you. It’s a great way to build rapport.

A lot of this is simple stuff, like showing up on time and letting your mentor know if you’re going to be late. If you need to cancel, give them as much notice as possible. Remember that a lot of mentors (67% on GrowthMentor) are offering up their time for free.

Make sure that you’re not the only person talking, and don’t try to tell them your entire life story. There’ll be plenty of time for that later on as you continue to work together.

One tip is to look at the clock and to be mindful of how long you spend talking. If you’ve been talking for over two minutes, take a breath and just pause for a few seconds, something good might happen.

Remember, they didn’t agree to a call just to hear you talk.

Finding a mentor isn’t a short-term fix, and if you want to see results then you need to be in it for the long haul.

Try to be likable by doing the basics: be friendly, receptive, polite, and appreciative.

After the call, spend some time writing a thank you message, and be sure to leave a thorough review.

Follow them on social networking sites and start interacting with their posts by liking, sharing and commenting on them.

If you found their advice useful, follow up with them to let them know. Remember, this is what they do it for – they want to feel like they’re making an impact.

If you’re not transparent with your mentor then they’re not going to be able to help you.

Give them the details that make you feel uncomfortable and go out of your way to share wherever possible relevant metrics and numbers like conversion rates, LTV, CAC,  churn stats, and growth rates.

The more data that you give them, the more they’ll be able to understand your business and give you advice that helps.

Think of it as a counseling session – if you want results, you need to open up and be honest.

What’s some best practice advice from the community?