Daniel Johnson on mentoring with GrowthMentor

Mentor story

Midas · 393 sessions

“The most rewarding part is helping a founder, then seeing a review about how it actually moved their business. These are people who poured everything in. That keeps me here.”

Daniel Johnson

GTM & Growth Operator · We Scale Startups

United Kingdom · danieljohnson.xyz ↗ · Jun 2026

Growth Marketing Product-Market Fit Sales

The Work

Tell us about what you do and how you got here.

I'm a GTM and growth operator. I work on the go-to-market and growth side with startups, and I've done a fair bit as a Google Mentor along the way too. A lot of what I do is helping founders figure out the gap between where they are and where they're trying to get to, and how to actually close it.

Most of the value I add comes from pattern recognition. I've seen enough businesses now that when a founder describes their situation, I can usually spot which of the familiar traps they've walked into, and the questions to ask to get them out of it.

Why Mentor

What made you join GrowthMentor in the first place?

I couldn't find a single community that was quite the same. I was part of lots of little communities that helped me in particular areas, but none of them had the culture I really resonated with. GrowthMentor did.

The most rewarding part is being able to help founders and then seeing them leave a review about how it actually moved their business. These are people who've poured so much time and effort into something, and to help them on their journey, that feels really good. That's the thing that keeps me here.

Who They Help

You're a pattern-spotter. What's the pattern you see most often?

It's founders creating something based on what they want to see, instead of what actually exists in the market. Then they validate it through their own biases, and then they come here and go, why isn't this scaling?

I worked with someone recently who was frustrated they weren't growing. They'd evolved past their core job to be done, kept bolting on features, and then ran this massive customer acquisition campaign that got zero results. They were like, what's going on, this should work. So I started asking the right kind of questions, the five whys, what is the problem you're actually solving for your customer. And it was only at that point they realised they'd gone so far off course, purely because they wanted to. That was a real realisation for him.

The fix is almost always the same, and it's unglamorous: do the customer research, and constantly be interviewing. Read The Mom Test, understand jobs to be done. It blows my mind how many people haven't.

A Standout Session

How do you actually run a session so the mentee gets there themselves?

I used to have a formula. Now I don't. It really just comes down to being empathetic, understanding the person in front of you and figuring out what they're trying to achieve from the call.

It's very easy to consult. You can just tell someone what to do. But what you really want is to help them come to the realisation on their own, because otherwise they'll constantly be relying on other people. It's the teach them how to fish thing. I prepare by checking their page and their site beforehand and asking myself what are they actually asking me, and do they even know. A lot of mentees know roughly where they want to be, but they're not sure how to ask the right question. So I try to think that through in advance.

Inside the Platform

How do you give a founder hard feedback without them taking it personally?

Empathetic, but direct. For a lot of these founders the startup is their baby, they're emotionally vested in whether it succeeds or fails, so when you give them bad news they often take it personally. You have to be careful how you frame it, because if you insult their product, or it's perceived that way, they take it as a personal offence.

But you can't hide in ambiguity either. You want to actually add value with the feedback, and you can't do that if you're being vague to spare feelings. So it's both at once: warm about the person, direct about the work.

What They Got Back

Does mentoring feed back into your own work?

Absolutely, all the time. It helps me clarify my own thoughts, which then lets me turn my own experiences into actual learnings. I'll be mid-conversation and go, oh, I've actually thought about this before, I just hadn't articulated it.

Asking other people different questions also forces me to understand different industries and different perspectives. I've had mentees with very little growth experience but great ideas that I've massively learned from. And the network compounds: through being a little bit social with people who share your values, I've worked with mentors on shared projects, through Google Mentors, all sorts. They're interesting people and they're very well connected, so I've met people who are usually quite difficult to get access to.

The Filter

Who makes a good mentee, and who doesn't?

Curiosity, plainly. The best mentees are the ones who ask questions because they genuinely want to understand how things work, the different processes and the relationship between them. That naturally curious type is the one who gets the most out of a session.

The curiosity tends to come first, and a lot of the most curious mentees also happen to run projects that are very financially successful. As a mentor, the equivalent is being able to sit with someone's emotionally vested baby and challenge it without making them defensive.

The Verdict