marketing, investment, sales, product-market-fit, leadershipI started a business a year ago and have learned the hard way how difficult it is to succeed when you don’t know marketing and sales.
Therefore, I’ve been reaching out to experienced people who can help guide me in the right direction for marketing, sales, and finding product-market fit. The biggest concern/ hurdle I’ve experienced reaching out to mentors is asking them for their time with a solid whats-in-it-for-me reason to meet with me once a month.
I don’t have significant revenue right now and am a solo operation.
What are ways that you’ve been able to get mentors excited about what you’re doing and about advising you?
I once “paid” two different mentors for business advice by buying them lunch, and having our discussions there. This worked well for me because I never felt like I was wasting their time, and I assume it worked well for them since you have to eat anyway. One of them I didn’t know very well and he seemed honored that I asked for his advice. I’m pretty sure he would have met with me without the free meal, but I find spending an extra $15-$20 on lunch well worth it. One important point though, you need to make it very clear that the purpose of lunch is to “pick their brain” or “get advice from someone already established in the field”. Most of the time when a business owner is asked to go out to lunch they assume it’s a sales pitch, and will automatically decline.
Once you meet with your mentor, I don’t think there is a secret recipe for getting them excited, as that is highly dependent on your business model and the personality and interests of the mentor. In my case one of my mentors was happy to help and decided to get involved in my business. We were able to define measurable goals and worked out a commission structure based on the result of the changes he recommended. It ended up being beneficial for both of us.
As more of a technical mentor myself, I find the discussions I have are generally helpful to me in both reflecting on scenarios and gaining a different person’s perspective on individual issues. So even if I am clearly the mentor in a meeting, there is some distinct mutual benefit - in the absence of any direct reward.
This does assume you can show you’re able to drive issues on your own, and can make the mentoring process effective - you need to show you’re not simply looking for some easy leads.
I can connect your situation to mine when I was running a startup(now acquired).
We had approached a mentor, whom my co-founder knows very well, and also who is a veteran in the industry/domain. And as he liked the idea and is close to my co-founder, he readily agreed to mentor us, not only with the product but also with things like fund-raising, talking to VC’s etc.
Mentors are people who are well versed with the startup domain. So, they do understand that early-stage startups can’t really have a lot to offer for them. However, they choose to mentor startups which they believe has potential for nice growth.
So, they tend to mentor for free (generally) till you are ready to raise the first round of funding, and then they themselves help you out by giving funding. If they don’t lead a funding round, then you can always pay them back with equity and shares when you raise funding.
So, in the initial stage, you can’t do much except try and convince them that your idea has a potential for growth and their mentorship would be definitely paid back and is worth the time put, when the startup takes flight.
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