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Researched profile. Starter Story's AI research system compiled this page from 36 public sources — the founder didn't write it. Automated research can misread or misattribute a source, so treat figures as best-effort. How this works →
How MentorCruise Grew
Hire professional mentors for career growth.
How did MentorCruise grow?
Summary of the sourced claims below
MentorCruise initially grew through content marketing and SEO, leveraging blog posts and organic traffic from search engines, which led to backlinks and visitors from sources like Reddit. Word of mouth also played a significant role, especially as prominent industry mentors joined and their networks brought more traffic and bookings. More recently, MentorCruise has invested in paid advertising on platforms like Meta and Google, spending around $1,000 per month and aiming to push growth further. Additionally, the company sustains growth through a combination of an affiliate program, a referral scheme for mentors, encouraging mentors to share more, and maintaining a community blog.
Channels
18 channels · grouped by how MentorCruise grows
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Word of mouth
· 6 mentions · 5 sources“what happens is a mentee signs up for Mentor Cruise as a mentor, has a really good experience, goes to their boss and says like, hey, I'm getting tremendous amount of professional value out of this. Would you be open to like reimbursing me for this through my learning budget, something like that?...”
highShow 5 more quotes
“There was a lot of the followers of the initial mentors who said, Hey, I wanted to talk to you for a while. So let's get started...So they were able to bring more people in.”
medium“But in the end, it’s all about the service. The fact that existing mentors tell their coworkers and friends. The fact that mentees write about us and tell their friends. It’s a nice network effect where every new mentor usually also attracts other mentees and mentors.”
high“As a marketplace, MentorCruise always had a certain level of virality and word of mouth built in. This was only accelerated when many of the mentors that joined were prominent members of the industry. Once their networks would find out that they were available as a mentor, we got some more traffi...”
high“As a marketplace, MentorCruise always had a certain level of virality and word of mouth built in. This was only accelerated when many of the mentors that joined were prominent members of the industry. Once their networks would find out that they were available as a mentor, we got some more traffi...”
high“Right at the beginning, it was really just the quality of mentors. The fact that they came with a network and just kind of encouraging them to share that they're available now. So at the beginning, it was very much more of a, the people have been around and would probably have been open to mentor...”
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SEO
· 5 mentions · 4 sources“I had a solid background as a technical writer. So the first real traction channel that opened up was content marketing and SEO. I simply started blogging through my own product, which led to some first backlinks and visitors from other sources, like Reddit. I realized that SEO would become and s...”
highShow 4 more quotes
“And then over time, I built this, you know, this base of mentors...And then also some SEO effect kicked in where people actually searching for mentors got shown our website on Google.”
high“Turns out, their mentor profile got indexed by Google and when they were researching about this known developer figure, they found the offering and took the chance. So, I’d say this was probably how we got our first 10 paying customers.”
high“I had a solid background as a technical writer. So the first real traction channel that opened up was content marketing and SEO. I simply started blogging through my own product, which led to some first backlinks and visitors from other sources, like Reddit. I realized that SEO would become and s...”
high“somewhere along the line just got kind of overtaken by actual marketing strategies, which was like SEO at the start, later on email marketing, paid ads, all of that.”
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Organic social media
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“The strategy was clear: They’d all sign up, share their profile and all their followers would come streaming in. Well, that didn’t happen of course. Out of the 100 interested people, around 10 ended up signing up, and maybe one or two of them ended up sharing their profiles elsewhere.”
highShow 2 more quotes
“But especially after I had built the MVP, I concentrated 100% on marketing. And that's where I tried out a lot of things and just reserved 20-30 minutes per day to try out a new channel, to post things on Reddit, to write something.”
high“What I definitely remember is what worked much better than cold email was Twitter DMs for me. So I ended up investing a lot of time and effort into that just because you at least have a face there.”
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Advertising on social media
· 2 mentions“Only this year, we also started investing in paid ads through Meta and Google. We’re currently spending $1,000 per month on these and are usually around break-even, with lots of potential to push further.”
highShow 1 more quote
“Only this year, we also started investing in paid ads through Meta and Google. We’re currently spending $1,000 per month on these and are usually around break-even, with lots of potential to push further.”
high -
Email marketing
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“you said, I just wrote 120 emails. And so you went into your database, you queried all of your Power users, these are mentees who've been signed up with mentors for six months or more, who've paid over $1,000 for Mentor Cruise over time, and you wrote a personal, unique email for each and every o...”
highShow 1 more quote
“somewhere along the line just got kind of overtaken by actual marketing strategies, which was like SEO at the start, later on email marketing, paid ads, all of that.”
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Pay Per Click Advertising
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“So I call it marketing, but the tasks vary quite a bit, anything from like actually publishing SEO blog posts, which are probably marketing and reviewing paid ads to having like a partnerships call, doing a podcast, stuff like that.”
highShow 1 more quote
“Today, we do a lot to sustain our growth and momentum. We have a new affiliate program, we run a referral scheme for mentors, we do paid ads, we ask mentors to share more, we have a community blog and incentivize mentors to do well.”
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Partnerships
· 1 mention“So I call it marketing, but the tasks vary quite a bit, anything from like actually publishing SEO blog posts, which are probably marketing and reviewing paid ads to having like a partnerships call, doing a podcast, stuff like that.”
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Referral Program
· 1 mention“Today, we do a lot to sustain our growth and momentum. We have a new affiliate program, we run a referral scheme for mentors, we do paid ads, we ask mentors to share more, we have a community blog and incentivize mentors to do well.”
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Personal network
· 1 mention“And many of them stayed for many, many years. Some of them are even active today and they were definitely also, I'm going to say a handful of them were the ones that also got the first mentees in just because they had the network and the followers and yeah, the reach to back it up.”
medium -
Direct sales
· 1 mention“My marketing days, you know, I call them marketing days, but they're also a little bit like everything else days where, I mean, you can classify as you want, but like cold emailing and stuff like that, it's, it's more like sales, I guess.”
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Webinars
· 1 mention“We've been doing a lot of free webinars as well where people join, do a live stream, and you can spend an hour with an expert, not in a one-on-one setting, but you can ask some questions and maybe get a bit of a better insight.”
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LinkedIn
· 1 mention“I was reaching out to people on Twitter. And I think probably a few hundred people, actually. People who work in tech, who are more on the senior side. But also a lot of people who have a certain audience and following. And I was DMing them and asking, hey, I'm building this platform...Would you ...”
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Reddit
· 1 mention“And that's where I tried out a lot of things and just reserved 20-30 minutes per day to try out a new channel, to post things on Reddit, to write something.”
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Podcasting
· 1 mention“So I call it marketing, but the tasks vary quite a bit, anything from like actually publishing SEO blog posts, which are probably marketing and reviewing paid ads to having like a partnerships call, doing a podcast, stuff like that.”
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Organic network effect
· 1 mention“So again, it's a little bit of a flywheel and a lot of great network effects where just continued growth drives more growth.”
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Cold outreach
· 1 mention“Before launch even, that was 2017, 2018, I typed out something like a thousand cold DMs and emails to mentors just trying to like get their opt-in to the platform and to see if they would be interested in mentoring.”
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Network effects
· 1 mention“And also what's probably the strength, there's a lot of downsides to building a marketplace, but this is one of the strengths where if you acquire one side, which is usually a little bit easier to acquire than a paying customer, they might bring in the paying customers themselves. So they do the ...”
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Affiliate program
· 1 mention“Today, we do a lot to sustain our growth and momentum. We have a new affiliate program, we run a referral scheme for mentors, we do paid ads, we ask mentors to share more, we have a community blog and incentivize mentors to do well.”
high
How 3,222 businesses grow
Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each —
MentorCruise’s highlighted.
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Referral/Word-of-mouth64% ◀
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Social media63% ◀
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Search/SEO58% ◀
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Email47% ◀
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Community37% ◀
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Content/Inbound35%
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Partnerships32% ◀
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Events24% ◀
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Paid ads23% ◀
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Outbound/Sales19% ◀
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Press/PR17%
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Marketplaces/App stores12%
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Podcasting4% ◀
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Influencer partnerships3%
