We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dominic Monn. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dominic below.
Hi Dominic, thanks for joining us today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.
Getting your first customer is extra tough for a business like MentorCruise, which is a two-sided marketplace. Building a two-sided marketplace often means you have to fill one side of the equation before you can fill the other one, and the first side often doesn’t bring in any revenue for your business.
That was the exact case for us as well. What ended up happening is we were building a coaching marketplace and so you actually need to acquire coaches first before you can bring in clients. And so I actually spent a lot of time and energy in just acquiring coaches I looked up to and in terms I was hoping that other people would look up to them as well and start booking them.
It was a bit of a drag. It took us three months to acquire a list of like a hundred coaches. We ended up launching. We ended up getting like 10 or 15 coaches to sign up with us. And, you know, going from there just because those coaches had their own network going, we then ended up getting bookings very soon after and got our first few mere cents of revenue.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I come from a self-taught background. I got my first job as a software engineering trainee when I was 15 years old and kind of just went from there through the tech industry including various startups in Silicon Valley as well as a stint as an internet NVIDIA.
So navigating career challenges is not something new to me. It’s something where I’ve learned just how important it is to have someone in your corner, how important it is to have the right connections in the industry, and coming from that background that doesn’t usually give you access to that sort of stuff. It was a very clear fit for me to say, “This is something that I want to work on.”
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
For about five years I was building MentorCruise as a side project while holding down full-time engineering jobs. That hasn’t always been easy, especially because day jobs can take a lot of time and that time directly goes away from your own startup and also just if the day job gets stressful that impacts the side project. If the side project gets stressful that’s something that impacts the day job.
So initially, obviously as the business was kind of just small and growing, there wasn’t as big of an issue, but as the business kind of started getting some speed, I had to cut back on engagements in my day job, switching jobs to other positions that would provide me with more time for my side project, and then ultimately I obviously quit my day job to be able to focus on the business full-time.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
A lot of our competitors early on were kind of looking for shortcuts. They were looking to build a very profitable, high-growing business. And I think in many cases that broke trust with the market. And it is a market where trust is very, very important. For us, as a bootstrap business, it has always been kind of a slow ramp up. We were able to design a business where all the incentives are aligned of all the people involved. So we were able to build up a community that kind of had more trust. And in return, it’s something where people still come to us today. And they’re saying both as a mentor and as a mentee, it’s one of the services that they appreciate the most. Because of that kind of trust and thought that has gone into building the product over the years.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mentorcruise.com
Image Credits
All mine