The Founder’s Guide to Mentorship

Building a startup is hard. I knew there were going to be challenges building my startup that would either kill us or take time to overcome.

But few of the challenges you face in business are unique — they’re new to you, but they’re not new.

Having great mentors can be a game changer.

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I have been pushing myself out of my comfort zone to connect with mentors who have been through similar challenges while building their own business, and the lessons they have shared have been priceless

In this post, I’ll go deep into the approach I took working with mentors.

Be Clear — What Do You Need?

We grew a lot in our first month at HelpFlow, but naturally started having some people choose not to renew their service for the second month.

My background is in marketing services / consulting, so when a client says “we’re not going to continue working together” it means you’re losing a $3–5K/mo client and probably 10–30% of your total revenue.

When 1 or 2 people said “we’re not going to continue with HelpFlow after this month…”, I freaked out a bit.

But then I got more clear with what questions I needed to answer in order to move forward:

• What is a “normal” amount of customer churn to have at our current size?
• Here’s why I think we’re having this happen, and here’s what I’m doing right now to overcome this. Is there anything else I should be doing now, which I’ll realize in a few months?

I had no idea what the answers were, but I did have clear questions I needed to find answers for — this is the key first step.

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Someone Has The Answer — Find Them

It’s hard to find someone to mentor you if you’re not clear about what you need right now.

But once you know what you want, it becomes a lot easier.

• Who in your network has a business that would experience similar challenges?
• If you don’t have anyone in your network, start researching entrepreneurs that blog about their business adventures.

I had been following Dan and Alex at WPCurve.com — they inspired me to start HelpFlow as a “service as a service” business. I had been keeping in touch with Alex via quick emails every week or two, but was now ready for a full call with him to dive deep.

Resources to Find Mentors

Here’s a few helpful resources to find a mentor:

• Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics has a detailed mentor guide here
• Michael Hyatt has some great ideas for finding virtual mentorship opportunities through the eight levels of mentoring.
• Billy Murphy and Jayson Gaignard share some interesting tips in this podcast about how to find a mentor.

Ask Clear and Concise Questions

I didn’t reach out to Alex and say “I have a few questions — can we jump on a call?”. Instead, I was super specific with where the business was at, the challenge we were facing, and why specifically I wanted to speak with him.

Do As Much As You Can Yourself

If you’re going to meet with a mentor, it’s best for everyone if you spend the time on questions and insights that couldn’t be answered any other way. Not only is this more valuable for you, but it’s more fun for the mentor since it’s a deeper discussion.

Remember, my questions for Alex were around “cancellation / churn” and “showing value”.

I dug deep into other resources to find answers.

• Here’s a post that details how WP Curve faced churn and how they handled it.
• Here’s a post that goes deeper into customer onboarding processes

Our service was solid and providing value, but we weren’t doing a good enough job showing the value to customers consistently.

I implemented the “obvious” solutions before our meeting:

• We launched a “weekly summary report” right away.
• We created simple but effective value sharing content to use during the customer onboarding process, and started sending out re-purposed versions of this to current customers so everyone experienced it (not just new customers in future).

I was also concerned about the money back guarantee we were offering.

• I felt it was too long, and a bit risky as we started to scale up if more customers cancelled and requested the refund.
• I brainstormed a few ways to restructure the refund to be great for the customer, but also fair to us.

These are basic things, but not something I had focused on while getting our first few customers. But now that I was going to be asking “What should I do to solve (x)?”, I wanted to make sure that I’d already addressed the basics.

Be Transparent — Show Everything

So many entrepreneurs get scared to share the details of what they’re doing because someone might “steal the idea”. I’ve always felt like if the idea is easy to steal, then it’s not a good idea.

I didn’t initially share deep details with Alex, but knew I should at some point. Alex sent me a really low pressure note after booking the meeting.

I shared quite a bit of context with Alex so all of my cards were on the table. While this is obviously helpful for him, it’s actually more beneficial for me because he now had all the info I had and could use this, and his experience, to identify paths forward that I wasn’t seeing yet.

Short Focused Meetings

We scheduled a 30 minute GoToMeeting video conference, and dove right in.

I briefly summarized our main challenges, and what we’re doing to overcome them. These were already in the email, so Alex was aware.

I asked Alex to poke holes in my current plans, and share any lessons he learned with similar challenges in WP Curve that would probably happen to me in the next 1–6 months.

In short, Alex was from the future, and I was trying to get his perspective on what I was facing and would be facing in the months to come.

Take Notes & Next Actions

I recorded the audio of the call with Go To Meeting, and also took brief notes of key items I wanted to listen back on later.

Immediately after the meeting, while my head was still turning over what we talked about, I summarized the notes and got clear on next actions from the meeting.

At this point, I had a few key insights and clear action items to move forward on from the meeting.

Commit, Execute, and Show Progress

At the end of the meeting, I briefly shared what I would be working on next, and that I would share specifics with Alex shortly after finalizing my notes.

For context, my key items were:

• Don’t shorten the guarantee period, although that felt like the “safe” thing to do to avoid doing tons of work and then having a customer request a refund. Alex changed my thinking on this guarantee period being a risk to me — it’s actually a huge asset… (more on this below).
• Show value, but focus on getting more customers as priority #1. Don’t over engineer the reporting or value sharing process — the weekly reports and onboarding emails are enough.
• Operate like a Swan. Everything should look smooth and seamless to the customer, but underneath it’s ok if the operations are really hectic and unscalable.

Immediate Wins

I had already started implementing the weekly reports and onboaring emails prior to our meeting, but I put Alex’s advice re: the guarantee to use right away.

He recommended extending the guarantee for any customer that seemed like a good match but was considering cancelling.

One of our customers the fit this profile emailed me the day after the meeting and said he didn’t want to renew for the following month due to budget constraints.

I used Alex’s specific recommendation:

I offered to extend the trial by 2 weeks, and the customer ended up opting to simply renew for a full month and not even worry about the extended 2 week trial.

I shared the win with Alex and let him know we’d be in touch in a month or so with progress.

The Quick Start Guide

I didn’t want to cloud this post with too many specific insights and actions items related to HelpFlow, but thought the overall experience and approach to being mentored could be helpful for other founders facing challenges that a mentor could help with.

• Get clear on what your challenges and questions are
• Identify specific people that have overcome similar challenges
• Reach out to them with a specific question, and ask for a 15–30 minute call
• Give them as much context as they want re: your business so they see what you see, and can share insight you’re not seeing yet.

What’s the best advice a mentor has giving you recently? What’s a challenge you’re facing right now that a mentor could help with?