Story about Mentedy — My Startup Odyssey
What could be the most exciting aspiration for a designer? For me, it was (and still is) building my own SaaS startup. I’ve tried once and I’m excited to share the story — a journey of friends coming together to chase a digital dream. Join me and dive into the tale of turning aspirations into a reality.
Intro: From the Noodle Soup to the Doors of Venture Capital
It all began with a bowl of noodles 🍜 and a dash of coincidence. Picture this: an Asian restaurant in Budapest, 2018. Two old high school buddies, Lukas and I, found ourselves talking about life over a juicy meal. Little did we know, that noodle dinner would change the course of our lives for a long time. It’s funny because back in high school Lukas wasn’t able to do simple math and he’d evolved into an extraordinaire programmer while I had delved deep into the realm of product design. It’s incredible how people can improve themself if they invest energy into it. And exactly about that was our project.
Some people are lucky enough to have someone by their side with a ton of experience, who can guide them through life’s twists and turns. Some are left to navigate the journey alone. That’s when inspiration struck — why not create an innovative space where seekers could effortlessly connect with mentors, sparking personal and professional growth?
So there we were, fueled by noodles and a shared vision, taking the first steps toward what would become our brainchild — Mentedy. Late into the night, accompanied by the tunes of Alt-J and a few beverages (yes, those bears got involved too), we made a pact: Let’s turn this idea into a reality. And just like that, our wild journey into the world of mentorship had begun.
From Zero to Hero
Once we got home, we hit the ground running. Our vision? Build a mentoring hub that’s rock-solid in reliability. It wouldn’t just find you a mentor, it’d orchestrate the whole journey — scheduling calls, hosting lessons, and even handling payments. Ambitious? You bet.
We mapped out a plan and core pillars and I got to work sketching wireframes and defining the core elements. We aimed for top-tier mentorship quality. So, we aimed to control the entire mentoring process, which led us to dive into creating our own video call and messaging feature. Lukas dabbled in web RTC technology, and we cooked our very own video call and messaging version — back then called Mentory.
But hold up, did people even need this mentoring platform? Was it something that people would find valuable? To decode this mystery, I started a fact-finding mission. Armed with a survey, I dive deep into the minds of potential users, tapping into their views on mentoring and education. I also interviewed friends who were already riding on the mentoring wave.
Guess what? A specific group of people was hungry for growth, both personal and professional. Armed with this intel, I translated it into designs, creating screen mock-ups and pathways that would guide users through the Mentedy experience and we ran the usability testing.
As the wheels of progress churned, we recruited a new ally — a fellow Michal, an enthusiast who also helped us with development. With this expanded team, we cooked up a better name: Mentedy.
Lukas took the stage and showcased our idea at the T-mobile rozjezdy startup event. The pitch sparked curiosity and positive vibes. Seasoned startup gurus, like the CEO of Apiary, showered us with praise, and suddenly, we were in the spotlight, featured in local papers 💪. The road was clearer now, and the energy–electrifying. Mentedy was blazing its trail in the startup world.
Key lesson: Don’t hesitate to share your idea. It can bring you valuable feedback and connections. While there’s a chance that someone might steal your concept, the real magic lies in execution, which contributes over 99% to your potential success. Plus, you’re likely not the only one exploring the same idea, so it’s an execution race to bring your vision to life as first.
Steady Progress in Dual Realities
The challenge? Balancing this aspiration with our full-time job. But here’s the twist — we made significant headway in just a few months, burning the midnight oil. I laid the foundation for the Mentedy brand, crafted and coded our initial landing page, established our online presence, and initiated our first interactions with the world.
Why did we go with the elephant in our logo? Because this animal’s truly one-of-a-kind. It’s a mix of super–strength and gentleness, with wisdom that comes from experience. The elephant stands for good fortune and success, but the elephant is also a symbol of tackling challenges head-on and defeating negativity — and those were the right attributes of Mentedy.
Fun fact: We definitely weren’t superhumanly strong, but Lukas and I won bodybuilding championships in Czechia at our 17 years, which surely shaped our resilience.
Simultaneously, the essence of our app crystallized — we’ve built and improved login flow, mentors list, user setting, and also our video call & messaging platform where you could suggest the times for mentoring.
In the middle of this, a game-changing message from Lukas arrived: “I just left my job to focus solely on Mentedy.” While Lukas’s bold move impressed me, it posed a unique challenge since it didn’t align with my prevailing life strategy, preventing me from taking the same step.
Nonetheless, Lukas’s decision turbocharged our progress, compelling me to devote mornings, evenings, and weekends to keep the design and other product management on track. This intense commitment paid off, but it had also costs.
A few months later, we reached the milestone — the moment of introduction of Mentedy to the world. We set up a simple yet effective social media campaign to let the world know that we existed. But a complex riddle lay before us: How could we entice both mentors and mentees to join our platform? The chicken and egg problem was ahead of us.
We aimed to apply a service fee for each mentoring session, adaptable based on the supplementary services that mentees could opt for, such as a guarantee. I’ve put together a basic financial model with three distinct scenarios. Our analysis defined break break-event point: achieving a monthly average of 150 to 200 mentoring sessions. This was a point where operational expenses would be in harmony with our day-to-day livelihood costs.
Seeds of first user acquisition and engagement
Our initial focus was on mentor recruitment and the goal was to onboard 80 mentors with complete profiles onto the platform. I researched and reached out to around 250 potential mentors across Czechia and Slovakia through emails and LinkedIn and I conducted this outreach in batches.
In the first batch, I directed the initial 80 mentors to a Typeform survey, whose structure was aligned with the Mentedy user settings. This approach allowed us to manually create mentors' profiles directly in the database and at the same time present this option to the user as an exclusive opportunity. It was a crucial step because if we shared a direct link to our empty app it would hardly attract anyone to take action and register. Our conversion rate was remarkably positive, resulting in the creation of about 50 mentor profiles.
During this phase, we enhanced the usability, reliability, and visual appeal of our app, transforming it from garbage to quite a solid product. It turned out to be a robust solution that offered more functionality than we initially envisioned. We've built a streamlined scheduling flow, messaging system, in-house video call solution, and rating mechanism. As of now, it seems we’ve overbuilt the MVP for this initial phase, but all the functionality came in handy in the later pivots.
For our second wave of potential mentors, I followed a similar approach, but this time, we already had a landing page so we provided a direct link from where they could go to our app and register as mentors.
This marked the first instance where we observed first user interactions in our analytics. It was a remarkable moment — our effort was paying off. Over 90 mentors joined our platform, and within the first week, three mentoring sessions were scheduled without any additional promotional efforts. One mentoring session even successfully took place, underscoring the genuine desire people had to share their experiences.
Embracing Change
As the mentor acquisition went relatively smoothly, we found ourselves struggling with the mentees' acquisition. However, we faced a lack of mentors equipped with high-demand skills, coupled with the steep hourly rates of most mentors. This combination with limited acquisition channels and modest traffic, pushed the break-even point further into the distance.
So ahead of us were questions like “How can we get more mentees into the platform? What is stopping adoption? Do we need to start paying for promotions? How to get more traffic? and we needed to find the answers to these.
We held off outbound marketing and paid promotions. Why? Because putting money into ads wouldn’t bring any returns at that point. Our Mentedy platform didn’t have a payment system in place yet, so monetization was still a puzzle. Besides, we discovered that most mentoring sessions were happening for free — a common trend. We also predicted that even if we introduced payments, people might just bypass our system and pay mentors directly. It was the early days, and we had a bunch of hurdles to clear.
The game changer
Then came the unexpected game-changer: COVID-19. The world shifted, and so did our perspectives. We saw an opportunity to reshape and validate Mentedy’s potential. This led us to onboard our first salesperson, Lukáš Lískovec, who introduced us to a promising collaboration with the student organization of CVUT University — Spolupracujeme. Their vision aligned perfectly with ours. They wanted to repurpose Mentedy for their community, enabling students to connect with business experts. COVID-19 prompted us to broaden this concept — it wasn’t limited to only students so anyone could participate in the mutual mentoring community. We tailored a new instance of Mentedy to fit this vision, accomplishing the changes within two weeks. The Spolupracujeme team enthusiastically joined forces with us, spreading the word and bringing their community on board.
The collaboration proved to be an immense success. Mentedy gained substantial exposure, drawing in around 250 mentors and consultants who generously volunteered their expertise and I participated as well. Seeing our app in action was an empowering experience. This achievement also caught the attention of one of the Czech well-known newspapers — Hospodářské novinky, leading to a surge in traffic and interest. And the reliability of our platform was really strong, even in situations like mine when I had a video call with a mentee based in Australia.
Key lesson: Becoming a user of your own solution is essential. By experiencing it firsthand, you can truly understand its strengths and weaknesses. This firsthand insight is the key to identifying problems and crafting a valuable solution.
One extraordinary moment stands out vividly. I remember it as if it happened just now. I was driving, when suddenly my co-founder Lukas phoned me and said — pull over and listen. Lukas’s words came through the phone, electrifying the moment: I just spoke with the CEO of digiskills.cz, who is impressed with our solution and wanted to delve deeper into discussions about a potential collaboration or acquisition. The recognition and interest from the CEO of Digiskills.cz affirmed that we were onto something valuable. Yet, despite these milestones, we remained in the early stages, offering our platform for free. So path to profitability and monetization was still on the hot list to figure out.
Key lesson: We should have a better strategy, say no and think within a horizons and not to try nurture every opportunity. But this is easy to say now, in reality you desperately need to find product market fit and you will chase every opportunity.
The Dance with Pivots — Exploring B2B
During the pandemic, reskilling and upskilling the workforce, skill management, employee learning motivation, and engagement in the corporate landscape became critical problem as everyone was working remotely.
In this period, I was working as a product designer for the Czech travel-hacking company Kiwi.com. I engaged with HR leaders and uncovered their pressing challenges. The lack of a straightforward method to locate skilled people and potential mentors within the organization, and the increasing knowledge gap were issues they wanted to overcome. Inspired by the potential to revolutionize this space, I pitched our app to Kiwi.com’s Head of Learning and Development and explained how our app can help with their challenges. Their enthusiastic response hinted at a promising B2B opportunity.
I persuaded my co-founder to hop on the B2B journey. At that time our team was strengthened by one more guru, of programming, Erich. We initiated the development of a corporate version for Kiwi.com’s needs and simultaneously pursued sales to other IT companies. I firmly believe that the ultimate test of a product’s worth is when someone is willing to pay for it — and that I wanted to achieve it. As a first step, I crafted a simple landing page, secured a new domain, and delved into sales — an invaluable experience.
In just three months, we customized our app and initiated an enablement process. This led to a significant achievement: launching MentedyHub — a knowledge-sharing platform in Kiwi.com for a six-month pilot. This marked a pivotal milestone on our journey. However, the pilot test revealed a gap between our hopes and the reality. Initial enthusiasm from leaders didn’t translate into the desired level of engagement of end users. Though we onboarded many Kiwi’s employees, active involvement remained a challenge.
With Kiwi.com backing us, I dared to showcase our product to other tech players. Tech companies were logical targets due to their openness to innovation and available budgets. We haven’t reached out to every tech company, but we had a specific target profile — dynamic digital-first startups and thriving businesses with a proven track record of growth, innovation, and a strong commitment to cultivating their people’s potential. Despite my lack of sales experience, I was able to book discovery meetings with Productboard, Miton, and Tipsport. They showed genuine interest in testing our product’s value through pilots.
However, roadblocks arose. Security concerns and app implementation complexities arose, causing setbacks. We admitted that we weren’t fully prepared for this step and decided to step back, leading to some lost opportunities. While it seemed there was a market gap waiting to be filled, the problem of involving end users and automatic skill mapping within the organization remained unsolved.
Key lesson: The ultimate validation for product-market fit is when someone is willing to pay for your product — not only once, but repeatedly.
Third pivot — Navigating through venture capital
While we were putting MentedyHub to the test with startups, we also joined the Slovakia-based accelerator program called PerryTalent. Although our primary focus remained unchanged, we were intrigued by what the startup world and community could offer us.
The response was almost immediate. Following interviews, it was clear that PerryTalent was interested in us. Venture firm, Zaka.vc also expressed interest, leaving us with a great sense of validation.
Upon entering the accelerator cycle, PerryTalent wanted to experience MentedyHub firsthand. They managed all joined startups, mentors, and investors manually, lacking visibility to all community interactions. We customized MentedyHub as a white-label solution for PerryTalents and together we’ve formulated an enablement strategy. The value was evident: offering a platform that would showcase mentors and investors based on skills or interests, and also supporting the startups enrolled in the accelerator program through mentoring.
This provided a strategic advantage to PerryTalents compared to other accelerators. Notably, Y Combinator, the best startup accelerator in the world, has also digitized its accelerator experience with a similar solution.
The launch turned out to be a massive success throughout the Slovakia startup community. Our inbox overflowed with daily registration emails. The media, including newspapers, Forbes, and Slovakia television also noticed a triumphant moment and the peak of user engagement on our platform. A significant milestone arrived when we sold a white-label license to PerryTalent. The attention from other accelerators expressing interest in our solution hinted at a potential alignment with the market’s needs.
What did it look like? Take a look at the video below— I admit, there’s room for improvement from a design perspective. But here’s the thing: there’s a difference between what you as a designer envision in tools like Figma (or back then, Sketch) and what you can actually bring to life as a co-founder. And this always comes with trade-offs. Especially when you’re crafting the first version of your brainchild, the trade-off is often substantial.
Key lesson: Don’t underestimate the significance of visual design. In a landscape of intense competition, your product can’t afford to look like garbage. It’s not just about aesthetics, it holds a profound psychological impact on users. You’d be amazed by how a simple, elegant illustration or animation can forge a powerful connection with your product. Moreover, neglecting visual appeal from the product development will lead to a design debt that’s challenging to catch down the road.
Yet, another venture capital firm, Startup Den, reached out, initiating discussions about pre-seed investment. We came close to a deal, but we encountered issues. The investment would require selling a significant share of our company, jeopardizing our future decision-making power and independence. Moreover, the financial aspect posed challenges. While the proposed investment of 300–400K EUR for around a year and a half, to support a team of 5–7, might sound decent, it didn’t take into account all the fixed and operational costs, leaving very little for our livelihoods. On top of that, the Russian invasion of Ukraine added another layer of uncertainty to the mix and we decided to step back, recognizing the absence of a win-win scenario.
Key lesson: Creating a digital product is a challenging journey that demands a particular mindset from you and your co-founders. Certainty is rare, so being prepared to pivot your idea is essential — it’s almost inevitable. As your solution interacts with the world, you’ll receive feedback that requires your response. ~40% of startups pivoted at least once before landing on their winning idea and oftentimes more than once.
A little surprise, the last one
With determination, we wanted to do another push. We envisioned crafting a solution that satisfies the needs of accelerators and the startup community. Our goal was to replicate the success we had achieved once before — selling our solution to other accelerators. We were hopeful that this time, we’d crack the code, secure early adopter customers, and pave the way for a sustainable business model, allowing us to transition to full-time involvement.
However, shortly after the investment discussions, my co-founder dropped a bombshell and told me “I’m done and don’t want to proceed further.”
His energy and excitement shrunk. Considering the 3.5 years we had spent juggling this project alongside our personal lives, his decision wasn’t surprising. Building a startup is rewarding, terrifying, and exhausting — usually everything at once. Continuing without him felt futile, and so, this marked the end of the journey and we completely shut the Mentedy down.
Mentedy Epilog
You know, creating something meaningful is undeniably challenging. From the outset, you’ll joggle with two critical resources: time and energy. When opting for bootstrapping, a brief window opens where your finances allow complete dedication to your idea. Simultaneously, energy becomes a finite resource, shared among you, your co-founders, and your loved ones.
I consider myself fortunate to have embraced the full spectrum of struggles and triumphs. I lived the life of a true startup enthusiast, witnessing the dream firsthand, and it was an incredibly rewarding experience full of mistakes, learning, and correcting. Rarely do you get the opportunity to nurture your brainchild. I’ve experienced remarkable moments, gathered priceless lessons, and uncovered doors to new possibilities that a conventional design job could never offer — and yes, I would do it again.
Last key lesson: Culture is the key element of a startup any size. I think many founders don’t realize it, but a robust culture becomes the driving force, greatly enhancing company overall value — Work with people who want to conquer challenges, who dare to change the status quo, who are bold but also humble. Work with people who provide support and courage during difficult times, and who will dance next to you in good times.
And your thoughts? — love hearing from ya.
