Short, bite-sized conversations with indie hackers that have started small, profitable and bootstrapped businesses. You'll learn how they come up with ideas, what they do to validate, find those first customers and make a sustainable income.
Building a mentorship platform to $1m GMV - Dominic Monn, MentorCruise
Dominic Monn is the founder of MentorCruise, a marketplace that connect mentors and mentees in Tech, which is currently doing $15k in monthly revenue and processed over $1m through the platform. Previously, Domm was a Machine Learning engineer at Doist, a job that he left in Feb '22 to pursue MentorCruise full time.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Dom left his full-time job at Doist
- How going full-time has impacted MentorCruise
- What Dom’s day-to-day looks like
- Not feeling guilty about unproductive hobbies
- How Dom’s discovered mentorship through Udacity
- Taking 5 months to build an MVP
- Why validation wouldn’t work for MentorCruise
- How it took 3 months to get his first paying customer
- Why he decided to push through regardless
- How persistence pays off
- Why building a business is like building a muscle
- How programmatic SEO works
Recommendations
- Book: Built to Sell
- Podcast: My First Million
- Indie Hacker: Julian Canlas
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👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.