MagicalRaccoon
MagicalRaccoon
Student

Building a startup

I am building a platform which would help aspirants get connected with peers and mentors to get guidance about their respective domains. How should I attract initial users?

22mo ago
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions
Round 1 by Grapevine
SleepyPotato
SleepyPotato

Small market Existing competition Aspirants aren’t exactly the ones who have the buying power Lack of moat

Still if you want to go ahead

  1. Forum / Communities
    Use every forum and community where these aspirants are and ideally let your mentors answer their questions on these platforms, if the aspirants are looking for a deeper engagement then they’ll come to your website

  2. Website content - Blogs and Q&A Develop a nice SEO friendly blog, Q&A and AMA section

  3. Website SEO optimisation
    To drive traffic to the above website properties focus on the following

  4. Lighthouse score of each page should be >92

  5. Website structure and page structure (SEO markups)

  6. Connect with high ranking websites in your niche and convince them to link to your website (backlinks)

  7. Focus on long tail keywords which the competition isn’t focusing on due to low search volume to rank for those keywords first and then slowly move up the chain after dominating the low volume low competition search terms

  8. Schools / Colleges guest sessions Ask your mentors to do guest sessions in schools and colleges nearest to them (to save time and money), this should be maximised and the registration for such a session MUST be through your website to drive traffic and awareness

  9. Focus on getting Mentors who aren’t motivated by money Mentors who have achieved even slight success in their life would be earning 50 lpa+, so even if you offer 10k an hour won’t be enough for them if they’re evaluating it purely financially and if you focus on only young mentors then you’ll have to get a whole bunch of new mentors every year which will also have an acquisition cost

  10. Focus on a niche at the start Before you become everything for everyone be something for someone - great product advice

You anyway won’t be able to launch all categories like JEE, NEET, CAT, GRE, GMAT, IAS, etc all at one go Focus on one or two and really mail it before moving to the next one

JazzyBoba
JazzyBoba
Adobe22mo

There are many other similar companies already

BouncyBagel
BouncyBagel
Google22mo

Example?

WigglySushi
WigglySushi
Student22mo

Unstop, any other platform which is selling a course allows you to access the mentor ?

PrancingCupcake
PrancingCupcake

How are you structuring it financially- free, free+paid, paid?

Topmate does the same job. What different thing you would be doing ? Find your unique selling point - create good content around it - slides/pics/video. Demo it on social media.

Ask people if they are looking for mentors or seeking to give mentorship under a free service initially. Test your product in market before going full on. Plus, yoh will get few initial users.

Hope this helps in getting initial users.

Discover more
Curated from across
Indian Startups
by MagicalRaccoonStudent

Startup idea review

A platform for long term mentorship where users can connect with professionals to get guidance for getting into their desired organisations or universities. It would be a close-knit community where only 3-4 students can only join for a ...

Business Roles
by FloatingTacoSpotDraft

A question to Grapevine Founder/team

Hi @Grapevine team and Community marketing enthusiast who have worked on 0-1/1-10, We are building a community app related to dating and figuring out unpaid marketing channels what will work or not since we don’t have much money to do pa...

Indian Startups
by MagicalPenguinData Scientist

Need Advice to Get Users for my B2C startup.

I am running a bootstrapped B2C startup, and our Product(app) is in the market, the domain is pure tech, like productivity tools for end users, One thing we are facing problem is acquiring users, as our product is not based on dopamine r...

Indian Startups
by BouncyKoalaSoftware Engineer

How to Kickstart a Startup idea as a Fresher

I have a unique idea to revolutionize online medical services using AI with good key concepts, which stands out from existing solutions in India and globally. While I prefer not to share the idea here, I already have a solid concept, a s...