Product
Why we built a marketplace into a mentorship platform
Mentors were already sending files over email. We decided to stop pretending that was not part of the product.
Marco Ferrari
24 July 20266 min read
Watch what people do with a product for long enough and it tells you what to build next. In our case it told us something we had been avoiding.
The file was always part of the session
Mentors kept ending calls by promising to send something. A template, a checklist, the spreadsheet they built three jobs ago. Then it went out over email and nobody saw it again.
That file is often the most reusable thing a mentor owns. It gets made once and helps everybody, which is the opposite of an hour, which gets made every time.
Selling it elsewhere costs more than the fee
The alternative was sending people to another platform, asking them to make a second account and hoping they came back. Every hop loses people, and the person who was about to buy is the person you already convinced.
Keeping it in the same account means the audience you built teaching is the audience you sell to. No hop, no second checkout, no new profile to maintain.
It changes what a slow month looks like
Sessions stop when you are ill, on holiday or busy at work. Files do not. For most of the mentors we spoke to that is the difference between a side income and an unreliable one.
It is not passive, whatever anyone tells you. You still have to make the thing. But you make it once.
