Saturday Startup Review II – Mentorsquare.com – A Mentoring Platform
(2 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)
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This is the second startup we are reviewing in the day and its probably the most interesting ones that we’ve reviewed till date. Reason? Well thats because a lot of times entrepreneurs have turned VC but rarely does a VC turn into an entrepreneur! Yes MentorSquare is a startup that comes from the Mentor Partners stable a pretty well know Venture firm in the Indian space.
One sentence description: A platform for connection and conversation between mentors and entrepreneurs
About the startup: The startup is focussing on democratizing the mentoring process by bringing all the mentors and the entrepreneurs on one platform. The revenue model is ofcourse via subscription through entrepreneurs.
About Founder: As stated earlier the founder is Ravi Narayan who is also a MD at Mentor Partners a VC firm.
WAT’s HOT: Well for starters this is a completely vacant space! Mentorsquare has no direct competition except for maybe GENportal which is an initiative by IIT ECell Mumbai. But even that can’t match what these guys can do as Ravi is a known space in the venture space and has closely worked with startups as he is on the steering committee of Proto.in the startup event.
But besides for being an innovative initiative from an idea perspective there is also a dying need for such a networking platform because there are too many raw entrepreneurs i.e. first time entrepreneurs that are around across the board in the Indian business space and given the reserved culture in India no one seem to be wanting to part with equity for mentorship. This platform provides a solution to a very strong need.
WAT’s NOT: Well what’s a little grey area is the interest of mentors and their availability and response times. I spoke to Ravi and he stated that there were already 35 mentors on board and they were working on keeping the response times lower than 48 hours. Well so far so good is all I will say. It isnt easy to manage this kind of platform where demand far exceeds supply i.e. number of entrepreneurs over mentors. Also the other issue is what if a college student and aspiring entrepreneur poses really basic questions? To which Ravi stated that their plan was to recruit a set of baseline mentors who would take care of basic questions.
Well all I can say is it wont be easy to maintain quality and thats something the mentorsquare team would have to watch for. But all in all this is surely an impressive startup idea. Also given that a VC has turned entrepreneur there shouldn’t be any problem of funding and scaling Im guessing and also for a change it would be nice to see VC’s walk the talk!
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Rajiv,
When art thou going to get your tenses right?
“..as he was on the board of Proto.in the startup event.”
He still IS one of the steering committee members of Proto.in.
Thanks Vijay. I stand corrected.
Hehe. Thanks
I have noticed that a lot of indian web startups are spending so much time, money and effort into launching successful ideas however the basics of setting up global access for their users to access the website is neglected.
In this particular case, one must add www. before the website address to be able to access it.
http://mentorsquare.com/ is not setup properly in DNS system where as http://www.mentorsquare.com/ works fine.
Perhaps I should launch a consultation service to hold hands for setting up the proper protocols before they get millions in funding (oh wait they already get that even with faulty configurations)
I was wondering what would be the motivation for mentors to spend their valuable time with startups. Do they get paid by Mentorsquare on an hourly basis . If yes how much can mentorsquare pay them .
What could be the motivation for mentors if not money . because we have to understand that they are spending quality time from their schedule which is going to be pretty costly
what are the chances that someone will get across an interesting start up and establish a personal relationship with them and start mentoring them for an equity