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 DoistHow going full-time has impacted MentorCruiseWhat Dom’s day-to-day looks likeNot feeling guilty about unproductive hobbiesHow Dom’s discovered mentorship through UdacityTaking 5 months to build an MVPWhy validation wouldn’t work for MentorCruiseHow it took 3 months to get his first paying customerWhy he decided to push through regardlessHow persistence pays offWhy building a business is like building a muscleHow programmatic SEO worksRecommendationsBook: Built to SellPodcast: My First MillionIndie Hacker: Julian CanlasFollow DomTwitterHire him as a mentorPersonal siteFollow Me👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.TwitterIndie Bites TwitterPersonal WebsiteBuy A Wallet2 Hour Podcast CourseSponsor - AhrefsThank 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.