Ask HN: Founders, have you ever mentored someone or been mentored? I've read that having a mentor can really help when you're a startup founder. But how do you set up an effective relationship? Do you have regular meetings? How often? Is it helpful to have a standard agenda? What gets covered? Would love to hear your experience. |
My first experience with mentoring was when I ranted about a bunch of stats on an online game. I impressed someone who asked me to be his mentor. He helped me gather more data, I helped to process them and taught him how statistics worked. It was incredibly fruitful both ways, probably my benchmark of what mentoring should be like.
There's another more regimented way, which I used with my thesis supervisor in university and a mentor at an incubator. Set up a meeting time, same time each week. Show what progress you've made. They'll comment on it. The mentor gave me some good insights, such how I shouldn't have designed it as Tinder, or how I should spend a week planning out my UI and testing it with people. I told him that in a week, I could build a full app and launch it to real people to test, and that's story of how I made a startup in 2 weeks and got a thousand downloads overnight.
Sometimes all the talk is just rubber duck debugging. I'm not even sure you need a proper mentor sometimes. Something like a devlog and fan base could work as well.
Mentors are best at spotting things you've never heard about though. There were many times when I considered a career path and a mentor just points out the starting point or tells me how others on that path fared.