What's the expectation about the depth of question and response?
Given the example of the feedback on a pitch, would the mentor be expected to watch a 10 minute pitch in full?
If I were looking for feedback on a 10 minute pitch, I think the most valuable feedback would be in the form of a 15-30 minute discussion with the person so that you can clarify, dig, and get to the necessary depth.
What sort of reply length are you considering? For the prices I'm guessing this is closer to a 30s-5min Cameo video?
These are great questions. In the fundraising example, the mentor wouldn't watch the pitch in full, but instead answer specific questions around a pitch, for example what valuation cap to set, KPIs to highlight, when to raise and from whom etc. The typical interaction goes beyond just one question and answer. The duration of each response is capped at 3 minutes but a mentor can respond with multiple recorded messages. The biggest reason we haven't started offering live calls yet is because of scheduling challenges; that said the asynchronous format is just a start and we are thinking about other formats and features for future releases.
Glad you’re thinking about all of this. I personally can’t imagine getting a useful response in 3 minutes to a one sentence question. I suspect it’s either going to be generic advice not tailored to me, or an answer that I could have just looked up.
That said, connecting these sorts of mentors for longer form feedback/input, or perhaps customised talks for companies, that could be really impactful and you’ll have a good platform on which to build those.
The duration of the responses will be increased to 9 minutes on the next release. We have received feedback from some of the mentors on this and have observed some mentors sending more than one response to 1 question. That said, the experience is meant convert into as a dialogue, which it often does.
Customized talks for cohorts os users is an excellent idea. What type of talks would you like to see, just out of curiosity? Pre-recorded, customized sessions, and live videos with groups that can send in questions have been discussed.
We've had a few guest speakers in to do talks at my workplace (~50 people) – it's usually something fairly informal and off-the-record/private, so they have been extremely high value as you get the sort of detail that doesn't tend to make it into generic talks on YouTube. Often these have taken the format of a "fireside chat" with one of our senior people, plus audience questions, for a total time of about an hour. Now that Zoom/et al are so commonplace I could see us doing this over video conferencing as well even though they've historically been in person.
To my knowledge we've never paid for these sessions – they're mostly "friends of the company", investors, CEOs from other companies in our investors' portfolios, etc, but assuming the price wasn't extortionate or the topic area was an important one, I could see us paying for this sort of thing. Again, to my knowledge, the speakers haven't prepped for these explicitly in the past so the time commitment would have likely been small, apart from travel.
The fireside chat concept could work well. Especially if the folks in the audience don't have access to these opportunities otherwise and can sigh up individually. Thanks for sharing these ideas Dan!
Given the example of the feedback on a pitch, would the mentor be expected to watch a 10 minute pitch in full?
If I were looking for feedback on a 10 minute pitch, I think the most valuable feedback would be in the form of a 15-30 minute discussion with the person so that you can clarify, dig, and get to the necessary depth.
What sort of reply length are you considering? For the prices I'm guessing this is closer to a 30s-5min Cameo video?