Why we shut down 1:1 mentorship platform at Frontbench?
Relating to a personal pain-point, we felt that the students of Tier 2/3 colleges, face a lot of hardships while in college as -
- they lacked self-motivation and self-belief to do what they want
- they couldn’t figure out what they wanted to achieve in their career due to information asymmetry, lack of proper guidance, network and exposure.
At Frontbench, we worked on creating a marketplace for 1:1 mentorship for Tier 2/3 college students.
Demand side issues
1. Customer acquisition cost
Mentorship as a stand alone offering has high acquisition cost. Say, a student wants to take mentorship for CAT preparation. The student at max needs 1–2 sessions either to get started or to seek a very contextual advise. Once they seek mentorship (i.e. achieved their goal), their probability of coming to the platform again was low & infrequent.
The lifetime value (LTV) from a customer will always be less than average customer acquisition cost (CAC) per user. Also as a business, since repeat transactions is low, we would constantly need to acquire new users.
We brainstormed a lot on this. Point(a) was our way to keep us a 0 CAC business and point (b) was a thought to increase LTV so that we can spend on CAC.
- Build a distribution channel/traction product — We crowd sourced & listed the resources a student needs to gets started with a specific learning path. <frontbench.xyz> was a free resource listing/exploration platform. We acquired 10k+ users with 0 CAC in less than 90 days and created strong re-direction to mentorship landing page.
- Upsell — Since we had decent top of the funnel to start with, we thought of listing courses (either affiliate or built in-house). We shunt the idea as we didn’t want to move in this direction and lose our focus.
2. Value vs price-point
- In ed-tech, most students are willing to pay for a tangible end outcome — a promise of new/better job/internship, better pay check, and even certificate.
- Mentorship as a stand alone offering sounded more like a vitamin to students instead of pain-killer. We often heard feedback like — ‘Bhaiya, session toh ho gaya, ab kya?’
- Students found ₹999 price-point extremely expensive for an hour. The paying propensity of students is low.
3. Ingrained cultural phenomenon
When you visit a doctor or a therapist, you are inherently wired to pay them for their service. Most students shared the feedback, that mentorship is pious.
They have been seeking advise from their peers, seniors, relatives, elder siblings for ages and they can’t imagine paying for seeking advise. (Shocking, right?)
4. Mentorship demands creation of homogeneous supply side
- Heterogeneous supply side — Say, Uber. You book a ride. It hardly matters to you — who your driver is, how many years of experience they have, what brand, colour of car you are travelling in.
- Homogenous supply side — Say, therapist booking platform. You care a lot about who your therapist is, what’s their qualification, gender, years of experience etc.
An average mentorship cycle consisted of 2 sessions. Students always wanted the same mentor. As mentors were doing this part-time, with their limited bandwidth and frequent non-availability, user experience got hampered and we saw a lot of churn.
Supply side issues
LinkedIn was our organic channel to acquire mentors.
1. Trading time at low price point
Most mentors were professionals, industry veterans. They wanted a higher ticket price than ₹999 (as they were trading their time) but students found ₹999 (for 1 hour) a very high price point.
2. No standardisation of overall experience
The experience of the mentorship sessions was driven by mentors — their charm, intellect, humour, presentation, personal interest and wit. As a platform, we weren’t able to control experience, although the onus was on. Building rating module, standardised training mechanism etc. were way forward but we couldn’t never pass the product market fit (PMF) to built this.
Will you built Frontbench again? :P
No, we won’t built it again as a stand-alone offering for the reasons mentioned above.
- Mentorship for the target audience we were catering to — i.e. students, has to blended with content. Content as a primary offering and mentorship as a-la-carte. Cohort-based course is a living example of that.
- I have recently mentored more than 30+ folks (all of them were working professional) on how to break into product roles, charging 999 for an hour and have found (over time) that folks who are willing to pay for mentorship have life problems (looking for a switch/want to change industry, career path, profile, looking to do higher studies) and are sorted with money problem.
The paying propensity of working professionals for mentorship is way higher than students. The scalability of this needs to be checked though.
- For a different target audience, mentorship as a continuous learning tutoring platform has found a big market. e.g.- Whitehat Jr, Classplus etc.
