The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid Kahl 0:00
Dominic Monn runs MentorCruise, a bootstrapped software platform that connects eager people with you guested, mentors. Now, as someone who has tried and failed to build a marketplace before, I really wanted to know how Dom did it. We'll talk about how hard it really is to bootstrap two audiences at the same time, how to deal with payments, taxes, that kind of stuff and most importantly, how to handle business that revolves around people. Dominic is a very thoughtful founder and you learn a lot about approaching building a calm, but quite profitable business here today. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More about that later. Now, here is Dominic.

Dominic, welcome to the show. I'm a big fan of MentorCruise. And that's a platform that I have used already to mentor software founders in the past, it's really cool. It's a great software business itself to dive into. We're gonna do that during our conversation. And it's a big catalyst for learning. So it's right down my alley. So let's talk about mentorship for a little bit. In terms of the dynamics of mentorship, can you share with me a myth about digital mentoring, mentoring virtually or online that MentorCruise has successfully debunked?

Dominic Monn 1:10
Yeah, there's been this persistent myth that I would encounter usually in the beginning stages of MentorCruise, that would usually say, virtual and then also paid mentorship just can't work out. Because mentorship is like highly personal thing where you reach out to a trusted person in your circles, maybe someone that you've worked with for years or maybe someone that works at university and so on. And the same magic can't be encountered just like picking someone online paying for them and having a relationship that way. I think after like 12,000 mentorships, where we helped a ton of people, like start new businesses and get into new jobs and move contracts and whatever, we've probably debunked that. But yeah, and those first few weeks or first few months when I was reaching out to mentors, no credibility at all. That was a thing that I've heard quite often.

Arvid Kahl 2:01
That's an interesting one. It's also that was one of the thoughts that I had when I went to the platform, like, how is this going to work? Like, how can I trust and I think that is the central word, right? Trust, that the platform is right for me that the people that come to the platform trust me. I think that's a big issue, trust building and trust retention, right? Though, that seems to be a central part of this. Have you ever dealt with fraud? Like, is there a lot of fraud? Because where there's money, people try to cheat. How is that happening for that platform?

Dominic Monn 2:29
You know, I wouldn't say fraud is first rampant, maybe we're too small platform for that I've encountered a lot. But I mean, definitely it happens, especially now, when we, you know, get into the space of AI and Chat GPT. It's actually becoming more frequent, where, you know, we just encounter like applications that seem like very much GPT written and you try to background check and there's not an actual real person behind it. That has always been a thing, maybe people that lie a little bit about their jobs. And, you know, maybe don't tell that whole truth. But now, especially with AI, you know, sometimes we get almost a little bit of like an attack vector where people try to get into the platform somehow with a fake profile. I mean, fortunately, we've been around long enough that we have systems that catch that. You know, you need to come to MentorCruise. You need to essentially do a KYC verification, which is you need to submit an ID through Stripe and so on. So we know who these people are, we know where they live, we know that they have an ID somewhere. And so there is a certain source of trust there. And we also review the profiles, we talk to the people, we make sure that hopefully 99 plus percent of people on the platform are real people and really are what they say they are. So we're lucky in that regard. But yeah, it's been getting more common definitely.

Arvid Kahl 3:47
That sounds like a lot of work on your side. And not like a typical SaaS business in terms of just you know, you have it running somewhere and you're sitting on the beach. So there's a lot of manual labor, just in validating and verifying people. Am I getting this right? How many people are working on this right now?

Dominic Monn 4:04
So we're five people. I would say roughly me and then two other people in what I would call operations, which is just like leaving the thing running. And yeah, definitely, I mean, a marketplace is a different game, especially to the way that we are doing it which you will call a vetted marketplace, which means that you know, you kind of have to go through us to be on the marketplace in the first place. And so there's a bit of manual labor involved as well. What's also makes it interesting, like our product is very slim, what maybe a SaaS founder can say. I think they're you know, building a lot on their software, they maybe need to hire a dev, it's kind of their first hire. That's not the case for us. It's definitely more of a people business. And so, you know, the most hires that we do are operations people, customer support, community management, that kind of stuff.

Arvid Kahl 4:51
It's funny when I think about SaaS businesses, I think about like people building features, features features. It feels like for you, you have a certain kind of scope of what you need to offer and the features are actually people that come onto the platform to teach, right? New wonderful mentors, that's a new feature. You don't need to implement a new software feature if you can attract more talent to come to the platform. That brings me to I think one of the biggest questions that anybody has about like marketplaces, like marketplaces are hardmode. That's what it feels like to me, building a marketplace, bootstrapping and like bootstrapping in two ways, right? Bootstrapping financially and bootstrapping from nothing of two sided marketplace that feels like it's the hardest way to build a business. How did you do that? How did you get the vetted marketplace going, where you had both high quality mentors and students that would actually stick with those mentors?

Dominic Monn 5:44
Yeah, I mean, I think marketplace are a different game than SaaS, maybe you could call it harder. But I think that really highly depends on who you are as a founder as well. Because you know, if you are, say, the typical bootstrapper indie hacker, you probably have like a software background and or maybe a design background. But the thing that you do really well is building a software product. That's kind of what you do. And so it's very natural to say, you know, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to build a software product. This is what I do well and then I just need to kind of sell it and market it somehow. And that's it. Marketplace are a people business. So this is kind of the background that you need to have to build a business like that. Which also means it's actually a really great business if you don't have that software design background, if you have some sort of kind of leverage or maybe a community behind you. Marketplace are a wonderful business because you don't need to build a ton of features, you just need to build out the people. And if you already have the people somehow that makes it a lot easier. And that was the situation for me as well. I had kind of uncommon background coming into tech. I did a lot of self teaching self studying. I was embedded in all those community which you know, you know, what to speak of there. I was embedded in all those self learning communities that were just hungry and longing for mentorship. And so I kind of already had one of the sites or at least access to one of the sites. And so the second part was finding those mentors and kind of getting them into the marketplace. And so in the end, I actually just had to do, let's call it sales for one side of the marketplace, which was attract really good mentors and I put a lot of energy and time and writing and DMS into that. But then I was essentially able to bring those two sides together. I was able to do a lot of sweat at DMing to get the mentors in but then I also had a community behind me who wanted those mentors. And so my job was just bring those two together.

Arvid Kahl 7:41
That makes perfect sense. And thank you for sharing this kind of perspective shift. Because to me, marketplaces are hard because I am one of these technical people, you know. I come from a very technical background. And whenever I did try to bootstrap a marketplace with other people in the past, like a local food marketplace back in my days in Berlin in like 2015 or something. And it didn't work because we were so focused on the features on the technical side, but very little focus on the community and or like the vetting the sales process. It's funny that what comes so easy to you came so incredibly hard to me, which, you know, it's nice to see this shifted to another perspective and it kind of makes my next question almost answer itself, I guess. But so how do you prevent yourself from building too many features in the marketplace? I guess the answer is you just don't care as much about that stuff. That's kind of what I want to know, like, do you have a certain scope of features that once you have them, you're done with it and the rest is just like putting people power into the business?

Dominic Monn 8:40
You know, I wouldn't say so. I would say you know, MentorCruise right now, I would call it feature complete, you could say like, it's a perfectly fine marketplace where you can book mentors, where you can have like a little chat, little dashboard there, a couple of billing tools. I think that's quite important. And you know, from that side, now we could go 100% on getting on new users. And the thing would scale to some degree. That doesn't mean that MentorCruise doesn't change. I think, as we, for example, change markets, I think we had to adapt a couple of things. You know, before it was like this thing where you would almost do pro bono mentorship for like self teaching students. And nowadays, it's like this thing where you can almost put together coaching packages and it's like, it's becoming much more serious. And so that also needed more features in there. But I would say it's more feature light. To give you an idea we're five people right now. I'm actually the only one writing code and I do it about two days per week, maybe not even because you know, there's emails and other stuff. So we get by by doing maybe like 10 hours of coding per week as a company. I'm not sure you know what other SaaS companies can say that about themselves because obviously you need to build those features. You need to work with those customers and their requirements. That's not so much the case for us. For us, it's important that you know, the people that we have on the marketplace are really good that we do moderation, that we, you know, more so build out systems that help people mentoring and coaching rather than, you know, features that you can use on the platform.

Arvid Kahl 10:09
Yeah, that kind of thought that makes perfect sense to me like the systems that you put in place, they're immediately usable by everybody else. And the feature might be something a couple of people might use, might need even but just a couple of them. I think that that to me is a priority thing, right? If you prioritize those systems, it has a massive impact. How much time do you spend generally on operating, like talking to your customers, talking to the mentors or the students any given day?

Dominic Monn 10:38
At any given day, I will probably say two to three hours. That's usually kind of my morning job, which is to go through emails, to go through our Slack channel, which is full of mentors. So every mentor is on our Slack channel. It's like a pretty busy place to be in there. I also have actually a couple of systems that helped me reach out to more mentees, such as like get into conversations with them. So you know, here and there, there might be a call to kind of see how they're doing maybe to work on something together, like a case study or a blog. So I try to, you know, do that first thing in the morning, like answering emails, go through messages, Slack channels, and so on. And what happens then is basically, it leaves me with however long I want to work, let's say, five, six hours, but maybe sometimes less for, you know, deep work, be it doing something with marketing, be it looking at a product, seeing what does it need kind of for the next step, what's the next thing that we work on? Or then you know, on a couple of days actually going in and coding something.

Arvid Kahl 11:37
Wow, so it's kind of a nine to five at this point? Or is it more or less than that? So that's always what I'm interested in with that particular kind of business.

Dominic Monn 11:46
I would say it's more than a nine to five, but it has an immense amount of freedom. So in the sense that I can basically say, whenever I want to work, I'm able to travel and work. I'm able to maybe take lunch time off and go to the gym for two hours. You know, essentially, it's a very free business. I tried to have very little calls in that business, kind of in a very typical bootstrapper/lifestyle, business lifestyle. So basically just have a lot of self governance over what I do. But in the end, yeah, I end up putting a lot of time into this. But it's generally a lot of fun. And if I didn't want to put a lot of time into it, after those two, three hours of emails, I might just like shut off my computer and do something else as well.

Arvid Kahl 12:29
Nice. Yeah, that's, I think I just recently read a tweet by Dagobert Renouf and he was talking about the difference between freedom and autonomy for bootstrappers, for founders like us. I think it's an interesting thing to just ponder, like, what is freedom for me? Is it just making my own decisions? Or does it mean like having all the time in the world? Like, depending on what you choose there, it's kind of informs what you're going to be doing. And if you work more than other people who have a full time job but you feel you're more autonomous, it might feel like less work because it's not forced, right?

Dominic Monn 13:02
Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, in this thing, I think startups and bootstrapped or VC funded, whatever, they're hard and you need to put a lot of time into them. And then you know, when you have that, let's call it freedom or autonomy to decide what you want to do. And you know, work on something that you find truly rewarding. But then also, you know, have that control over your time and you know, have a lot of things that you can do, but not a lot of things that you really have to do. I think it's really rewarding. And it also helps protect you from things like burnout. Because, you know, if I have a stressful week on the Friday, I might say, hey, you know what? I think I'm going to work the morning and then I'm going to take the afternoon off. And I don't need to ask my boss about it. I don't need to like just push a lot of work onto my Mondays or on the weekends. It's a business that is designed to basically say, hey, I can take time off and nobody's gonna miss me essentially.

Arvid Kahl 13:54
Oh, that's great. Is that something that you also extend to your employees or the people you work with? This kind of freedom?

Dominic Monn 14:01
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're fully remote. So I don't have anyone here where I live in Zurich. We're also async. So I don't really care when people are online. I'm not tracking their working hours. I just want us to do a good job. I'm setting goals. I'm meeting with them somewhat infrequently, just that we can have time to do what we want. So we work, you know, for our goals, we work for things that we want to get done. I don't care in the end if they work, you know, 35, 30 hours, 40 hours or even more. I think there's maybe a thing where you want to protect people from working too much because they feel pressure. But yeah, in the same sense they have the freedom to do the same as I do.

Arvid Kahl 14:43
Cool. Where did you find the people you work with? One of the biggest problems that I've had with my businesses, just finding the right people and nobody taught me how to hire so I'm always interested in other founder stories around that.

Dominic Monn 14:55
Yeah, hiring is hard, really hard. And I'm not going to claim that I have a perfect system for it yet. And really the people when I look at them in my team, they come from, you know, really various backgrounds. For example, my product designer, Maggie, shout out to Maggie, is someone who actually worked on a case study about MentorCruise for her like bootcamp project. And so she reached out to me and said, hey, I'm working on this case study. I'm just going to send it to you, you know, let me know what you think. And she actually sent it to me in the exact moment I was hiring for a product designer. So I was saying, hey, you know, just jump into this like, interview cycle that I'm doing. Let's see how this goes. So you know, this was just like cold outreach, LinkedIn, really good timing. I hire people before they were part of the MentorCruise community which was cool as well to, you know, have someone that knows the product, uses the product, really loves the product, work on the product as well. And then you know, there are also the typical channels. I think, someone we hired from Upwork. There are a couple of like lists of maybe more like a bad freelancers, if you don't want to scour through the whole like Upwork sea of freelancers to maybe get something a bit more vetted. But yeah, I mean, they come from from everywhere and it never gets easier to actually hire them. I think I'm getting better at it now that I've done it a couple of times. But it's hard definitely.

Arvid Kahl 16:11
I think what you just pointed out, like, besides the regular kind of Upwork stuff, like we just need people for particular job, like to be done very quickly to project based work, the thing you describe with finding people inside your community that already are close to the product and not just the product, the founder close to you, that understand you, that have a relationship with you, that's something I see more and more in kind of founder led creator led businesses like ours, right? Like small ish software businesses or all other kinds of businesses where the creator has a presence online. I see this a lot with YouTubers, like people who build YouTube channels, media businesses, they recruit their editors, the people who help them with captions and the people who help them with like thumbnails and that stuff directly from the audience. Like shout out to Nick, who literally is doing the, if not just the thumbnail, maybe even editing this whole thing here today. He comes from my own audience because he likes what I did and liked it enough to reach out to me. And here we are, right? So there's that kind of connection that people already have with you that we would be kind of we would be missing something if we didn't tap into that for recruiting the people that we need. That is really cool. So that is your internal team. But let's say as a marketplace, you also have to recruit in the best sense, the mentors, where do you go there? Like, how do you reach out to people on the, I guess, supply side of the marketplace? How do you recruit more of them?

Dominic Monn 17:37
Yeah, so I mean, nowadays, we're really lucky that if you actually type into Google become a mentor or become a coach or become a tutor, we're usually there. So I think outbound we're doing actually CRO. We're getting enough people getting in. It's actually very competitive, we let it in about like 20% I think, maybe even a little less. And so we really have no shortage of like new and exciting and really great mentors coming in. There might be a situation here and there where actually, I'm just personally seeing someone, let's say on Twitter/x or maybe somewhere else. And I'm just saying, hey, you know, why don't you jump in. I think what you're doing is really cool. Or maybe they have, you know, shared that they want to get into mentoring or coaching. So it will be a nice fit. But yeah, we essentially get a lot of inbound interest nowadays, but that wasn't always the case. I think the first let's say 100 mentors have been really hard. And you know, that was just manual labor, cold DMing, cold emailing on mass. We never really found a channel where we can get people in at scale because you need to find like, really, really experienced people. They need to have like some kind of knack for mentoring as well. So maybe have done it in their day job before at least to kind of know what things are about. And then yeah, they also need to kind of have the quality and you know, the social proof and as you said before, the trust to essentially that we can throw them onto our marketplace and people will actually book them, which is another big topic. So fortunately, nowadays, the supply side is going really well for us. But yeah, in the beginning, it was manual outreach, just probably north of 2000 messages to get the first 100 people or so.

Arvid Kahl 19:18
Yeah, crazy. And I think work for me. I think you got me on the platform like that.

Dominic Monn 19:24
Might be, might be, yeah. You were probably one of the candidates where I was just like it would be so cool to have all Arvid on this marketplace. And then, you know, to my surprise that you said actually,yes, which was great.

Arvid Kahl 19:36
Yeah, I felt like this is a wonderful project. And I already had kind of it was at a point in my journey where I had started just to write. I have my blog and I don't think I even had the podcast at this point. But it was just trying to teach so I thought hey, this might be a great opportunity to teach, not at scale as it is on the blog, but to teach like individually and be part of somebody else's journey. That's something I think in many ways you impacted pretty heavily my shift towards building in public with the platform, like something that is now a very, very potent thing in my life, right? I'm wearing the t shirt as we speak, like building in public is a theme that I've dug myself into even more writing a book about it and all that, mostly because of the couple of people. I think I mentored like five or six people around the time when I started and I saw those journeys. And one of my mentees on your platform, let me just tell you how amazing the platform is. Okay, let me just do this. Because the people I met there were so cool, like all of them very different. And it was really interesting to see just how diverse founders can be in their many ways. One of the people I met there was a French guy who shout out to the French founders, we had this this topic, in the lead up conversation to, to this chat, who was traveling the world in an RV pretty much like building a software business while on the road. It was really fun just to be part of that literally part of his journey, right? With the business that he was building and how he was touring through Europe, at that point. At some point, he even sent me some I think it was some marmalade from France like because like, you know, the kind of connection that you have built with people over long times. A Christmas present came out of that. It was really, really fun. Conrad was his name. That's the kind of connection that you have if you build a relationship with people on that platform and I'm really grateful that I had an opportunity back in the day. I should really get back to it. Let me just say this.

Dominic Monn 21:35
Oh, I would love that.

Arvid Kahl 21:38
That brings me to my next thing. It was interesting because you know, as a teacher on on Twitter, you pretty much giving stuff away for free. So it was a mindset shift for me to charge money for mentorship and you already kind of debunked the myth that paid mentorship doesn't work because it literally does. I've seen it and it works for both parties involved. How involved are you with setting prices? And like helping people figuring this out? Well, maybe over time, did that change that you start helping people? And now it's less or how does it work?

Dominic Monn 22:10
Yeah, I think at the beginning, I was very hands on. I basically gave like certain limits. I think maybe at the beginning, we even had certain preset prices. And so yeah, at the beginning, very involved and also maybe because of that initial feedback that I got that paid mentorship wouldn't work out, I was really kind of micromanaging the side of that. So we actually had an aspect. We still have an aspect of free mentorship. Back then it was actually just free mentorship. You could you know, if someone wanted to mentor for free, they could come in and get a mentorship. Nowadays, we do it through charity, so you actually have to pay, I'm gonna say $20 per month, but it goes to charity just as some sort of like quality filter. And then I think we had a plan that for some reason that I really can't explain nowadays was weekly billing for like one call. I'm gonna say for $50 or something, and I just said this is the price that we have, this is the thing that we do. And then over time, you know, I have people join in that were maybe even like coaching and mentoring for a lot of years. And they were basically saying, hey, this does work for me. I actually charge $500 for my calls because I really think with like 20, 25 years of experience, this is the value that I can bring. And this is something that like blew my mind, right. And then I think at some point, probably not too far away from when you joined, we actually switched to well, for one monthly billing, which I think makes a lot more sense. And then you were able to set up these like packages. So it was just a call for $50. That was packages that you were able to put together. And I think we just gave like a pricing range, which probably was quite low at that time. I'm going to say put it somewhere between zero and two or $300. And this is kind of what you can do. And so nowadays, we're a lot more relaxed with it. We still have certain guidelines also because there's a certain risk factors for us in there. You know, if someone comes in and they charge $10,000 for one call and then we get a charge back. And it might be like messy with marketplace and so on and money needs to go different places and so on, we might end up with like a pretty big bill ourselves. But I think people can come in. They have a certain limit, let's say you know, $300 per month. For some people, it's enough to do like a weekly call for that price. For other people that have a lot more experience and a higher hourly rate, it's maybe just one call. And then it can basically scale up from there. And you know, nowadays we see mentorships that go up all the way to like $1,500 per month for let's say maybe two weekly calls or maybe even just one weekly call with just someone where you are 100% sure that they're able to propel your career or business forward.

Arvid Kahl 24:51
That's quite the range. I think I remember there being a ceiling of like, 200ish, 250 or something at that time too. And it was like wow, I could never charge this much today and now it's like, it's probably what I would charge per hour, at least at this point as well. Because for my own consulting experience.

Dominic Monn 25:08
Yeah, that's the progression.

Arvid Kahl 25:09
So it's nice to see that you've grown and that you both and you had to be exposed to the people that brought this value to be able to offer to the platform, right?

Dominic Monn 25:19
I mean, I was the same way as you, right? Because I was thinking about mentorship that I was kind of know that I knew from, let's say, coding boot camps where people were almost like, volunteers, I'm gonna say maybe like paid volunteers. But they didn't make a ton of money from this kind of stuff. And so yeah, MentorCruise was almost pro bono. You wouldn't spend a ton of money on MentorCruise. You also wouldn't make a lot of money. And then just having these people come in that say, you know, I've been a UX designer for every large company on this world for last 25 years. I'm not going to charge less than $500 for a call with me. Yeah, it was wide opening, eye opening. And, yeah, just I guess had to happen over time to be exposed to these new things. And also, as a marketplace, I guess, you're almost always in the crossfire of two different sites, where obviously, then the mentees come in. And you know, the mentees at the time were still mostly like students and that kind of stuff. And then they were saying, why is this guy charging $500 per month that I would never be able to afford that? But then over time, that side matured as well. And now we have, you know, let's say, a VP of engineering of a public company getting mentorship from a CTO of a public company. And obviously, the prices are much, much higher.

Arvid Kahl 25:23
Interesting. Is that on the demand side now? Is that something that you actively put like money into in terms of like advertising or marketing? Or how do you source now those higher quality mentees at this point?

Dominic Monn 26:37
I think it happened over time, as we also raised our prices. I think it just changes the perception of MentorCruise as well. Now, it's not like a little hacker site where you can, you know, get a coding mentor for 40-50 bucks. Now, it's like one of the largest open coaching marketplaces where there's something for everyone like, you might be able to get like a coding tutor. And maybe they're only charging like $100. But we actually have like, people that are pretty high up at Google that are overseeing stuff like Gmail as a whole, you know, available on MentorCruise to get booked. And obviously, they're going to charge higher prices, but they're also going to attract basically, like higher up people or more experienced people with the budget to basically get that kind of coaching as well.

Arvid Kahl 27:35
Is that something that you help them with? Like you said any tooling that you provide for people to like, make themselves louder and make themselves be heard more by the people that they want to attract?

Dominic Monn 27:46
Not so much. I mean, a lot of the people that are coming in, they already have a vast network, you know, kind of the same. I'm gonna say the same audience that maybe you were in because you're maybe wanted to try something new and maybe want to get into teaching. But you're actually a very accomplished professional, yourself. And so you have to network to basically get a couple of people in already. And then as far as the marketplace goes itself, you know, we attract people through various sources and marketing channels. Paid is a pretty new one, actually, for the last four years. We've done organic marketing, almost 100%. And then it's just basically our job to place them in the right places and get them exposure that's relevant. You know, if someone's looking for like beginner UX help, it's really not in our interest to show them the UX lead at Google that's charging $500 per call. But if you're coming in, then you're already a UX design leadership person, for example, that might be more relevant. So it's more about yeah, attracting a vast variety of people actually, but showing them the right people that are a match for them.

Arvid Kahl 28:52
In the marketplace like this, what kind of metrics do you track? Like we were initially talking about, like churn and retention. And the words in German that we both don't really know. You know, because we're exposed to English all the time. What kind of metrics do you track like in a people based business?

Dominic Monn 29:09
Yeah, I mean, there's a ton. And there's a large overlap with SaaS as well. So just like a SaaS, for example, we also track churn and retention, especially as we are a subscription based or a lot of our prices are subscription based. That's very relevant for us as well, would also be relevant. You know, there's a really interesting case study about Airbnb, where they also track retention and churn even though there's no subscription because they estimate that people book one vacation per year with Airbnb and so their retention is basically one booking per year. And so we have that aspect as well for the non subscription businesses, but then we have a lot of metrics that wouldn't make any sense in SaaS. One that I really like is time to first sale, which is basically how long does it take for a mentor that joins MentorCruise to get their first mentee. And that's like a really crucial metric because it basically means like, how balanced is our marketplace? If you come in, you have no, I'm gonna say social proof on the marketplace, you have no reviews and so on. You don't have any history. Maybe you're not charging the big bucks yet. You don't have your profile optimized. How long does it really take you to get that first mentee to basically get started on the platform? And yeah, I mean, there's a very large variety of other metrics, instead of just MRR revenue, you then track GMV basically how much money is going through the whole marketplace? Not only the cut that you're taking, but kind of what's happening elsewhere. You have liquidity. So how much of or how many of our mentors currently work with a mentee? How much of our supply is actually on use right now? You have the demand to supply ratio, which basically means like, are we scaling both sides at the same time? Or is maybe the amount of mentors outgrowing the amount of mentees that we can get in? And if that so should we like increase our marketing for the mentee side to basically balanced all of that altogether? So yeah, it's definitely a bit of a science as well. And what I would say is a bit different from SaaS as well as that there's just way, way, way less resources about it, which makes sense. I think, you know, SaaS is really like booming right now. But when you compare it with marketplaces, you really need to kind of search for that kind of stuff. And the tooling is much less mature than in the SaaS world.

Arvid Kahl 31:30
Interesting. Were you ever tempted to, you know, build a business around that or even just write a book about this topic?

Dominic Monn 31:37
You know, we have like an internal analytics board that I would love to maybe make available at one point, but then we come back to the, you know, should you have side projects next to your job. And I was already telling you that this thing is more than a nine to five. So it's probably not going to happen in the near future. But definitely, I think it's a market gap. And, you know, maybe if whatever happens and I don't need to spend as much time anymore, I would maybe also be inclined to kind of help marketplaces as a business model. Yeah, grow to the level or close to the level that SaaS is right now.

Arvid Kahl 32:10
Yeah, you could be a mentor around this topic.

Dominic Monn 32:12
Right. I think it's my number one or number two tag on MentorCruise, actually.

Arvid Kahl 32:17
That's cool. That's interesting to know. I think I'm with you. I think market place tooling as we tried to build it back in 2015, was non existent. We had to build the whole thing ourselves. I think even back then stripe marketplace, like their internal, you know, like, connect your account to Stripe and charge through and get like this past through kind of compensation going was in its infancy. And I think it's more mature now. I'm still wondering, is it complicated to integrate this? I'm asking this both like as a business operator and a technical founder at this point, like how is dealing with that particular platform? And have you ever like found another platform that could even rival this because I'm always looking at alternatives, right? You want to minimize platform risk with this kind of stuff. Like how is the Stripe marketplace happening for you?

Dominic Monn 33:02
I mean, just stripe marketplace is amazing. And I know that in SaaS, maybe Stripe isn't the kind of number one king or queen anymore. But I think a marketplace is definitely. There's like nothing that gets close to it. Mostly, because with Stripe, you get the end to end experience, right? Like you get the checkout where you add your credit card and whatever. And then you can basically just write, I mean, really, it's like five lines of code to say, hey, I want to get 20% of that. And 80% of that go to the mentor or the supplier. So that's pretty great. All the other tools in the market, what they're basically doing is send us a bunch of money and we'll do the job of like distributing it. But that still involves you like collecting the money usually through Stripe again. Or maybe then you can go with like an MOR or whatever and then pay it out. And what's quite interesting is that legally speaking and in terms of like bookkeeping and accountants, it becomes 1000 times more complex as soon as you touch that money because then you're the merchant of record right? Then you're liable for that money coming in. With Stripe, that's not the case because I never see that money. I just get a basically a fee. Just like Stripe gets there like 3-4% fee, I get my 10, 15, 20% fee. And I, you know, just see that part of the money and it just makes it much, much easier, cheaper, and less stressful to build a marketplace business.

Arvid Kahl 34:27
That is good to know because I was wondering how complicated this is. And it sounds like you found your stride. You found a way to, you know, automate all these things using a platform that has just as one cohesive process. As you are in the middle of Europe, probably slap dab in the middle of that content and you probably surrounded by a lot of people who have to deal with a lot of taxes and a lot of those kind of things, right?

Dominic Monn 34:48
Definitely.

Arvid Kahl 34:49
How is that with that platform? Stripe has kind of been notorious about making taxes an afterthought in the past. Is that something that even touches you or is that for every mentor to figure out for themselves?

Dominic Monn 35:00
So fun story actually, in Switzerland, the good thing is, you can do a business quite easily. At least when you're like a sole proprietor, you don't have an LLC or something. It's very easy to start a business. And then the limits to actually become a real business are quite high 100k per year. By that time, you know, you have a bit of funds a bit of leverage to hire people to do this for you. But the thing with Europe is that I think we don't have as much exposure to these new kinds of businesses. And so when I hit those 100k per year with MentorCruise initially, I started going to bookkeepers and accountants basically asking them, hey, what do I need to do here? And I think I ended up taking four consultant or like intro calls and I got four different answers. Especially around like the marketplace thing, right? Like, what do I need to pay VAT on? What are the taxes on this stuff? And nobody was able to give me an answer. I got anything from, you don't need to pay any VAT because, you know, it's just like fees that you're collecting up to you actually need to pay VAT on the whole transaction, not just like your little cup that you're getting, which would have like, turned our profits to zero, right? And so one thing that I've done, which I'm actually ending up talking on every podcast with a German for some reason is I moved the business to the US. So MentorCruise is MentorCruise Inc. Right now, it's in Wyoming. I used to service like a lot of the other services. And very quickly, we went from I need to go to 10 accountants and pay quite a bit of money to basically get no answer to a new bookkeeper that is able to tell me yeah, just sent me your Stripe report, super easy. Just send me like this PDF from your Stripe and I'm gonna do everything for you. So I think that was a good step. So II wouldn't be able to tell you much about how it is right now to like run the business in Switzerland because legally, I'm just an employee that happens to be employed at a US company. I don't do any more with Switzerland actually.

Arvid Kahl 37:05
That's a great answer. That's also something I did for Permanent Link, my little SaaS business that I run, which is also in Wyoming in Sheridan, Wyoming.

Dominic Monn 37:13
Yeah, Sheridan, Wyoming. I know that the zip code and everything.

Arvid Kahl 37:16
I think we might have the same post box like the most, I think I actually use the same platform for this, which is cool, right? How easy that is, how cheap it was, and how quickly it went. And I have the same experience with my bookkeeper there is like, yeah, send me whatever and you just sent them like random emails and documents that go sure, here's your final thing. We're gonna send it in for you, just pay us a couple 100 bucks, same experience. And same other experience in Germany here when we had Feedback Panda and we were getting into the, you know, like 30-40k monthly recurring revenue in US dollars. We went to a tax advisors trying to figure out how we're going to do this. And the first guy we met was like, well, yeah, you print out all the invoices, which at this point, we had like 2000 customers monthly, so we would have had to print like a stack of paper, at least this high. And then we're going to deal with that, which was not now we're going to find somebody else. And we eventually found somebody who would take an email with an Excel sheet with all the invoices that I had to build a feature in the platform for that would give them the Excel sheet in the exact right way because they couldn't do it. Otherwise, it was horrible. Like, had I known it back then I probably would have started a Wyoming or Delaware company as well.

Dominic Monn 38:29
Yeah. I mean, we now get into this issue where we work with a lot of mentors and a lot of them, you know, they don't do anything like freelancing, they don't run a company. And so in order to start mentoring, essentially, they need to have at least like some minimal setup to get a Stripe account, right. And that's no issue at all. Like you can put a sole proprietorship. You can make however much money without any issues, except for in Germany. And we actually have a little self help group in our Slack channel just for mentors in Germany. Because generally, they can come on to platform and earn $100 per month without getting into a whole lot of trouble with papers and whatever. So yeah, it's a huge issue. I would love that if it was a bit easier. I think you know, some of the other European countries are making strides with that where you can just come in put in your like social security number essentially and think at taxes freelancer on this kind of metric stuff. And then as you mentioned Stripe also has a Stripe tax integration also, you know, that gets a little bit easier for kind of them as a freelancer as well. But Germany remains like one of the really difficult places to even earn 1k per year with mentoring definitely.

Arvid Kahl 39:48
It's a bizarre place like it has such convoluted tax law and the system that exists isn't just a law. It's also like this layer of people dealing with the law and tax advisers, bookkeepers and all that that make it equally complicated because they are involved in everything. notaries, right? If you want to start a company in Germany and I don't want to turn this into like a diss of the German business system, but I've went through it as well, like even if you want to start one of these kind of small, limited companies, the one euro company there, right? You still have to notarize it and you still have to go into a place where somebody is sitting in an office reading your document and you have to give them money for those 40 minutes that they literally just read the thing you could have read into. It's really, really horrible. And in many ways, keeping people from doing this. Is Switzerland much better? How many indie founders do you know in Switzerland that enjoy working there with a Swiss company?

Dominic Monn 40:47
Yeah, I mean, I would say it might be a little better than Germany, but it's not great. And, you know, indie founders that I've met IRL, you know, because it's a small country, I should really be able to meet everyone. IRL is less than my 10 fingers. Right? So I met a couple of lovely people here that you know, run their own indie business and so on. But it's not a lot. There's definitely not like a thriving community around indie businesses here. And I think it ends up being like a couple of different things in Switzerland that come at play. One is, it's an extremely, extremely expensive place, right? You need to if you wanted to do this thing, you need to be able to get to a revenue of, I'm gonna say, if you live in Zurich, you probably need a revenue of like, 8k MRR to after costs and taxes and whatever, just survive out here. Maybe you can, like, go super ramen profitable and just like in a small room and just eat ramen, then you might go down to like, 5k. MRR, you know.

Arvid Kahl 41:48
Crazy! In some countries, that would be $500 not even yet, right? It's bizarre.

Dominic Monn 41:53
No. So you know, you need to pay for a bunch of stuff, the rents are high, health insurance, you actually need to pay yourself over a year. And then I think the other thing is, then the counterpart of that is obviously the salaries are super high, right? Like, as a software engineer, I was able to get out of school. Granted, I took some like weird jobs and you know, remote Jobs and so on. But I basically came out of school making 100k per year, right? And that's like US level of salaries. And so if you have a really easy path, I'm gonna say, especially as a software engineer to make 150-200k per year, you really need to have a lot of conviction to say, hey, I'm gonna quit all of this for my like struggling business that's not even ramen profitable at 5k MRR for some reason, right? So I think it's just another really attractive thing to do. And then, you know, culturally, I think it's like the rest of Europe, where we probably value security and stability and so on a little bit more over to like thrill and freedom or whatever, of running a business.

Arvid Kahl 42:57
That's funny. How is MentorCruise doing financially? Like, how much do you share about this? And how is it doing?

Dominic Monn 42:57
Yeah, I share, you know, certain milestone numbers here and there. I stopped sharing like actual revenues or like the open pages that I saw loft as I started my journey. I don't really do any more. What I can say is we're somewhere around like 40k MRR, which I really like to be in. I think we're growing every month, which I also really like. And then, you know, probably the best part of this is I grew actually very profitable to the point where we can put a lot of the money that we don't spend on people and operation costs and so on into marketing, paid marketing, but as well as marketing freelancers, getting in a couple of experts to help out. I think this is a really kind of joyful part or a joyful time to be building this because yeah, there's just a bit of like money and leverage around where I can hire like really experts, not only to like, fix the business and maybe like getting to the next step, but also to learn a lot just like getting experts in and them showing me what I can do, showing what other things we can do for the business brainstorming. And yeah, growing the business more and more.

Arvid Kahl 44:10
That sounds really cool. That is a wonderful journey to be on and 40k ish and growing. That's solid. That's awesome for a team of five and somebody who eats very expensive ramen, that's a pretty, pretty solid. I love it. I'd love to see it. I'm always super happy to see what you share about this business. Because like I said in the beginning, it's not just that it's a cool software business that you're building. It's also like a vehicle for learning and it's a vehicle for people to make money for people to learn how to make money. It's like the mix of all the things that I love. So I'm really really glad that you're sharing so much about it. Thank you so much for sharing all these insights. If people want to follow you and want to see you building this amazing platform in the future, where should they go?

Dominic Monn 44:56
So best place to follow my journey is Twitter/X. It's @dqmonn. You can, you know, you can tell me and DM me what you think the Q stands for. Then I'm also on MentorCruise. If you actually want to book me for a call, my short link is mentors.to/dom if you want to go to my profile directly and then I'm hearing they're on LinkedIn a little bit as well just kind of under my name, but really the best place to go is Twitter/X.

Arvid Kahl 45:24
Yeah, who knows what it's called? Really, I don't know. Like to me, it's always going to be Twitter. I think I'm growing old.

Dominic Monn 45:30
I think I'm gonna stick with Twitter or Twitter slash x is kind of funny to say as well. Yeah

Arvid Kahl 45:35
It's worse than X. But it's not better than Twitter. Right? So you know, it's a very easy choice. Hey, thanks, Dom, so much for all of these things that you shared about your platform. I think

Dominic Monn 45:46
Hey, thanks for having me.

Arvid Kahl 45:47
Yeah, man. Obviously, it's taken a couple of years to get to this. But it's such a pleasure to talk to you. I think you will have inspired several people to become mentors today. You probably also have inspired many people to try and build a marketplace in their field because

Dominic Monn 46:02
That's amazing.

Arvid Kahl 46:02
The way you shared it sounds like it's a pretty feasible thing. So thank you so much. And that was really, really nice.

Dominic Monn 46:10
Thank you so much for having me.

Arvid Kahl 46:12
And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor acquire.com. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a really solid SaaS product, you acquired all those customers, and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That's the dream of every SaaS founder, right? Problem is you're not growing for whatever reason, maybe it's lack of skill or lack of focus or play in lack of interest. You don't know, you just feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire, and you started working on the business, not just in the business and all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach, they really helped you to go down this road, six months down the road, making all that money. You tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who's facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn't look different every time it's the story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation. Because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don't do anything. So if you find yourself here, already at this point or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option and that is selling your business on acquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It's certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list. They've helped hundreds of founders already, just go check it out at try.acquire.com/arvid, me and see for yourself, if this is the right option for you, your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It's always good to be in the know.

Thank you for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder today. I really appreciate that. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you'll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know, it'd be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people's feeds. And that's, I think where we all would like it to be just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.