🎓 How We Onboarded Entire College Communities to Mentorpedia

A case study on executing mass user onboarding for a mentorship platform

TL;DR

To scale Mentorpedia across India, we designed a mass onboarding strategy targeting college and university networks. This included playbooks for student ambassadors, tailored landing pages, localized campaigns, and incentive loops. Within 6 weeks, we onboarded users from 20+ colleges, activated 700+ students, and established early momentum — all with zero paid ads.

🎯 The Problem

Early traction was promising, but user growth plateaued.
We were gaining individual users, but not clusters — which meant lower engagement, fewer repeat bookings, and fragmented community effects.

“If 1 person uses a mentorship platform, they get value.
But if 30 people in the same college use it, they build culture.”

We realized we had to shift our focus from B2C pull to B2B2C push — specifically targeting student groups, clubs, and placement cells in colleges and universities.

The Goal

• Onboard hundreds of students in a single activation cycle

• Build college-based micro-communities inside the platform

• Drive trust via peer-led onboarding, not cold outreach

• Incentivize continuous usage through credits, feedback loops, and familiarity

📦 Our Strategy

1. Campus Ambassador Program

• Recruited 2–3 student leaders per college as “Mentorpedia Guides”

• Provided them with a playbook (Notion-based) to:

  • Run workshops

  • Onboard friends

  • Share feedback

• Incentivized with bonus credits, LinkedIn certificates, and feature badges

2. College-Specific Landing Pages

• Created custom URLs per campus (e.g., /mentorpedia.io/gbuniversity)

• Showed localized testimonials, mentor picks, and session stats

• Enabled group invites to book mentorship in pairs

3. Live Webinars + Demo Days

• Hosted “Meet Your Mentor” Fridays with real mentors

• Focused on topics like “Career in UI/UX” or “How to Break Into Product”

• Drove 3× higher conversions immediately post-webinar

4. Referral Loops with In-App Credits

• “Invite your campus buddy” = 2 credits

• 5 successful invites = unlock mentor badge and early access to premium mentors

• Designed sharing links for WhatsApp, Telegram, and LinkedIn (platform-native)

⚙️ Ops Stack & Tools Used

• Notion + Typeform for ambassador onboarding

• Glide App for internal tracking of referrals by campus

• Firebase Functions for credit reward automation

• Google Meet + Zoom for onboarding calls and demo days

• Figma for building playbooks, guides, and campus kits

📈 Results

MetricBefore Campus GTMAfter LaunchWeekly active users40–50270+ ↑Bookings/week~35160+ ↑Referrals/user~0.42.2 ↑Session show-up rate68%88% ↑Colleges reached~620+ in 6 weeks

Top campuses included: Gautam Buddha University, Graphic Era University, Galgotia University, BML Munjal University, etc.

🔍 What We Learned

• People follow people — ambassadors drive more trust than features

• Custom landing pages convert better than general signups

• The phrase “mentor from Google/Swiggy/Zomato” converted 3× more

• Students love gamified incentives that feel like progress, not bribes

• Webinars → Bookings = the best activation funnel we had

🧠 What I’d Do Next

• Build a self-serve onboarding kit for clubs and placement cells

• Add college dashboards with live stats, mentor leaderboards

• Partner with edtech sponsors to reward high-usage campuses

• Launch a “college-to-career” track with mentor paths curated by degree

Final Thoughts

This was the moment Mentorpedia shifted from a mentorship app to a movement inside campus networks. It showed me the power of designing not just features, but systems of distribution.
Because real growth doesn’t happen by chance — it happens by designing onboarding that feels like belonging.

Want the full Ambassador Playbook, demo flow, or GTM deck?
→ Reach out via amishsri.framer.website
→ Or ping me directly on LinkedIn