Mentorpedia

Building a mentorship marketplace from zero — and learning everything the hard way

Role: Co-Founder, Product Designer & Team Lead Timeline: January 2024 – April 2025 Platform: Web & Mobile Status: Closed Website: mentorpedia.io

The Problem

92% of people feel lost at some point in their career or education. Most don't have access to the right mentor at the right time — not because mentors don't exist, but because there's no structured, accessible way to connect with them.

Guidance is one of the most unevenly distributed resources in the world. Where you're from, who you know, and what college you attended shouldn't determine the quality of advice you receive. Mentorpedia was built to change that.

"I had experienced firsthand the challenges of navigating life's crossroads without proper guidance. I wanted to build a solution that could bridge that gap."

We Got Featured !

My Role

As co-founder, I owned the full product lifecycle — not just design, but strategy, research, team leadership, and go-to-market execution. This was the most complete product experience of my career.

• Defined product vision, roadmap, and KPIs from day one

• Led end-to-end UX across all core flows

• Conducted user research and prototype testing

• Managed cross-functional teams across design, engineering, and marketing

• Pitched to mentors, mentees, and early investors

• Raised a seed round to fund initial development

Understanding the User

Before designing a single screen, I spent weeks talking to potential users — students navigating career choices, early professionals changing industries, and mentors who had tried other platforms and felt underutilised.

Three core pain points emerged consistently:

For mentees:

• No easy way to find mentors relevant to their specific situation

• Unclear what a session would actually involve before booking

• Trust gap — paying a stranger for advice felt risky

For mentors:

• Existing platforms made it hard to showcase their expertise meaningfully

• Session management was chaotic — scheduling, payments, and follow-ups were fragmented

• No feedback loop to improve over time

These insights became the foundation for every design decision.

User Research / Insights

The Solution

Mentorpedia was designed as a two-sided marketplace where every interaction — discovery, booking, session, feedback — felt intentional and trustworthy.

Core Features Designed

Customisable Mentor Profiles Mentors could showcase their expertise, experience, and approach in a way that felt human — not like a CV. The goal was to help mentees make an informed, confident decision before booking.

Smart Discovery & Matching Mentees could filter by domain, goal, budget, and availability. The matching logic was designed to surface relevance, not just popularity — so a first-generation college student could find a mentor who'd walked their exact path.

Session Management One-click booking, calendar sync, and automated reminders — removing every friction point between a mentee deciding they want guidance and actually getting it.

Secure Payments End-to-end payment flow with escrow-style release after session completion — building trust on both sides of the marketplace.

Feedback System Post-session ratings and structured feedback that helped mentors improve and gave mentees confidence in future bookings.

Core Product Screens

The Design Process

Information Architecture First

With two user types and multiple core flows, I started with IA before any visual design. Every screen needed a clear answer to: whose job does this serve, and what do they need to do next?

Mobile-First

Most mentees were students accessing the platform on their phones. I designed every core flow mobile-first, then adapted to desktop — not the other way around.

Conversion-Focused Onboarding

Getting mentees through sign-up to their first booked session was the critical funnel. I mapped every step, identified drop-off points, and iterated until the path from landing page to confirmed booking was as short as possible.

The result: 25% improvement in booking conversion through funnel simplification and friction reduction.

Iterative Testing

Every major flow went through prototype testing with real users before development. I ran sessions with 10-15 users per iteration, capturing both behavioural data and qualitative feedback.

Design Process

Outcomes

• 800+ active users onboarded within 4 months of launch

• 1,000+ mentorship sessions completed on the platform

• 25% improvement in booking conversion through funnel redesign

• 65% month-on-month adoption growth driven by onboarding and matching UX improvements

• 200+ pre-launch signups secured through go-to-market experiments

• Seed round raised to fund initial product development

• Featured by KaroStartup — "Friends Turned Founders Revolutionising Guidance for Dreamers"

Metrics / Results

What Didn't Work — And Why That Matters

Mentorpedia closed in April 2025. Finding product-market fit in the mentorship space proved harder than anticipated — monetisation models that worked for Western markets didn't translate cleanly to the Indian context, and scaling supply (quality mentors) alongside demand was a constant tension.

I'm sharing this not as a footnote but as a central part of the story — because the most valuable design lessons I've learned came from watching real users struggle with flows I thought were perfect, and from making product decisions under real constraints with real stakes.

A Google designer once said: "The best way to learn product is to build one and watch it fail in interesting ways." Mentorpedia failed in very interesting ways.

KaroStartup Feature

Key Lessons

Design for trust before delight. In a two-sided marketplace, users won't engage with clever interactions until they feel safe. Trust signals — reviews, verified profiles, secure payments — had to come before anything else.

Conversion is a design problem. Every percentage point of drop-off in our booking funnel was a design decision that hadn't been thought through carefully enough. I became obsessive about funnel analytics as a result.

Founders make the worst user researchers. It's hard to hear that something you built doesn't make sense to someone. The discipline of sitting on your hands during a usability test — not explaining, not defending — is one of the hardest skills I developed.

Simplicity requires more work, not less. The cleaner a flow looks, the more iterations it took to get there. Our final onboarding was 4 steps. The first version was 11.

Reflection

Mentorpedia was more than a product — it was the experience that shaped how I think about design, users, and building from scratch. The connections it created, the lessons it taught, and the team it brought together are its real legacy.

I carry its spirit into every product I work on now: deep empathy for the user, relentless iteration, and the belief that clarity is always worth fighting for.

Mentorpedia — Jan 2024 to Apr 2025 mentorpedia.io