Building a startup

Small market Existing competition Aspirants aren’t exactly the ones who have the buying power Lack of moat

Still if you want to go ahead

1. Forum / Communities
   Use every forum and community where these aspirants are and ideally let your mentors answer their questions on these platforms, if the aspirants are looking for a deeper engagement then they’ll come to your website

2. Website content - Blogs and Q&A Develop a nice SEO friendly blog, Q&A and AMA section

3. Website SEO optimisation
   To drive traffic to the above website properties focus on the following

4. Lighthouse score of each page should be >92

5. Website structure and page structure (SEO markups)

6. Connect with high ranking websites in your niche and convince them to link to your website (backlinks)

7. Focus on long tail keywords which the competition isn’t focusing on due to low search volume to rank for those keywords first and then slowly move up the chain after dominating the low volume low competition search terms

8. Schools / Colleges guest sessions Ask your mentors to do guest sessions in schools and colleges nearest to them (to save time and money), this should be maximised and the registration for such a session MUST be through your website to drive traffic and awareness

9. Focus on getting Mentors who aren’t motivated by money Mentors who have achieved even slight success in their life would be earning 50 lpa+, so even if you offer 10k an hour won’t be enough for them if they’re evaluating it purely financially and if you focus on only young mentors then you’ll have to get a whole bunch of new mentors every year which will also have an acquisition cost

10. Focus on a niche at the start Before you become everything for everyone be something for someone - great product advice

You anyway won’t be able to launch all categories like JEE, NEET, CAT, GRE, GMAT, IAS, etc all at one go Focus on one or two and really mail it before moving to the next one

There are many other similar companies already

How are you structuring it financially- free, free+paid, paid?

Topmate does the same job. What different thing you would be doing ? Find your unique selling point - create good content around it - slides/pics/video. Demo it on social media.

Ask people if they are looking for mentors or seeking to give mentorship under a free service initially. Test your product in market before going full on. Plus, yoh will get few initial users.

Hope this helps in getting initial users.