Time Travel to 2025 - Looking back to a Year of Growth and Inspiration at The Mentoring Club!
The Mentoring Club will celebrate it's 4th anniversary in 2024. With this post we'd like to take you on a journey to the end of 2024. Where might we stand?
First things first: If you wonder why you received this email, we’d like to inform you that we migrated our newsletter to Substack, a platform that aligns much better with our creator mindset and the community behind The Mentoring Club. You can easily unsubscribe if you don’t want to receive such emails. If you want to support us, please donate (as a non-profit registered in Germany, we’re eligible for donations) or upgrade to a paid subscription.
The “Founding Member” subscription comes with a special gift, sent to your home address and an invite to an exclusive Slack Channel with the founders of the Mentoring Club and some of our most inspiring mentors.
With this newsletter, we’ll continue to inform you and the rest of the community about new features, events, and other stuff that happens in and around The Mentoring Club. We’ll also publish a newsletter every 1 or 2 weeks with our thoughts, insightful articles, mentor stories, and book recommendations. Stay tuned and tell all your friends about this new substack and The Mentoring Club.
Now, fasten your seat belt. The time travel will start in 1…2…3 …..
Dear community,
we wish you all a fantastic new year 2025!
Last year has been an outstanding ride for us. Started as a two-people initiative during the first coronavirus lockdown, our community grew to more than 30,000 people worldwide. While we kept our promise of enabling as many people as possible with free access to the best and most inspiring mentors in their field, we also started more than 6 specific mentoring programs during the year. The first two (“The PMO Leader” and “Global Female Leaders”) were phenomenal successes and paved the path for a more diverse mentorship experience on our platform.
A year ago, in January 2024, we looked back to 2023, and we were already impressed, grateful, and just speechless by looking at the numbers:
From the beginning, the foundation for our reach and growth was our LinkedIn community, which grew from 15k in 2023 to more than 25k in 2024. If you are not part of this community, follow us for regular updates and inspiring content.
With the introduction of the new feature that allowed our partners to create mentoring programs using our platform, we were able to grow from 9 to 30k members. About 30% of these are mentors who provided more than 25.000 sessions, or more than 15Mio Mentoring Minutes. Most of these (80%) were pro-bono mentoring sessions. This was only possible because our donations doubled (from 6,500 € in 2023 to over 15,000 in 2024), and we could introduce our substack channel, some B2B features, and more partnerships and sponsorships. By the way, if you want to become a sponsor, please contact us here.
But there was even more: We hosted 10 outstanding online events with amazing speakers and our first onsite meetups in our 5 strongest countries (Germany, India, UK, USA, and Nigeria), and we started a new season of our mentoring podcast. A lot of great learning sources.
The mentoring experience at The Mentoring Club was heavily improved with new features like the Mentoring Journey, where mentors and mentees can organize follow-up sessions, chat with each other, set up a session curriculum, and much more, or Group Mentorings, where mentors can organize sessions with small groups of mentees. Many more features have been launched in the last 12 months. Most of these came to life because you helped us define a roadmap with your feature requests.
We had more than 100,000 visitors in one month for the first time since we started. Coming from 40,000 in 2023, this is quite a significant growth with a price tag (infrastructure, data, etc.). As a non-profit initiative, we spend all revenue (donations, and actual revenue) on growing and scaling the good cause of our community. This does not come for free. So please join our founders, Jessica and Bastian, who create this platform pro bono in their valuable free time, and help grow The Mentoring Club even further.
Happy New Year!
Bastian and Jessica
Back to today! Of course, all of this is fiction and maybe wishful thinking. But we could make it happen. And you can be a part of it. Let us know how we can improve. Send us your donation, tell your friends and colleagues about us, create an article if you are a journalist, or write a guest post on our substack. Whatever it is, let us build a platform where people learn from people, strangers from different parts of the world meet and inspire each other, and where amazing things can happen.
We know that The Mentoring Club is not perfect. It is built by two volunteers in their free time. But we are committed to continuing this journey and following the path we started to walk almost 4 years ago. We believe many beautiful experiences are waiting for us and every single member of our community.
Happy New Year, dear community!
Bastian & Jess
co-Founders of The Mentoring Club