Leveling the field for under-networked tech workers to grow their craft, career, and confidence
My chat with Kirk, Founder of Merit
Can you tell people who you are and what you’ve been building?
I’m Kirk, founder of Merit. I’ve spent a decade in the tech industry working as an engineer, designer, and product manager in big tech (Microsoft), consulting, and startups (Hightower/VTS and Merit).
Merit is tech mentorship for the under-networked. We enable folks in their first years in tech to debug their career challenges via 1:1 video mentorship with senior tech leaders. Mentors use Merit to give back and diversify their own networks.
Our mission is to democratize the professional network. Mentorship is the most effective way to build your network and career. Not everyone has that network built in for them, so we built Merit for the under-networked tech worker to grow their craft, career, and confidence.
How did you get your first user or customer? When did you know you were onto something?
Merit has gone through about three major phases: prototype, program, and product. We cover each phase in more detail on our blog, but here’s a quick recap of how we went through each phase:
Prototype: We started as an internal Slack bot where people could ask for help. But we soon realized people didn’t want to ask for help in a work environment where their boss or HR could observe. So we scrapped this quickly.
Program: We then built a program to connect folks to people they don’t work with. Our initial program for Merit was hacked together with other services like Calendly, Airtable, Google Forms, and Zapier. Merit is a marketplace of members and mentors, so I’ll share how we got the initial supply and demand:
Members: We looked on LinkedIn to find early-stage startups where there wasn’t more than one level of management for a product, design, or engineering in NYC. We looked at the startup team page and messaged all the folks who came from under-represented backgrounds or were very junior, or both. We asked if they were looking for a mentor or career advice, and we did a 20-minute user interview with them. We collected their problems and the types (i.e advocates, connectors, experts etc.) of mentors they wanted to talk to.
Mentors: Randy (my co-founder) and I both worked in tech, so we had an initial network to tap into. We reached out to senior product managers, product designers, and software engineers that we worked with. We asked about 30 of those people if they wanted to be mentors on Merit (without anything built) and got about 15 to do a user interview with us. We collected their preferences and interests and kept that in an Airtable database. We created Calendly accounts for each one so they could take mentorship sessions.
Now that we had initial supply and demand on both sides, we started connecting folks via e-mail. After they were connected, we followed up to see if they talked and sent them both Google Forms for feedback. As we got each piece of positive feedback, we asked each member and mentor to refer 3 of their friends from either side. And we kept doing things until we’d generated 100 or so “sessions.” This was all without a web app.
Product: Soon the Airtable that collected this data was getting harder to manage, we realized we had to automate some parts of the process. We created an Airtable forms to capture member and mentor applications. We e-mailed the people who applied to do a short video on-boarding session with us. We then interviewed the first 100 mentors and the first 100 members personally. This was super useful because we could keep tuning the “product” and collect feedback. This was slower but more useful in learning. Again we did a lot of this over forms, automated e-mails via Zapier, and Airtable forms and triggers.
We built the first list of mentors as a web page once we couldn’t match people by hand anymore, and I think that’s when we knew we were on to something. This was the first “product” we built, which was the browse-able list of mentors. Over time, we expanded on this list of mentors to a fully featured mentorship platform, but it all started with that list of mentors.
Walk us through some early experiments.
We asked universities and bootcamps to give Merit as “homework” to their students
We messaged hundreds of student coordinators and student clubs to share Merit with their communities.
Student coordinators loved sharing Merit because it gave credibility to the advice they gave (i.e., students believe the same advice if it comes from people in industry vs. career services people). Brooklyn College now give Merit as homework to their computer science students when they are graduating.
We knew this was working when we would reliably get members from CUNY and SUNY schools, and that became a steady stream of new members every semester
I invited everyone I knew to use Merit; this was the initial bootstrapping of the network of both sides.
For mentors, I invited every single senior product manager, software engineer, and product designer I knew to be a mentor. Note that sometimes you’ll get higher than normal adoption since it's your friends but it's a great set of test data to work out the kinks, and you’ll get folks to share. I knew this was working when I could convert 20% of my LinkedIn connections to mentors on Merit.
I joined hundreds of Slacks, Discords, and communities to share Merit
I joined community groups and followed what questions people asked to offer help and shared Merit as a resource. I framed Merit as an answer to career questions they asked, especially questions about resume feedback, interview help, or just general questions about breaking into the tech industry
I knew this was working when I would reliably convert 40-50% of the people I would message
What channels have worked for you?
We’ve tried many channels: ads, content, sales, and virality.
The two channels that have reliably acquired users are
SEO and content: Merit is the kind of product that people search via Google. They search for questions like “tech mentorship” and “product management vs. project management”. They also search mentors’ names (e.g., “Catt Small”), so their Merit mentor profiles show up. So we rely on a mix of editorial and user-generated content. Content was an early channel, but it takes time to nail well. But once you get it going, it’s a reliable acquisition channel.
Direct outbound and sales: Directly messaging our target users via Slack/Twitter/DM etc. and also getting our users to share Merit in the groups that contain them (bootcamps for members and companies for mentors). We are essentially targeting aggregators of our demand (members) via direct outreach, top-down distribution via group leaders, or members sharing or profiles within those communities.
Here are all the channels we’ve tried and didn’t work
Virality: We tried mentor nomination and member referral loops, but they never quite took off because the reality is that Merit is really about meeting new people. “Better with friends” virality didn’t apply to Merit. Nominating mentors had some success, but inviting people to be members had less success because people decide for themselves if and when they need help. Users also felt slightly weird recommending a mentorship platform to their friends or co-workers. It was slightly similar to recommending someone to go to therapy.
Ads: These were useful to actually generate detailed user segments but it was very expensive to get less qualified users. It's better to use ads to get a segment and then write content against this segment.
What would you do differently?
I would have leaned into more “topical” events. As a founder, you want to surf waves to gain momentum—leaning into things we don’t control but where positioning your product or service can gain adoption either cheaper or faster. For example, we are now reaching out to folks who were recently laid off and seeing traction from it.
There is no such thing as “free” growth; it’s all “paid.” All marketing costs, either with time or money. You pay for virality with research and development time.
There aren’t growth “hacks”; there are lots of optimizations, though. Knowing where to spend your time and money is very tricky.
Marketing = growth = telling everyone about your startup. It’s not complicated; it just takes money and iteration to nail it right. The stronger your product is, the faster marketing becomes. Weak products burn money trying to grow. Sometimes a month of production time is cheaper than a year of marketing costs.
I would constantly test marketing channels and run marketing very similar to a product, which is a series of bets or experiments. Cheaply test every idea before investing more into (use a IF X THEN Y model). A lot of that initial marketing budget will be for experimentation and validation.
What advice would you give to founders looking to get their startups off the ground?
All the obvious advice is true: focus leads to speed, speed leads to leverage, and leverage means you don’t die.
Don’t spread your product or use case too wide in the early days; it can actually slow you down or possibly kill you.
Go wide when you don’t know, and go deep when you do.
The positioning and messaging of the value prop itself is the key thing to iterate on. The more you iterate and tighten this, the cheaper channels become. Messaging is a product in itself before you even get to the channels.
Talk to 100 customers: that's the fastest way to get 1,000 customers. Video and remote make this way easier than before.
You can ship daily, evaluate weekly, and change strategy monthly (at most). This model can be used as you go from the founders to the first squad up until multiple product lines.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share.