What We Have Learned from Mentoring Startups Since 2008

These days, everyone seems to be a startup mentor. Whether they have ever done a startup or not, whether they have ever raised money or not, they are ready to advise entrepreneurs. I want to share with you some things we have learned in running the 1Mby1M program since 2008. Over 680 free mentoring roundtables. Over 300,000 entrepreneurs have participated.

We started experimenting with the roundtable format of online mentoring way back in the fall of 2008. At the time, 1Mby1M did not exist, not even in our heads. It wasn’t until my January 2010 New Year Resolution that the concept was born.

The 1Mby1M Premium program was launched at the end of 2010. It took us about one year to figure out how to do what we were hoping to do: help entrepreneurs at scale.

We have been able to develop and enrich a curriculum that entrepreneurs have been using in web self-service mode since 2010. These curriculum modules, increasingly, are able to address questions from the entrepreneurs without the need for interactive sessions. As such, when we do get into interactive discussions, they are on more sophisticated issues. The basics can be handled by the curriculum.

Obviously, the feedback is good, or else, we wouldn’t be able to continue with such a consistent, long-running effort.

In 2021, we started uploading some of our curriculum modules onto Udemy. By 2025, over 80 modules have been released.

At this point, you can access the 1Mby1M curriculum through 1Mby1M Premium, 1Mby1M Basic, and Udemy.

Over time, we may offer the curriculum through other platforms. If you have such a platform with significant traffic, please feel free to reach out with a proposal. Please note, we do not work in all-you-can-eat subscription models. We have to have a transaction fee based royalty-sharing business model.

However, we’re all for expanding the impact of our curriculum and would love to work with you if we have a win-win possibility.

Are you doing something synergistic in entrepreneurship development in some corner of the world?