Mentorship is among many activities disrupted by coronavirus-related safety measures that restricted physical gatherings last year.
A Dubai-founded start-up decided to move mentorship – like many things in the age of Covid-19 – online.
Co-founder of digital platform Mentorshape Hassanain Anver described 2020 as a stressful year where a lot of young professionals, including himself, were losing their jobs or working in new ways as the global pandemic raged on. They needed guidance but felt unable to get that.
“I have a network of mentors that I am always in touch with but, with the pandemic, I felt I was unable to reach out to them especially since everybody was busy figuring out their own thing,” said Anver.
“That was when I felt there should be a proper online network connecting people with mentors immediately to get help,” he continued.
Hassanain Anver, Co-founder of digital platform Mentorshape.
Having previously collaborated on several initiatives during their university days in the UAE, Anver and the three other co-founders once again came together, this time remotely, to work on Mentorshape, launching it in early February.
“As founders, we are very passionate about mentoring because we have grown in our careers over the last few years through being mentored and talking to each other. If this helped us, then why not offer it to others?” asked Anver.
Mentorshape uses an AI-based matchmaking system that connects mentees to mentors based on their replies to a questionnaire that covers their preferred learning approach – for example, the harsher “tough love” approach versus the cheerleader positive-focused one – among other criteria.
Mentorship opportunities provided by the social platform fall in the areas of career and personal development, personal finance and entrepreneurship.
The platform is currently in the testing phase but already has 20 mentors on board based in different countries across the globe including the UAE, Canada, India and the USA, said Anver.
Mentorshape co-founders Upasana Bhatia, Aakash Gopalakrishnan and Anamta Farook.
“We have over 150 mentees signed up and eager to join and we are trying to manage expectations so that mentors can manage that many mentees,” said Anver.
So far, mentors have joined on a voluntary basis and mentees can use the platform for free initially, but Anver says they are planning to introduce a paid subscription model down the line, although some elements will continue to be free.
“The feedback we got to date is that mentors want to do this for free as a way of giving back but we believe that if you don’t put a price on it, it will not be valued. We want to attach a price to it so that [the] mentor’s time is valued,” explained Anver.
The subscription model will be based on a set number of hours the mentee gets with the mentor and the money generated will be used to compensate mentors and sustain Mentorshape’s business model.
Mentorshape also plans on adding new features such as to-do lists and calendars, through which mentors can assign tasks to their mentees following their discussion and “set goals for them so their engagement is beyond just the conversation,” said Anver.
“The four of us are extremely ambitious and our long-term goal is to add mentoring to the education system itself and have it be part of the curriculum globally,” explained Anver.
“Small scale goals include having 50 percent of the UAE workforce on mentoring platforms within the next two years. We hope for mentorship platforms to be developed in the region,” he continued.
When asked what advice he would give young entrepreneurs, Anver said: “Stop thinking and start doing. You can plan for all possibilities but until you do something, you will never know what the end-result will be so stop over analysing something and just start executing.”
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