I’ve developed a platform for MBA graduate students, offering 1:1 mock case interviews with former/active consultant experts, currently focusing on consulting.
The app is still in pre-alpha and fully functional for both sides, I’m in the phase of onboarding consultants who may be interested in joining and start posting their coaching offers on the platform and making extra cash per month by helping students be better at case interviews.
However I struggle to find consultants, I get few responses to my invitation messages, and this slows my growth because I need consultants in the app before I start looking for students.
I would like to hear your advice on that and if you have some tips.
Would it be easier to bring students if you had more/better consultants? Or to bring consultants if you had more students?
Consultants should be more interested in how much traffic you can bring to their doorstep because they already have a platform. A new platform means a new commitment, and if there’s nothing feasible for them then there’s no incentive to do so.
One possible strategy is to identify niche professional forums or groups where they gather online and promote your platform there.
Additionally, consider offering exclusive perks or incentives to attract consultants, making participation more appealing.
Because let’s be real—most of the people that you are looking for are already well sought after or own businesses of their own.
What are you offering them which they’re not already getting paid for (or paying themselves for) somewhere else?
The usual thing is that:
“It’s harder to run a shoe repair business if you can’t repair shoes”
Start by limiting the consulting to services you, your partners, close friends or existing contacts you already have can deliver.
You can get some true external consultants, but that’s a bonus for later when you have a customer base.
It’s a problem like this one: “Should I hire or get customer first ? without customers I can’t hire and without hiring I can’t get customers”
--> Disregarding an important variable might transform an easy answer “work yourself until you have enough work to hire” into a chicken and egg problem.You need to offer the deliverable internally for very long, it’ll take very long before you can fully externalize. Even then the internalized service might still be the most popular.