Manatee Mentor

Our Vision is to transform the way people build themselves AND their businesses up through values of solidarity, courage and curiosity.

Our solution is a digital platform and app allowing to 1) Set, select, go: match or unmatch with your mentor and mentee. It’s that easy. 2) Any topic is a good mentoring topic 3) Give back to receive back - in time or money 4) Ensure maximum trust and privacy for all. We innovate through a scalable business model combining social impact with profit, collaborations with strategic partners and data-driven match making through AI. It will help decrease unemployment, increase employee satisfaction and create business opportunities for freelancer and small business owners.

After running interviews and a survey with several dozens of professionals, we figured out there is a real need: 80% of surveyed people shared that the value of mentoring as a strengthener of company culture is often underestimated. 70% said that top mentors as inaccessible, while 85% considered paid coaching and training unaffordable. Still 90% answered that they are ready to be mentored and to mentor others but majority couldn’t find a mentoring solution or program corresponding to their individual needs and preferences. This led to the creation of Manatee Mentor, whose goal is to become the digital platform to match mentors and mentees by making mentoring simple, trustworthy and accessible to anyone. Our vision is to transform the way people build themselves and their businesses up through values of solidarity, courage and curiosity. The solution will contribute vastly to the social sustainability in the dimensions of economic development, education, professional development and integration. Manatee Mentor will offer mentoring not only for individuals and large companies but also for startups and SMEs. There is a huge unmet need for both individuals and companies.

We aim to introduce the first mentor-mentee match-making platform and community, which will help individuals reach their personal and professional goals and companies – strengthen their culture by retaining, developing and attracting a fitting new talent. MM will allow for free mentoring by volunteers but also for paid mentors who want to monetize their time and build their brand as experts and leaders of SMEs. 

1. Set, select and go: match or un-match with your mentor and mentee
Define your topic, preferences, find your perfect match in the app or on the desktop platform. 

2. Any topic is a good mentoring topic
We aim to build up from the shared human experience and knowledge, which can span over any topic impacting our professional lives. 

3. Give back to get back
We are looking for a mutual win-win. The community is based on solidarity through giving back: we count on every mentee and volunteer mentor to do so. If you give back, you earn Mana points which you can use for more mentoring. If you cannot give back with time, you can also choose from our pool of paid mentors. 

4. Trust and privacy for all
All your 1/1 mentoring exchanges are fully confidential. 

Professionals - graduates, employees, entrepreneurs, freelancers

Manatee Mentor innovates in its business model design. The team believes that as a social impact enterprise it can create both positive societal and economic benefit leveraging the power of collaborations for win-win, both for individuals and businesses. Currently, there are no large existing competitors. Although LinkedIn allows for individuals to list volunteering as an interest, there is no match-making service developed. Similarly, there are a number of dedicated and very niche mentoring programs, but their scope is rather limited and quite often not linked to the holistic needs of an individual or an enterprise: e.g. academic coaching within the university boundaries with technical subjects as focus, youth refugee support programs with focus on professional and personal integration, local programs for elderly residents over 60 years of age, female-centered coaching services.

Through continuous education and access to a like-minded support and skill network we will reimagine the pathways to employment. We believe that everybody can be a mentor and mentee, and as such both give back and benefit from continous professional education and development. 

Yes, after first MVP validation in Year 1. We would like to be able to scale to the US in 2022.

3 people

Lucy Setian

Claes Backman

Aditya Raj

Our co-founders represent multiple ethnicity groups, gender and religions.

We innovate through a scalable business model combining social impact with profit, collaborations with strategic partners and data-driven match making through AI.

Manatee is all about Business Model Innovation

•Device agnostic digital platform with a peer-to-peer network approach

•Strong collaboration mindset enabled by strategic partnerships with other organizations

•Social impact + Profit = Sustainability

•Core company values and skills

•Sustainable circular economic model power by virtual currency, and eventually – AI and blockchain

Why we succeed?

Our values are uniquely based on solidarity for win-win upgrowth

Heavily fragmented market with no leader

Current offers are organization and profit driven, not user driven and human need centric

We will use mobile and digital technology and AI as a core. In the future we plan to embed also blockchain for our Mana virtual currency.

Please see the shared Youtube video.

We believe that mentoring leads to fundamental professional transformation and growth.

On the other side we believe that many freelancer and small business owners, independent of that in which part of the world they live can contribute to building a growth mindset.

Lastly, we know that even CEOs need mentoring - because being on the top is never easy, given that you're mostly alone.

We plan to build the MVP, validate it, and release a Beta, with which we want to scale to a global solution.

Funding

Looking for a suitable grant partner.

We are looking to collect continuous data about the professional development of individuals. Additionally we want to collect data about the retention and new hire recruitment rate of companies who chose Manatee Mentor. 

We are not yet incorporated as an organization but we plan to do so by end of Jan 2021.

Our vast experience and complementarity. Combined we bring on the table skills on business strategy, digital products and services, marketing and sales, data science and web development, people and organization. 

We are happy to share more about our strategic partner's strategy during a call. We plan to have 3 types of strategic partners, core to the success of our business model. 

We are a platform based business with 4 revenue streams.

Our target audience are all professionals, as defined in the Switzerland Labour market indicators,as economically active. These means that they are either self-employed,employed or looking for an employment. In addition, we consider business owners also part of this customer group. As such our
customers are on one hand individual professionals and on the other organizations, who are interested in bringing next generation mentoring to their employees.

Key market drivers include the increase in broadband connectivity, the trend of increasing hiring of remote workers, the economic loss of job opportunities and business revenues due to Covid-19, the
need for urgent upskilling due to the arrival of new cut edge technologies such as AI, blockchain and quantum computing and lastly the migration due to lack of equal opportunities at the home market such as access to education, innovation funding and support networks.

We don't have major existing barrier to entry, except lack of capital. Once we have built our solution, we will focus our efforts in scaling it up and building the partner network with like-minded mentoring program, aiming to boost our mutual gains.Of course, as the technology behind the innovation is
rather simple, this creates a strong opportunity for other companies to copy our model, however we believe that thanks to our company culture and values, combined with the expertise of the core team,
we will be able to truly differentiate it once we take off.

The business model is composed of 4 main revenue streams, as mentioned earlier, B2C, B2B team  subscriptions, marketplace and advertising. In the B2C revenue stream we will charge a commission fee from all mentoring hours purchased from paid mentors on the platform. The commission rate will vary depending on the total of hours generated on the platform each month by the respective paid mentor - the more hours they generate, the lower the commission percentage charge will be.

In the B2B model, we will approach startups, SMEs and large organizations, who would like to purchase at bulk a number of hours for their employees giving them right to benefit from access to a number of our paid mentors and also a selected ones among the volunteer mentors, who will agree to
prioritize them. We aim to prioritize several sectors closer to our HQ base, such as health and life sciences, banking and technology.
The marketplace will allow for owned and partner offerings on mentoring such as custom goodies, partner provided- books and courses. The advertising will allow for both partners and paid mentors to promote jobs they are recruiting for and/or their firm's services linked to professional development,
recruitment.

none yet - we have fully self-funded the venture

We seek to raise a funding in the form of an equity-free 400k grant.

400000

We believe that our missions and visions are strongly aligned not only about Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US but also globally.

We are looking for like-minded partners who aim to reinvent the future of professional development, job creation and economic support for small businesses.

Foundations who have a shared mission to ours.