If you’re looking into mentorship platforms, you’re probably wondering what makes the difference between platforms. Is one better because it costs more? Is it down to the features? How can you know if a certain platform will be a good fit for you?

While we can’t pull out a magic eight ball and give you an exact answer to your “platform fit question,” we can tell you what to look for to make your decision. Let’s dive in to what really matters.

What to Look for in a Mentorship Platform

At their core, mentorship platforms mostly all function the same way.

You have a catalog of mentor profiles that you can browse by different industries, skills, or areas of mentorship. Then you can book calls with mentors through the program.  Some platforms may offer personalized matching or study plans.

Those features really aren’t a good way to evaluate whether a mentorship platform is a good fit for you.

Instead, you’ll want to look at a few different metrics:

Target Audience:

First up: are you in the platform’s target audience? Seems like a simple question, but it matters.

Some mentorship platforms have very niche target markets. More targeted platforms can be an advantage if you’re looking for help with super-specific, connected skills or you’re looking for advice from people in your industry.

Others have much broader target markets. Platforms like these are great choices if you think you’ll need help across a wide range of specialties or if you want diverse perspectives, possibly from outside your industry or company size.

Pricing

Next, you need to consider pricing.

Mentorship platforms vary a ton in this respect. Some platforms are free, which makes them a great way to test the waters. However, if you’re making a pivotal business decision, you may want to be wary of the old adage: you get what you pay for.

Paid mentorship platforms are generally going to guarantee a higher quality of mentors. These platforms know their customers have put money on the table.

Therefore, they’re going to double-check their mentor supply-side and often vet them to some extent (more on that in a minute).

Of course, there’s also the perennial affordability issue. Especially if you’re an early or mid-stage startup, every dollar counts. So you have to find a platform with quality mentors that’s also not going to break the bank.

Type of Mentor Engagements

Then there’s a question of what type of mentorship you’re looking for.

Mentorship platform engagements typically come in two flavors: long-term and single sessions.

For platforms geared towards the long-term, you’re likely going to only have one mentor you chat with. Simply by the nature of only speaking to one mentor, your mentoring sessions are likely going to focus more on specific subject areas.

For single-session platforms, you can chat with multiple mentors rather than just one. Thus, you’ll have more subject areas you can cover, but you won’t have the long-term company or career trajectory focus you’d get with a single mentor.

Diversity of Mentor Skills and Industries

This links back to the point about target audiences. Because mentorship platforms are essentially marketplaces, the demand-side and supply-side reflect each other.

In general, the wider a platform’s target audience is, the more diverse the array of mentor skills and industries will be. The narrower the target audience, the more niche the mentor pool will be. And certain platforms consciously constrain themselves to only offering a smaller number of mentors or focus on providing as many mentors as possible.

Quality of Mentors

Remember that point about mentor vetting we mentioned earlier? This is it.

Mentorship is not a standardized or regulated industry. Thus, platforms will all have different methods they use for vetting mentors. Some grant approval simply based on an application and a couple of filtering criteria. Others require mentors to go through multiple rounds of interviews and tests after an application.

So how important do you think it is to have a carefully vetted mentor? If you’re making big business decisions, you’ll want to chat with vetted mentors. Chances are you’ll likely need to use a paid mentorship platform rather than a free one to get said vetting.

Community

Finally, you have the community aspect. Yes, mentorship platforms are marketplaces with a mentee demand-side and a mentor supply-side.

However, that may not be all there is to a platform. You can have cases where the mentee-to-mentee community and their relationships are just as important as mentee-to-mentor relationships.

Platforms with communities often make for great places to network, meet cool people, build peer-to-peer support or mastermind groups, help others out, and ask the questions you feel might be too amateur-hour to ask your mentor. (Note: there’s no such thing as a stupid question to ask your mentor. But, we understand feeling awkward—the imposter syndrome is real.)

In some cases, mentors may even interact with the community, providing a great place to touch base with mentors outside of a regular mentoring session.

When you look at a specific mentorship platform to join, keep the above criteria in mind. Answering those points will help you find the platform that fits best for you.