“We accomplished more in those 30 minutes than I have in like three or four sessions with other career coaches.”

Tell us a bit about your company

Erin: We really have two segments of our project. There’s Readwise 1.0, which is a highlight aggregator. It makes it super easy to round up your highlights from pretty much any digital tool that you’re using for your reading, whether that’s Instapaper, Kindle, or Pocket.

And we pull all of those highlights into basically one database and make it super easy for you to review them.

And then from there you can export those highlights to your note-taking app of choice like Obsidian, Notion or Evernote.

That’s one side of our business. And then the second side is our own Read It Later app called Reader.

Basically that is an all-in-one reading tool that makes it super easy to read all of your web articles, PDFs, email newsletters, RSS feeds and eBooks.

And then, of course, same as our original product, any highlights you take in there will be exported to Readwise and then you can go on to export them to your note-taking app.

And what are each of your roles?

Erin: So I am the community marketing manager. Basically that any public facing customer service. So if you send us a tweet, I’ll reply to you. If you interact with either our Reddit or Discord server, I’ll interact with you there. I also handle all feature requests that come in over email, and then I handle our affiliate marketing program.

Eleanor: So I run the quality assurance department. My focus is making sure that we are not tripping bugs. And if there’s a bug in the app, I try to find it and help the developers figure out what’s causing it and make sure that we can get it fixed.

Abigail: I’m a general writer and I write our weekly newsletter that goes out as well as other projects that come up, so internal guides for employees, that type of thing.

Before starting with GrowthMentor, what challenges were you facing?

Erin: So I came in with two core challenges.

On the more tactical side, I wanted to learn ways in which we could build up our existing affiliate network and reach out to more of our existing users in a non-sleazy way to get more user-generated content that we could feature on our YouTube channel and in our marketing materials.  

On the softer end, I wanted to work on my communication skills. We’re a fully async remote organization, so it adds a layer of challenge to the team working together. I wanted to learn how my manager and I can be more on the same page. 

Eleanor: I’ve been working on a personal brand pivot now that I work for Readwise and now that my interests have changed. I was looking for ways to navigate the modern social media landscape in a way that is professional, but still not marketing.

Abigail: One big project that we’re working on right now is building out a footer for our homepage. That will serve both to help existing users find documentation that they need to understand how to use our products and then to also attract new customers.  

That’s where I jumped in with Growth Mentor, looking at some editorial SEO best practices and just kind of orienting myself in that space. I also wanted to learn how to navigate time management being part of a remote async startup. 

Did any one session stand out as super helpful to you?

Erin: I met with a mentor, Sarah Keffer.  She and I met right ahead of my annual review.

She was incredibly helpful just in negotiating salary and working through some points that I wanted to bring up but had been kind of fearful to talk through and I think she gave me a framework to use not only for that particular call but for raising questions and sticky situations in the future.

So that was incredibly well timed. I went into my annual review feeling much calmer, which is great.  

And I had another call with Mikel Ayala, who leads growth at Atani. And he was really helpful in thinking through ways we can start reaching out to more potential affiliates, growing our network there.

He also introduced me to the strategy he used at Atani for building this really powerful community of creators that I’m actually planning to try and replicate over at Readwise.  

So the booked calls were super, super tactical. I walked away from them feeling like I had a very clear framework, not only for the situation I was using, but for future situations as well.

Eleanor: Sarah Keffer was also my standout coach. She understood what the nature of my problem was and had very actionable advice. And some of the advice, I was initially a bit reluctant to consider, but she had really good reasons for the advice that she gave about things like the financial side of things.  

I was really, really impressed with how targeted she was and how well she knew the landscape and her Her background was different enough from mine to be valuable, but similar enough to where we were on the same page, which was nice.  

I also had a session with Lindsey Paholski. That was a little bit shorter, but she gave me some really great nitty gritty tactical advice that I found valuable.

Abigail: My session with Courtney Damji stood out to me.  She works remotely and so she had tips in that regard and we talked through like time blocking, and how to think about splitting up time between personal things like wedding planning, which she has been through fairly recently, so that was fun to get her perspective on that, and then also like travel.  

We also talked time-blocking. It’s been super helpful to kind of audit my time and see where it’s going and so that’s like really helps me understand how I’m using my time.

Did you have any surprises in your sessions?

Eleanor: I was surprised at the number of people I talked to where they said that none of their clients had ever used Twitter for anything.  I was thinking “what?”

Twitter is so deeply embedded in the tech world that I was surprised to be meeting with people giving this sorts of advice that was all Instagram and LinkedIn. I thought Twitter was sort of still, not like historically, the sort of the place where a lot of things were happening.

Based on your calls with mentors, do you have either results or plans that you guys are going to be moving forward with?

Erin: I think ones that I’ve already acted on, just having some tricky conversations, having the confidence to do that. Then In terms of carrying forward things that I learned through Mikel, I’m hoping to present a new community plan to our co-founders in the coming weeks.

Eleanor: So I’ve been using LinkedIn more, but truthfully, because Eleanor Konick is not my real name, it’s been difficult to get the sorts of reach that natively come when you’re a real person on LinkedIn. But I’ve definitely felt better about getting away from Twitter so that’s happened.

Abigail:  In terms of SEO, I have an upcoming call with an SEO expert we’ve hired to help us with this project and I feel like a little more ready to go in that conversation.  Like I have a better grasp on general practices and terminology. And while I don’t think I’ll stick with time blocking, it really helped me audit my time.

If you had somebody that was on the fence about potentially signing up, what would you guys say to any reservations they might have about joining? 

Erin: I was expecting my sessions to feel very sort of boilerplate, like being run through a typical process. But I found that my, in both instances, my mentors were I felt like they really tailored my sessions to my specific needs.  

Even before we had the session, they both sent really detailed follow-up or like introduction messages through the portal asking me what I was struggling with and sort of collecting details. So I feel like they both came to the meeting already really knowing me as an individual.  

And I was a little hesitant that they were only going to be 30 minute meetings, but we accomplished more in those 30 minutes than I feel like I have in like three or four sessions with other career coaches.

Eleanor: Unlike Erin, I’ve never really done anything like this before. I’ve always taken a sort of amateur approach to social media.  

The one thing I was most afraid of was that sort of the people I talked to would be working off of the same playbook as I was working off of. But there were moments where people were in like adjacent fields or you know were not super narrowly niched down into my exact same niche where I got valuable outside perspective.

So I would say that even if you feel like you are very knowledgeable about your own niche, having that outside adjacent perspective is really valuable.