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.
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.