Mentor Mailbox is shutting down

As of October 1, 2019 Mentor Mailbox will halt operations and disable the platform for all users.

If you are a customer, you can contact support@mentormailbox.com with any questions until January 1, 2020.

Goodbyes are hard

In fact, startups are hard; making inroads in edtech is harder. We did our best, the last couple years, to provide students of higher education seamless access to mentorship and academic support - but it was not enough.

In hindsight, here's what we think we got wrong:

• We pursued higher education administrators. In a "top down" approach, we attempted to sell to the purchase decision makers. Administrators were not our key audience though. In what was always a long, gruelling sales cycle, we were distracted from our true stakeholders (students, teachers, and tutors).
• We should have used a "bottoms up" approach, wherein we engaged teachers, students, and tutors to adopt the tool for free in order to better achieve their own goals: passing a class, graduating, staying in school, etc. With enough traction at the classroom level, we could then try to sell administrators analytics, dashboards, and control of the platform.
• Teachers are overworked and academic tutors are in short supply (especially in rural community colleges). If we could do it again, we would have partnered with a tutoring company in order to provide a pool of mentors and tutors, ready to help support students at schools from day 1. This would have drastically reduced the "onboarding time" for new schools. And, it would have reduced response times to students in the critical, "first impression" moments on Mentor Mailbox.

To our customers, thank you for taking the chance on us. You are truly the unsung heroes in edtech. We understand that administrators in education are bombarded with solicitations from edtech companies - and new ones every week. We so appreciate those of you that shared our vision for student success, in which students are constantly engaged and supported by the entire staff, together. We still wholeheartedly believe that "it takes a village", and someday we hope to try to realize our vision again.

Thank you!

- Morgan, Uriel, and Allen