“the first let's say a 100 mentor have been really hard and you know that was just manual labor cold yamming cold emailing on mass um we never really found a channel where we can get people in at scale... probably north of 2,000 messages to get the first 100 people or so”

Expect ~2,000 manual DMs to land your first 100 supply-side participants

Set your expectations for the cold-start phase: ~20 DMs / cold emails per signed-up mentor or supplier. No clever channel exists — only sustained, personalized outreach until inbound builds. Dominic sent 2,000+ messages to land the first 100 mentors. Today MentorCruise has zero outbound and 80% rejection of inbound applications. The grind is the price of getting to the inbound phase.