Meeting a founder in Zurich

Last month I was on holiday in Switzerland so I decided to meet up with Dominic Monn, a successful Swiss entrepreneur living in Zurich.

I had probably spoken to Dom for 6-7 years online so it was nice to finally meet! He was one of the early people I interviewed for my No CS Degree project and the first founder on my High Signal interview series. He runs Mentorcruise, a website that lets you find a mentor for your job. So if you want to get better at marketing, you can hire me to mentor you, for example.

Some things I got from our meeting:

• Switzerland is expensive so he didn't quit his job right away to build Mentorcruise. His previous employer was cool with people doing side projects and he only quit his job when he was making $10-15k per month. When a room in a shared house in a bad neighbourhood costs $2,000 per month, you can't afford to just quit your job with no revenue coming in.

• Dominic is locked in on Mentorcruise. No side projects. Why work for a year to get a second project to $1k MRR when he could add $1k to his monthly revenue with a new marketing experiment?

• We agreed that doing lots of tiny bet startups wasn't smart. Each and every product would be better if its founder was 100% focussed on it and not splitting their focus on other projects.

• He said B2C marketplaces are hard so he doesn’t mind competition. Other founders have made mentorship websites and told him, "we've raised venture capital. Join us or we'll crush you." And those teams have failed.  

• We talked about a few mutuals we know who have known blown up in popularity

• I'm not the only one who misses the "good 'ol days of indie hacking". We talked about how the scene has definitely changed a lot since 2019. It feels a lot more cut-throat and less collaborative now. But change is normal in life and you have to accept it.

We wound up talking for hours about entrepreneurship and indie-hacking and considering we had never met in person before, that's pretty cool! It's a reminder to me that it's always fun to meet other founders in-person.