A118. Paying the Mentee to Be the Mentee: The Business Model That Flips Mentorship on Its Head
Every mentor knows the same quiet disappointment. You offer your time for free, someone says yes with real enthusiasm, and then they vanish, after one session, two reschedules, silence. The problem was never your teaching. It was that free cost for the mentee; so nothing is what they invest.
Jack Lookman's answer is blunt and slightly absurd; pay them. Not a discount, not a scholarship, but an actual stipend, paid to the mentee for showing up, doing the work and finishing the programme. He laid the idea out in a recent episode of Curated Business Ideas, in conversation with host Juwon Ogungbe, and it is one of the more interesting business-model tweaks I have come across this year.
What follows is the model in full, which is the mechanics, the seven revenue streams, the vetting funnel, the legal scaffolding, and an honest look at where the maths gets shaky.
The Problem This Model Solves
Free mentoring has a 90% dropout rate dressed up as "life got busy." Lookman's diagnosis is not that people are lazy. It is that a free commitment carries no stake, so it loses every contest against a paid one.
His fix has three parts, and they work together:
- The mentee pays a deposit up front to prove seriousness.
- The deposit is refunded in instalments as they comply.
- The mentor pays a completion stipend when they finish.
So the mentee is simultaneously a customer and an employee of sorts, because he invested at the start, he is rewarded at the end, and monitored throughout. Lookman's example: a £60 deposit refunded at £10 a month over six months, plus a £100 stipend upon completion. The numbers are illustrative, but the architecture is the point. The deposit filters out time-wasters before they cost you a minute; the stipend gives the ones who stay a reason to finish.
The Mechanism: Scored Tasks and Financial Sanctions
A deposit alone is not enough. Money down creates attendance; it does not create effort. So the model adds a scoring layer.
Mentees are given tasks periodically, and those tasks are scored. Weekly commitments are agreed up front, along with whether the arrangement is full-time or part-time and how long the mentorship runs. If a mentee falls below the agreed threshold such as low effort, poor attitude, missed submissions, then sanctions apply. Those sanctions are financial: part of the deposit may not be returned, or the completion stipend is reduced or withheld entirely.
This is where most people flinch. Isn't this punitive? Lookman's framing is that it is a rewards-and-sanctions structure that is designed to get the best out of the project, and that it exists to protect both sides. The mentee is protected because the refund schedule is written into the terms and conditions before they pay. The mentor is protected because the programme is not a one-way giveaway.
It is worth being clear about the ethics here. This only works if the terms are genuinely transparent, the scoring criteria are published in advance, and the refund promise is honoured without argument. A model that pays people to show up but quietly keeps their deposit when they stumble is not mentorship, rather it is a subscription with extra steps.
The Supermarket Analogy: Free Core, Paid Add-Ons
The obvious objection arrived in the Q&A, and Ogungbe asked it well: if you are paying mentees, how are you also charging them?
Lookman's answer is the most useful 90 seconds in the episode. Imagine going to the supermarket for sugar and milk. Two items. But you brought the children, and you come out with chocolate and chewing gum as well. The sugar and milk are the core proposition, and they are free. The chocolate is the add-on, and it is not.
Translated into the model: the core teaching, the basics, and access to the membership site for the duration of the mentorship are free. After the programme ends, continued membership access is paid. Deeper material, such as the extended ebook, the advanced course, the one-to-one tuition, is paid. Ogungbe called it a lead magnet, and Lookman agreed without hesitation.
That honesty matters. It is not a bait-and-switch; the free tier genuinely delivers value, and the paid tier serves the minority who want to go further. The trap most "free mentoring" businesses fall into is that the free tier is deliberately crippled. This one is not, which is precisely why it converts.
The Seven Revenue Streams
Strip away the philosophy and this is a business with unusually diversified income. Lookman lists them explicitly:
1. Upsells. Related products and services like ebooks, extended courses, premium membership are sold to mentees who want to go deeper into a specific body of knowledge.
2. Business collaboration. The strongest stream in the long run. After six months you know exactly who is serious, competent and reliable, far more than any interview tells you. You can then bring the best into a revenue-sharing project, where they contribute labour and you contribute experience and networks.
3. Content sales. The material you create for teaching becomes a sellable product like courses, workbooks, templates, recordings.
4. Donations. Successful alumni giving back, plus outsiders who value what the programme does. Not reliable revenue, but real.
5. Administration charges. A small, token fee to cover onboarding and processing like automated or semi-automated where possible.
6. Affiliate marketing. Because the content is digital, relevant third-party tools and resources can be linked with affiliate codes attached.
7. Advertising and sponsorship. Businesses that resonate with your audience pay to appear on your platform; sponsors underwrite a cohort or a year.
Add membership renewals after the free period and you have eight. The principle is deliberate: no single stream has to carry the business, which is what makes a free core survivable.
The Vetting Funnel: Ten Audits Before Anyone Starts
Recruitment happens entirely online, and it is not a formality. At application stage, Lookman runs an audit across ten dimensions:
Skills · Interests · Mindset · Exposure · Experience · Personality · Numeracy · Literacy · Information technology · Internet access.
That list does more work than it appears to. Numeracy and literacy audits tell you whether the curriculum is pitched correctly; mindset and personality audits predict who survives the sanctions regime; IT and internet-access audits tell you whether someone can participate at all, giving a filter that matters where bandwidth is unreliable and data is expensive.
The byproducts are upskilling and networking because applicants often leave with more than they came for, even when they are not selected.
The Scaffolding: What Has to Exist Before You Launch
The model is simple to describe and administratively heavy to run. Lookman is specific about what must be in place first:
- A legal framework, with expectations managed and agreed up front.
- A refund policy, agreed up front and written into the terms.
- A conflict-management policy, for when the scoring gets disputed, and it will.
- An exit strategy, with documented policies and procedures.
- A defined mentorship length and weekly commitment level.
- Checks and balances protecting all stakeholders, including a plan for refunds if the business itself winds up.
That last one is the detail most people skip and the one a regulator would ask about first. If you are holding other people's deposits, you are holding their money. A business that collects £60 from two hundred mentees is sitting on £12,000 of other people's refundable cash. Treating that as revenue is how this model turns into a scandal.
The supporting machinery is unglamorous: a periodically updated business plan, market and competitor research, a budget with a safety factor, and a funding decision which is self-funded, family, crowdfunding, investors or a bank loan. Legal structure is a genuine choice too because social enterprise, sole trader, charity or NGO, and limited company each fit a different intent.
Where the Model Gets Interesting, and Where It Gets Hard
Three things about this idea deserve more scrutiny than a friendly podcast Q&A gives them.
The cash-flow inversion is brutal. Most businesses collect first and deliver later. This one takes a deposit, holds it as a liability, pays out instalments, and only then earns from upsells. like financing participation before earning a naira from the majority who never buy. Lookman's answer, that collaboration and content sales carry the load, is true but means the model only works at volume. Fifty mentees will not sustain it. Five hundred might.
The sanctions regime is a reputational minefield. Score people, dock their money, and someone will post about it. The only durable defence is documentation which is published rubrics, recorded assessments, and a refund process that never becomes adversarial. Get this wrong once and the programme's name is finished on social media.
Digital delivery has real limits. Ogungbe pushed on this and Lookman conceded it. Theoretical material travels well online; practical skills do not. His fix is a collaboration layer, partner with local mechanics, technicians or practitioners so mentees get hands-on exposure in their own city. This is elegant, and much harder to run across multiple locations than it sounds.
Is it even mentorship, or a training programme with a stipend attached? Lookman's own framing suggests the latter, which is scored tasks, weekly commitments, thresholds, sanctions, and certificates. That is an apprenticeship, not the coffee-and-advice version most people imagine, and recognising it is what makes the model scalable.
Scaling: Niche, Language, Franchise
Once one cohort works, Lookman sees four expansion routes.
New niches. Run the same machinery for a different subject such as marketing, digital entrepreneurship, content creation, bookkeeping, then choosing whatever sits closest to your own competence.
New languages. Digital delivery makes translation cheap; the audience for a well-run programme in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo or French is not small.
Collaboration. Bring in people who are stronger than you in an adjacent niche rather than pretending to possess expertise you do not have.
Franchise. Package the model, like curriculum, audits, scoring, terms, and license it to operators in other markets. This is the most ambitious option and the one that most depends on the documentation being genuinely good.
Who This Suits — and Who It Does Not
It suits someone with real, demonstrable expertise in a digital-adjacent field, patience for administration, and enough capital to fund stipends and deposits for a full cohort before any upsell revenue arrives.
It does not suit anyone who wants to start with zero cash, or anyone whose expertise is purely practical, or anyone unwilling to publish scoring criteria and honour refunds under pressure.
The unique selling point, as Lookman states it, is genuinely appealing like mentoring and coaching suitable mentees virtually for free, or helping disadvantaged people who could never afford a proper mentor. That is a real market. The people who cannot pay ₦200,000 for a mentorship programme are not a small segment, they are most of the market.
A 90-Day Pilot
If you want to test this rather than admire it, start small and unfunded in the ways that matter:
Weeks 1–2: Define one niche, write the curriculum outline, and publish the scoring rubric before you recruit anyone. Draft the refund policy with an actual lawyer or a template you have read line by line.
Weeks 3–4: Run the ten-audit application process on twenty applicants. Take twelve. Charge a modest deposit, one that is small enough to be payable, large enough to sting.
Weeks 5–10: Run six weeks of scored weekly tasks. Track completion, effort and drop-out. Pay the stipend only to those who finish, exactly as promised.
Weeks 11–12: Survey the cohort. Offer one paid upsell. Count how many people buy. That number, not the testimonials; tells you whether the business exists.
The Takeaway
The insight worth stealing is not "pay your mentees." It is the price of participation that determines the quality of participation, and that free, is a price that attracts people who will not show up. Lookman's model adds a stake, a score and a reward to a relationship that usually has none of the three, then monetises everything around the free core instead of the core itself.
Whether it becomes a business depends on volume, documentation and discipline. As model design, though, it is genuinely clever, and it starts from a truth every mentor recognises; the people who need help most are often the ones who are least able to value it for free.
Ps: Artificial intelligence was leveraged in creating this content.
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