Show HN: Find a mentor, Become a mentor

Thanks a lot! :)

Awesome work! This could be huge in terms of overcoming the gender/race barriers to finding great mentors within traditional corporate structures (and even within the super meritocratic startup world).

Thanks a lot for the encouraging words. Would love to see more of you on Mentii! :)

And to add to this .. We have some karma already in place and its called "Respect". Users can go to profile of others and give them Respect (by clicking on the Respect button) which helps in bubbling up engaged mentors in the community.

I love the idea. Yours is the first social network style site that I have joined. I do however, have a couple of comments and thoughts about the site.

Firstly, when I sign up and am filling out the form, I didn't see any warning that my profile and request were immediately going to be published on the front page with no apparent way to edit the request. I spent some time clicking around trying to find out how to edit my advice request with no luck. In my case this was not an issue (except for those who were subject to my whimsical filler posting), but I can imagine that it could come as a nasty shock to some. The distinction I am trying to make here is the fine line between making available and broadcasting to all. There may be no practical difference, but there is a world of emotional difference between the two.

This leads me to my second point; I note that the stream of requests is awfully repetitive. I would think you either need to encourage people to put more thought into there requests for help, or have awfully good analytics for those who are looking to be mentors, otherwise you are going to quickly run into the bane of dating sites everywhere. The race to the funniest/quirkiest profile as the myriads of potential proteges compete for the few mentors, leading to a situation where the only way to win is to already know the person, or to be highly manipulative and socially astute, which sort of defeats the purpose of the site to my mind.

Lastly, the site was very slow to load, worse it had appeared to load but the bar with advice requests, browse people etc. had not loaded, making navigation initially very confusing. Once this bar loaded things became much clearer, though why this element failed to load is not clear to me as other assets from the same source seemed to load? Mysteries.

Lastly congratulations on building and shipping such a cool idea and getting so many awesome people to sign up. Best of luck.