Mentorship Wins!

Mentorship runs through I.O.Me254, helping founders and young makers test ideas, brainstorm and turn them into working projects.

This quarter we tracked outcomes from 14 founders who went through our structured mentorship track. Eleven are still actively building. Four have paying customers. Two have registered their businesses. One has been accepted into a regional accelerator programme.

The mentors are practitioners — engineers, designers, business owners — who give time voluntarily. They meet with founders at the lab, sometimes weekly, sometimes whenever there's a decision to make. The relationship is less formal than a coaching programme and more sustained than a one-off workshop.

What works is proximity. When your mentor can walk over to your workbench and look at what you're building, the feedback is different. More specific. More honest. The lab makes that possible.

Applications for the next mentorship cohort open in January. If you have an idea and want structured support to develop it, come to either lab and speak to the team.