Building Mentino at 15: Lessons from a Young Founder

People ask me why I started Mentino at 15. Honestly? I didn't overthink it. I saw something that bothered me and I started building.

Where it came from

I shoot sports photography. I've been doing it since I was around 13, mostly professional and collegiate athletes in the Bay Area. It's my thing. And when I was trying to actually get good at it, I started cold-DMing photographers I followed online. Just asking questions. Most didn't respond. But a few did. And those few conversations did more for my work than years of watching YouTube tutorials.

At some point I realized: that experience I had (someone further along taking 20 minutes to talk to me) most students don't get that. Not because people don't want to help, but because there's no easy way for them to connect. That's the gap Mentino is trying to close.

About 1 in 3 young people in the U.S. will grow up without a mentor. That's 16 million people figuring things out alone when they don't have to.

Source: MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, "The Mentoring Gap" (2023).

What's actually hard about this

I'm not going to pretend it's been smooth. A few things have been genuinely difficult:

• Getting people to take you seriously. Asking adults to volunteer their time on a platform a 15-year-old built is not an easy pitch. Some people say yes immediately. Others look at my age and check out.
• Limited reach. I can only personally message so many people. Growth is slow when you're one person with a phone and a laptop.
• Building while learning. I was learning to code while building the actual product. That's a weird experience. Mistakes cost real time.
• Time. School. Photography clients. Mentino. Sleep is a luxury.

What building this taught me

The biggest one: start before you're ready. If I waited until I knew everything I needed to know, I'd still be waiting. You learn way more by building than by planning to build.

Second: asking for help isn't weakness. It's the whole point. Ironically, building a mentorship platform made me better at asking for mentorship myself. I've leaned on a lot of people to get here.

Third: keep the focus on impact. When things get frustrating (and they do), I come back to why I started. Someone's going to connect with the right mentor through this platform and it's going to change something for them. That's worth the hard days.

The Technical Side

A lot of people are surprised that a 15-year-old built this. I get it. But the tools available now make it genuinely possible — not easy, but possible. Mentino is built on Hono (a fast web framework), React for the UI, and Supabase for the database. I was learning most of this as I built it.

The hardest parts weren't the code. They were the decisions. How do you verify a mentor without asking for their social security number? How do you keep a platform safe for students under 18 without making it so locked down that nobody actually uses it? How do you build a matching algorithm that's actually useful and not just a feel-good percentage? These are design problems, not coding problems. You can't Google the answer — you have to think it through and make a call.

I shipped a lot of bad first versions. The first matching algorithm was a simple keyword match that returned nonsense. The first message system had no read receipts and no notifications, so conversations would just... die silently. The first profile page had no way to edit anything after signing up. Every one of those was a decision I made too fast that I had to go back and fix.

The lesson: ship early so you can find out what's broken, but be honest with yourself about what "early" means. Releasing something that actively works badly is different from releasing something that's incomplete. The former makes people not come back.

What I'd Tell Other Young Builders

If you're a student and you're thinking about building something:

• Pick a problem you actually have. I used Mentino. That made every design decision easier — I could just ask myself what I would want.
• Don't wait until you're good enough. You get good enough by building things. There is no other path.
• The first version will be embarrassing. That's fine. Put it in front of real users anyway. The feedback is worth more than the embarrassment.
• Find one person who's already done what you want to do. I've gotten more useful direction from a handful of conversations with people who've built products before than from any tutorial. Which is, honestly, exactly the point of Mentino.

What's next

I want a student to be able to open Mentino, find the right mentor for exactly where they're trying to go, and have a real conversation: not a form, not an algorithm pretending to care, just a real person with real experience. We're building toward that.

The next phase is growth — getting more real mentors from more fields, and making sure every student who signs up can find someone relevant to them. After that, features that make the relationship better over time: session notes, progress tracking, resources mentors can share with students.

If you're a student, sign up. If you're someone who's figured something out and wants to give back, we need you. We're just getting started.