Building Hop, new mentorship/coaching platform for designers by Design Buddies! Month 1 update
Learn how we validated and built a design mentorship platform using Claude Code, community feedback, and rapid iteration.
Hey everyone! Grace Ling, founder of Design Buddies here. In the last month, we’ve been working on Hop, our new design mentorship/coaching platform for Design Buddies community. I’m going to start sharing my learnings & product updates here too!
By the way, you can also sign up to be a founding mentor/mentee by submitting your email on the waitlist on our landing page. We invite people every single day off the waitlist to apply!
As a founding mentor, you get to influence the product, join a community of senior+ design professionals + come to weekly design show & tells, do free or paid mentorship/coaching sessions, and help impact the next generation of designers! All mentors can also book sessions with other mentors too.
As a founding mentee, you get to learn from the best mentors, influence the product, and meet peers on a similar journey as you. Anyone taking their design career advancement seriously is welcome! We have designers ranging from college to senior level looking to get into leadership, too.
I started Design Buddies in 2020 because I was an engineering student, struggling to land my first job in UX design. I wanted to gather designers to learn from them.
Design Buddies helped me land my first UX design job out of college at Electronic Arts, and I got to work on products for the Sims!
Design Buddies has also helped thousands of designers land their jobs, meet their mentors, cofounders, best friends, and even romantic partners.
We also have 100K members on our Discord and wanted a way for people to connect 1:1 and learn from each other
That was the inspiration to build Hop. (In addition to our lovely ADPList refugees for suggesting me to build this since 2025) I build what our community needs!
Now, it’s been 2 years since I left my UX design job to work on Design Buddies, content creation, and (semi) professional running. I missed building products so I got personally inspired to build Hop, too.
Here’s what I did so far:
Week 1: I quickly built an MVP and landing page + waitlist using Claude code. I shared it at Config and hundreds of designers signed up! Many very senior designers also wanted to be a founding mentor and help out. I feel so honored. That was the validation I needed to build out the rest of Hop
For my MVP, I’ve used Claude Code (Fable & Opus), Supabase, Vercel, Github, Resend, Jitsi, and Stripe as our stack. I’ve also been experimenting with Codex.
I also have my bf Justin Strong, who is a super cracked engineer & founder, as like our fractional CTO for all things technical. Who I also yap all my ideas to like 10x a day and get feedback.
Week 2: I invited our first 20 founding mentors to join. Since I only collected emails, I looked up people on LinkedIn. I am looking for senior+ designers with 5+ years of experience to be a mentor.
I had 1:1 chats with all of them to learn about their experience mentoring, and any initial product feedback. After each call, I had notes to build to improve Hop and/or fix bugs.
Some takeaways:
1. ADPList made mentoring feel transactional. Too many generic advice, referral asks that sound transactional, and one-off calls with no follow up. Also no shows
2. Senior designers need a way to scale their expertise without burning out. So we’ve built FAQs, async sessions, group mentorships, really strict mentee screening, and more
3. The product should measure progress, not just completed calls. So we’ve built action items and notes to follow up on
4. Free mentorship and paid mentorship/coaching solve different problems.
5. Free mentorship gives new designers a chance to break in. Paid mentorship/coaching creates accountability + working towards more specific goals
Thank you to our founding mentors for chatting with me: Nate Bauer, Charlie Weston, Timothy Gailey, Le Reing, Jibril R, Mukul Agarwal, Kylie Madsen, Hanif Putra, Adam Syed, Shivani Mehta, Matthew J Galley, Katie Knecht, Calvin Zheng, David Mendes, Alex Wilczewski, Alex Baca
All the founding mentors are invited to join a private Discord channel for product feedback, announcements, and to meet each other! My inbox is also open to everyone for feedback too.
Matthew also suggested doing a weekly mentors show & tell for hop mentors to meet each other and learn from our workflows, so we hosted our first one!
It’s important to me to also build community within Hop. I realize that most of the public Design Buddies community is mainly more junior designers (nothing wrong with that) but we created a space for more experienced designers to connect and learn from each other.
Week 3: I invited about 30 more founding mentors to join, and started inviting our first 50 founding mentees! I made sure to have about 30 mentors live before inviting the mentees in so immediately they would have a CTA. I also have a separate private Discord channel for all the mentees for announcements & product feedback & introductions/meet and greet.
I had more 1:1 chats with each founding mentors and built out more features
Some takeaways:
1. Mentorship vs coaching: Mentorship is typically informal, one-off guidance and perspective. Coaching is typically structured, goal-driven work with milestones, accountability, and deeper investment. Both serve different purposes so we’re offering both on Hop.
2. A mistake ADPList made that caused them backlash was marketing it as “free”. When you put something free under a paywall, there will be problems. So that’s why we’ll never put anything that has been free under a paywall, but are transparent that you can receive BOTH free and paid mentorship/coaching in Hop.
3. Paying changes mentee behavior. Two mentors independently: paid mentees show up more prepared and more respectful. But I also understand that not everyone is in a position to pay, so we have free options too (all mentees also must apply to join)
4. Measuring success depends on the mentee’s goals. Hours mentored is an empty metric. We’ve built testimonials and quarterly check ins with mentees on Hop to collect insight on how their careers are progressing + which mentors helped them out to recognize the mentors.
5. Great mentees come prepared with clear goals, specific questions, and work that is ready to discuss
Thank you to our founding mentors for chatting with me: Antonio Braz, Michael Descharles, Celine Yan, Amira Sallam, Izza B., Scott Williams, UXC, Miriam Contino, Matt Karakilic, Frankie Kastenbaum, Micah Gast, Kimberly Ezeama, Rafael Matos da Silva, Oren Pajela, Jonathan Brazeau, Jennifer Jing
At the end of week 3, we already had 100 sessions booked and 20 sessions already happening. Also 10% of the sessions were paid too!
I’m planning to reach out to the most active mentees and also have 1:1 chats with them for feedback too.
We also had our weekly mentors show & tell! This time, we added some more structure to it. Kept the introductions shorter and had more show & tell time.
We had mentors joining in from the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa! It was also 4 am and 11 pm for some mentors and I’m truly honored. We will have slightly different times each week for show & tell to enable mentors from all timezones to get a chance to join, too.
Week 4: We’re in the middle of this week now and we’ve shipped so many key features from product feedback since MVP like: personalized mentor matching, session notes, improved the onboarding & profile for both mentees and mentors, badges, discoverability, messaging, fixed bugs, and more!!
I’ve been continuing to have our 1:1 founding mentor calls. I’ve done about 40 now and I’ve enjoyed them so much. Been learning a lot and love meeting all our wonderful mentors or catching up.
Many of our mentors also have been part of Design Buddies since the beginning as a student, and now are senior designers. I’m so proud!
Thanks for being part of Design Buddies. I really appreciate it! It’s been 6+ years of building our community and we wouldn’t have done it without you.
You’re totally welcome to join Hop as a founding mentor or mentee too! Join below and we’ll let you in as soon as we can:
Resources
Online event: Design feedback Fridays, every friday at 11 am pacific time on our Discord
If you’re in Los Angeles, would love to invite you to my birthday party on Aug 28. Please message me on Instagram if you’d like to come. Last year we had 600+ people come to my birthday parties in LA and SF and it will be a fun time!!
One month free Granola meeting notes (favorite meeting notes app)
One month free Wonder design tool, use code DB2026. Generate designs with the latest models, edit with Figma-level precision, and connect your code context all on the same canvas.
20% off for Mobbin, the world’s largest library of real-world design inspiration! https://mobbin.com/designbuddies
$10 free Replit credits for you to build + new designer mode launched
🐰 About Design Buddies
Design Buddies is a community where you level up your design career. Land jobs, improve your design skills, and make friends. We have resources, events, design challenges, job boards, fun perks, and more.
👋 Visit our website and hop into our Discord community.
🐰 Join Hop, our new design mentorship & coaching platform as a mentor or mentee
💖 Partner with us, or share your resources in our newsletter (email grace@designbuddies.community)
🌟 Watch our past events and connect with us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn for more fun!
Got anything else you’d like to see in our newsletter and community? Please email grace@designbuddies.community
Love it!