Have you ever read an article by someone on the internet who shared awesome advice? And don’t you wish you could have them as your true mentors for your company?

I’ve been applying the idea of having “virtual mentors”, where I pick just 3-5 people I respect and follow their supposed advice as religiously as possible. To keep it simple, I find one mantra that gives me context for any advice they would give me in person.

1) Paul Graham: “No distractions.”
2) Dave Mcclure: “Focus on core product, stop adding useless features.”
3) Sean Ellis: “Focus on product/market fit. Until then, nothing else matters.”
4) Eric Ries: “Build minimum viable product for everything.”

The key isn’t in figuring out everything they would tell you, but rather in living by your virtual mentors’ rules. And you’ll find that if they were actually your mentors in real life, their advice would revolve around the mantras that you listed. The interesting thing about this is that you might yield up to 50% of a mentor’s value just by asking yourself “what would so-and-so say about this?”

For example, some people have been giving me the advice of thinking about marketing and distribution more than I do about product. But if I go through my checklist of virtual mentors, all of them would have something unique to say:

“What should I do about marketing and distribution?”

Paul Graham: It’s a distraction at this point. Focus on building something useful first.
Dave Mcclure: AARRR – optimize everything. Fix your landing page. Measure the funnel of conversions. Optimize signup page, make it as few steps possible. Fix core product to increase engagement, build in ways for users to refer their friends.
Sean Ellis: You don’t have product market fit yet, and until you do, focus on product.
Eric Ries: Resist the urge of launching. You’re locked into positioning, and you can’t launch again. Better to screw it up with early customers.

Of course, I don’t know exactly how they’d respond to my question, but simple role-play can go a long way. Consider this an alternative method of getting free world-class mentorship :)