Free “quick chats” all week.Make the mock €180.
You have run a hundred interview loops from the other side of the table. Strangers know it, and they ask for twenty minutes, then forty, then “could you look at my résumé?”. This is the setup that turns that into a business you keep 80% of: a sixty-minute mock with a written scorecard, an async review form for the quick looks, and a mentorship group with a weekly call instead of a Discord role nobody uses.
Free to start. You keep 80%. No marketplace between you and your mentees.
Europe/Berlin · Google Meet · free reschedule until 24 h before
The mock they book
instead of the “quick chat”.
A session type with three intake questions: level, target companies, what to practise. Your evening windows, a fifteen-minute hold while they pay, a Meet link in both calendars, reminders at 24 hours and 1 hour. Price it where the market already is: human mocks cost $179–419 on the marketplaces, and the largest one stopped offering them in May.
How bookings workThe deliverable is
the scorecard.
Five dimensions, a score each, one sentence of evidence, and a verdict against the level they are targeting. Written within the hour after the call, sent from the booking. It is what makes the price defensible, what they forward to a friend, and what makes a refund dispute almost impossible: the work is on the page.
Fix estimation first; the rest is repetition. Two problems attached.
Five products,
switched on in this order.
Sessions first, because that is where the money already is. Then the form that catches the quick looks, then the group priced like the mentorship it is, then the letter that fills all three.
- 1Day one · Bookings
Mock interview with a written scorecard €180 · 60 min
System design or coding. Intake: level, target, what to practise. A €120 45-minute career or offer-strategy call as the second session type.
- 2Day one · Forms & Requests
Async CV, study-plan or offer review €79 · 3 days
For “could you take a quick look?”. Attach the CV or the offer letter, one question, written reply within three days or an automatic refund. Priority tier €129 in 24 hours.
- 3Week two · Leads & CRM
12-week study plan free
A one-field download in your bio. Contacts are tagged by level and target company; you email the segment when a company-specific group opens.
- 4Week three · Community
Mentorship group with a weekly call €200 / month · cap 20
Not a Discord perk. A fixed Thursday call, an async questions channel, peer mock pairing on Mondays, a cap of twenty so it stays personal. Yearly plan on. Waitlist when full.
- 5Week six · Newsletter
One system-design problem a week free + €12 / month
The problem and the first insight free; the full solution and the scoring rubric behind the paid tier. The agent drafts from your notes; you edit.
#41 — Design a rate limiter for 50M users (and why everyone forgets the clock)
Per-user rate limiting, 50M MAU, 10k QPS peak, limits must hold across regions. You have 40 minutes.
The interview is not about the algorithm. It is about where the counter lives and what you accept when regions disagree.
Requirements → estimates (the three-number method) → token bucket vs sliding log → Redis with local burst allowance → what breaks at 10×.
What a 5/5 answer says in each of the five dimensions, and the two follow-ups a Staff-level interviewer will ask.
Hiring is up in the US and UK, down in Germany and France. Anthropic and OpenAI are half of all prep requests on the big marketplace. Two mock slots left.
What the weekly issue
actually contains.
One problem, walked through the way you would in a mock. The statement and the first insight are free, which is what gets it forwarded; the full walkthrough and the rubric are the paid part, which is what gets it renewed. Once a month, a short market note and the slots you have left. That is the whole format.
The two biggest engineering newsletters charge $15 a month for exactly this shape and convert three to four percent of their free readers. You do not need their list; you need two hundred paying readers.
A mentorship tier,
not a Discord perk.
Monthly mentorship at $150–300 is already normal on the marketplaces, where the platform adds 20% on top and the average mentor carries two or three mentees. Run the same thing as a capped group with a fixed weekly call and you keep 80%, the calendar does the scheduling, and access switches off the day someone stops paying. The rhythm below is what makes twenty people stay for the four months a mentorship usually lasts.
- MondayPeer mock pairing thread
Members pair up and run each other's problem of the week; you post the problem.
- ThursdayLive group review, 60 min
One member's design on screen, scored together against the rubric. Recorded for the archive.
- Always onQuestions and offers channels
Async questions answered within a day; offer letters and negotiation threads in their own channel.
- MonthlyHiring-manager AMA
A friend from the other side of the table. The reason people renew after they get the job.
Numbers from
the market.
interviewing.io starts at $179; company-specific mocks ran $289–419 before the largest provider ended 1:1 mocks on 31 May 2026.
Most mentors on the leading marketplace price monthly plans at $150–300; the platform adds 20% on top and mentorships last about four months.
Two to three mentees at half an hour a week each. A capped group of twenty at €200 is a different business.
600,000 free sessions in 2025. The demand exists; the payment rail is what's missing.
At $15 a month. The median newsletter converts 0.6%; a weekly problem with a rubric behind the paywall sits well above it.
Tech hiring concentrates in spring; layoffs cluster August to October. Open the group in February; sell yearly plans.
Market figures from published industry and platform data, September 2026, rounded. Your prices, volume and retention will differ.
“Am I allowed
to do this?”
Use public-style problems, never your employer's actual question bank, and say so on the page. You are selling your judgement as an interviewer, not confidential material. Most employers permit paid mentoring outside work hours; check your contract and keep the calendar to evenings and weekends, which is when candidates want the slots anyway.
The scorecard is the deliverable and it is on the page within the hour. No “guaranteed offer” language anywhere; the agent won't write it and you shouldn't either. Refund disputes on written deliverables are rare.
Two mocks and the Thursday group call fit in three evenings. Cap the async form at five a week. The rest is the newsletter, which the agent drafts.
Stay on it for discovery if it sends you people. Send your own audience here: same price, you keep 80% instead of the mentee paying 20% on top, and the CRM, the group and the letter are yours.
Make the “quick chat”
a €180 mock.
Tell the agent your LinkedIn or X handle. It reads what you post, proposes the mock, the review form and the mentorship tier with prices from the market, and sets them up when you create the account.