Expect 8–12 hours (depending on program size) to firm up goals, get leadership buy-in, decide on matching criteria, review best practices, and recruit participants. The bigger your cohort, the more effort goes into marketing and outreach.

Around 3 hours on calls with your dedicated Customer Success ManagerEnterprise — covering goal-setting, matching configuration, and launch planning — plus 1.5–2 hours of light homework and email correspondence. Your CSM builds the program with you from the ground up, including signup forms, custom matching, and launch-day support.

At 10 minutes per thoughtful match — reviewing profiles, weighing compatibility across your criteria — the hours add up fast. And that's before accounting for notification logistics, inevitable reshuffling, and the review cycles that follow. When a match doesn't work out, you're back to the spreadsheet, cross-referencing profiles from scratch with no compatibility context. At 500+ participants, manual matching isn't recommended.

Smart MatchEnterprise surfaces the strongest compatibility across all your criteria simultaneously. The side-by-side profile view and Match Rationale mean review is fast and informed — you're making final judgment calls, not starting from scratch. If a match needs to change, re-run matching for unmatched participants without touching confirmed pairs.

On Pro plans, Self Match and Manual Match both benefit from Smart Match-powered recommended matches — so the platform still does the heavy lifting.

Expect 1–8 hours per week depending on cohort size — split across participant correspondence, momentum troubleshooting, match issues, and juggling data across email, spreadsheets, and shared drives. The first few weeks post-launch are the busiest. An hour spent here is mostly data wrangling, not program management.

With participant data, communications, and analytics in one dashboard, you eliminate most of the cross-tool overhead. Automated momentum nudges and sentiment tracking surface issues proactively — so you spend your time on the human calls that actually move the needle. Most Mentorloop programs settle to 30 minutes to 2 hours per week once up and running.

Plan for a mid-year check-in report (survey distribution, chasing responses, compiling data: ~2–3 hrs), an end-of-program report (~3–5 hrs), and regular ad-hoc stakeholder updates throughout the year (~30 min/month). That's 11–20 hours annually, growing with cohort size as more data needs wrangling across more disconnected sources.

Live analytics, sentiment tracking, and program health reporting are generated continuously by the platform — there's no compilation step. Sharing a report with stakeholders takes minutes, not hours. Time scales slightly with program size as larger programs involve more stakeholders and more complex outcomes to communicate.