People waste expensive hours restating their life story. Mentors cannot work with a memoir. They can work with a decision. Write the decision in one sentence: ship or delay, hire or contract, raise or bootstrap, specialise or stay generalist. If you cannot write the sentence, the session should be a diagnostic — say that out loud in the first two minutes.
Bring artefacts. A deck, a repo, a landing page, a spreadsheet of channels, a list of candidates. Vague competence ("I am stuck on marketing") produces vague advice. Specific artefacts let a mentor point at a line and say stop, start, or continue. That is the difference between coaching-as-atmosphere and coaching-as-edit.
Name constraints honestly: budget, visa, team size, health, a launch date that is actually a fantasy. Mentors will not be rude about constraints you disclose. They will be useless about constraints you hide. Time zones and async follow-up exist so you can send a five-minute recap after the call instead of pretending you memorised everything.
After the session, write three actions with owners and dates before you close the laptop. If the platform keeps the thread — messages, notes, an AI Helper trained on that mentor's materials — use it to replay the agreements, not to outsource the next decision. The human remains accountable. The tools keep the thread from dissolving into chat history.
Booking is the easy part. Preparation is the respect you pay for the other person's hour. When you are ready, pick a mentor whose recent work matches the decision you wrote down, not the identity you wish you had.