Mentorbox is a monthly subscription service that teaches you how to speed read so you can extract a book’s most critical information in less time.
I’m sure you’ve heard that the top CEOs and other high-performers in most industries credit some of their success to their extensive reading habits.
For example, Bill Gates claims to read 50 books a year, which is about 1 new book each week. Mark Cuban reads for 3 hours every day.
Most impressive of all, Tai Lopez claims to read an entire book each day.
He’s also a co-founder of Mentorbox, which promises to teach you how to read like the successful read so that you too can succeed.
But does Mentorbox make good on this promise? Or are they just another scam providing you the “secret” to wealth?
Keep reading our Mentorbox review to find out more.
FAQ
1.) What does Mentorbox teach it’s customers? Mentorbox is a monthly subscription service that teaches you how to speed read so you can extract a book’s most critical information in less time. People like Tai Lopez use speed reading techniques to read up to a book a day. Valuable knowledge from Mentorbox’s book offerings is a nice byproduct of learning to speed read.
2.) How much time does Mentorbox consider “a short time” to read a book? Mentorbox considers anywhere from 1 to 1.5 hours a good amount of time for speed reading an entire book.
3.) How much does a Mentorbox subscription cost? Mentorbox’s online subscription costs $7 per month or $59 per year if you’d like to save some cash; opting for the materials to be sent to you physically instead of digitally costs $89 per month.
4.) Are there any substantial differences between digital and physical subscriptions? No, aside from the obvious different delivery method and a few small goodies in the physical subscription.
5.) Do I have to return the books if I get a physical subscription? Nope! They’re yours to keep for rereading.
6.) Does Mentorbox have a free trial? Yes. You can join free for 3 days. Be absolutely sure that you cancel if you aren’t interested after trying it for free.
7.) What’s included in a Mentorbox subscription? The online subscription includes over 500 hours of video lessons, downloadable workbooks, audio summaries of books, access to the online learning area (Teachable), cheat sheets for improving retention and reading speed, access to a private Mentorbox mastermind group, and other study materials. If you upgrade to the physical version, you get 2-3 books a month, study guides, a USB with book summaries in audio form, workbooks, cheat sheets, and some other reading knick-knacks.
8.) Are there upsells? Yes, and they change fairly often. Currently, they have two upsells: a VIP membership subscription dubbed “Mentor Network” and a collection of workshops that you can buy individually called “MentorClass”
9.) Do I get to choose the books I get each month? Nope, Mentorbox chooses for you. However, each month’s book selection tends to follow a certain theme within the personal development/business/mindset realm.
10.) Why not just buy the books separately for cheap? The books themselves aren’t the point; Mentorbox teaches you how to speed read using real books, with the books themselves and the knowledge you gain from them being nifty bonuses.
11.) Are there any authors would I recognize? Some authors whose works are included in Mentorbox include Tony Robbins, Mark Manson, Robert Cialdini, and Jocko Willink.
12.) What devices let me access my membership? You can use Mentorbox on your desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet.
13.) How long has Mentorbox been in business? Almost 3 years.
14.) What’s their refund policy? You have 30 days from the date you receive your first digital/physical package to ask for a refund.
15.) Does Mentorbox have an affiliate program? Yes. You earn $30 for each referral of yours that purchases a subscription.
16.) What is Mentorbox’s BBB rating? F
17.) Is Mentorbox A Scam? No. They aren’t truly trying to scam money out of you; however, a couple caveats. First, there have been numerous complaints regarding both payment and customer support. Second, they have a history of using questionable marketing tactics, such as one-click upsells, innocent-looking buttons, and false urgency. Not to mention the many Mentorbox ads you’ll be hit with online if they determine you’re a potential customer.
18.) Comparable Companies: Blinkist, NextBigIdeaClub
Overview
Mentorbox’s goal is to teach you how to read like successful people read.
You see, reading is touted by many successful people as a key factor in their success, and for good reason.
Books serve as a glimpse into the author’s mind. By reading a lot of books, you’re accumulating knowledge and wisdom from some smart people.
However, reading is a time-consuming activity; successful people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates are very busy and don’t always have time to sit down and read a book cover-to-cover. Rather, they look to extract the few most important lessons from each book and disregard the rest.
This is known as speed reading.
Mentorbox was created to teach others how to speed read books so they can learn more valuable lessons in less time.
Launched only in 2016 by Tai Lopez and Zoosk cofounder Alex Mehr, Mentorbox is headquartered in Las Vegas, NV. However, they have a few other locations.
This is by no means either man’s first venture.
Although you may know him as the guy who bragged about the new Lamborghini he just bought, Tai Lopez has found success in many business pursuits: e-commerce, coaching, consulting, online courses, and even dating websites.
Seeing as Alex Mehr cofounded a dating website himself, I’d have to guess that dating brought these two men together… in a strictly professional sense, of course.
But let’s get back to speed reading. As I said, speed reading is the practice of absorbing the most important lessons in a short time.
How short?
Mentorbox aims for between 1 and 1.5 hours per book; this comes out to only 10 minutes of reading per day, or the amount it might take you to read a chapter at normal speeds.
Now, will the speed reading skills you gain from a Mentorbox subscription allow you to make the same kind of money that these famous CEOs and entrepreneurs make?
Well, not exactly.
See, a lot of people believe that stuffing your mind full of knowledge will magically attract more money to you.
You’ll have some sort of entrepreneurial epiphany and start the next billion dollar business.
In reality, that rarely happens. Highly successful people who attribute part of their success to a prolific reading habit most likely had a skill that they could profit off of; by reading books, they gained knowledge that allowed them to leverage the skills for way more money.
Without a marketable skill, you’ll be left with nothing but a head full of knowledge.
Think of it like this; the lessons you learn from books are just one ingredient for success, while the skills are another ingredient.
At the bare minimum, you need these two ingredients to bake the cake known as success; having an endless supply of one ingredient won’t help you bake the cake if you’re missing the other.
Also, you need to actually hold yourself accountable for doing the work. There’s no teacher looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re keeping up with the assignments.
If you subscribe to Mentorbox for that “self-improvement” high, you’re better off just investing your money into sharpening a skill you can sell to others.
Don’t get me wrong; pursuing knowledge is always a good idea.
All that knowledge isn’t helpful if you don’t apply it, though.
As long as you do the work and apply the lessons, Mentorbox sounds like a pretty cool idea.
However, there have been plenty of complaints against them in their 3 years of existence.
For one, payment issues seem to be a concern with a lot of Mentorbox customers. Refunds are quite slow, but some people have even noticed that they charge your credit card without your permission on occasion.
Some Mentorbox customers have discovered the “Enroll In Entrepreneur Academy Button” is at least partly to blame for this. There’s no price listed anywhere near that button, but Mentorbox subscribers noticed they were charged for enrolling without being informed.
They aren’t trying to directly scam you, but they’re towing that line very closely by acting like that’s just a part of the subscription, rather than an upsell.
Upselling is totally fine and should be encouraged as long as customers know it’s an upsell. Not telling them that something is an upsell is just bad business.
As of now, I don’t believe they have that Entrepreneur Academy upsell anymore. Still, be careful before clicking any buttons on their site once they have your credit card on file.
In a similar vein, there’s also their sales page.
Look: Tai Lopez is an internet marketer, so of course he’s going to pull out all the copywriting stops when selling Mentorbox.
Still, the sales page is very “in-your-face” and “salesy”.
Yet another common complaint is their customer support. Many claim it’s well-intentioned and fairly responsive but messy and inefficient.
In an industry full of half-baked “make money online” money-grabbing scams, these complaints certainly don’t help Mentorbox’s image.
Despite these issues, Mentorbox is a legit business and many customers have benefitted from the enhanced reading abilities they gained through their subscriptions.
Fun fact: Mentorbox’s entire business is built on Clickfunnels. If you’ve ever doubted the power of Clickfunnels, then Mentorbox is here to show you your doubts are mistaken.
Products
Mentorbox’s basic product is their monthly subscription.
The subscription is offered in two different forms: digital and physical.
Both subscriptions utilize 4 learning methods to teach you the content: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and reading.
So what’s inside a Mentorbox subscription?
If you get the digital subscription, here’s what you’ll get each month:
- Over 500 hours of video lessons
- Downloadable lesson workbooks
- Unlimited access to the course
- Book summaries in audio format
- Cheat sheets for retention and speed reading
- Access to a private Facebook mastermind group
- Various other study materials
Your digital copies of books, video lessons, workbooks, audio summaries, and some other study materials are all stuffed into a Teachable course.
If you’ve ever used Teachable before, you know how intuitive and satisfying Teachable courses are to run through. I think this was a good choice on Mentorbox’s part.
As for the mastermind group: Mentorbox has a private Facebook group for paying subscribers to discuss what they’re learning with each other.
To gain access to the mastermind group, you have to apply; however, this is just so Mentorbox can confirm your subscription before letting you into the group.
If you get tired of doing everything online and prefer to read physical books, the digital subscription gives you the opportunity to upgrade to the physical subscription.
The physical subscription includes
- Your 2-3 monthly books
- Study guides
- A USB drive full of your books’ summaries
- Cheat sheets and workbooks for each book
- Magnet
- Bookmark
Your physical subscription also grants you access to the online course; however, you’ll only need it for video lessons and other digital items included in your subscription.
Whichever subscription you choose, you’ll notice Mentorbox has some pretty good authors.
Ever heard of Tony Robbins? How about Mark Manson? Those are just a couple of the authors whose books you’ll read with a Mentorbox subscription.
You don’t get to choose the books you receive, but Mentorbox makes sure each month’s books are relevant to both personal development/business and relevant to that month’s speed reading lessons.
And given the names I just mentioned, you at least know that you’re getting some quality material each month.
Upsells
As you’d expect from an online business, Mentorbox offers plenty of upsells. They do change every so often but rest assured you can spend more of your money on Mentorbox content if you please.
But before we talk about some of these upsell, let me reiterate: be careful about clicking buttons on their site once you have a subscription. Any innocent looking button could be their sneaky way of upselling you.
Anyways, on to their current upsells.
One of them is a VIP membership called MentorNetwork. When you buy a MentorNetwork membership, Mentorbox grants you access to their “mentor network”. This is their fancy name for the group of high-level authors, executives, professors, and entrepreneurs they partnered with.
Some of these partners include Arianna Huffington, Mark Manson, Robert Cialdini, and Mentorbox’s two founders.
Your VIP membership gives you exclusive access to weekly live sessions with this partner network. Ask questions during the session or email in your questions ahead of time.
If you miss a live session, you can rewatch the video at your convenience.
Some other features include discounted live seminars, a special “members-only” LinkedIn networking group, and even free meetups all over the US.
But that’s only one upsell.
If you don’t need this all-inclusive VIP membership but still want access to selected experts, Mentorbox offers a smaller upsell called MentorClass.
MentorClass is essentially a catalog of upcoming seminars and workshops hosted by various Mentorbox partners and other experts.
Among these offerings are a few mainstays that cover your typical business topics. For example, in their “Fundraising Ideas: How to Get Venture Capital, Crowdfunding, or Bank Loans For Your Business” class, you learn about the “what” and “how” of funding a business.
But aside from these “normal” courses, there are some interesting offerings that pop up every so often.
One that caught my eye the other day was a workshop called “Drink Like A CEO”.
Taught by a world champion in mixology that holds numerous other accolades, the purpose of the course is to teach you all about liquor and cocktails: their history, how to make them, and how to order them.
Unlike Mentorbox’s mainstay Mentor Classes, unique workshops like “Drink Like A CEO” have limited seating and aren’t around forever.
Something to keep an eye on if you become a basic Mentorbox subscriber.
Pricing
A digital Mentorbox subscription costs $7/month or $59/year, while the physical subscription costs $89/month.
Buying the books separately and teaching yourself how to speed read without Mentorbox’s physical subscription is quite possible and actually cheaper.
But that’s not the point; Mentorbox provides you only the information you need to learn how to speed read, and they do it in a structured way so you can easily track your progress.
The price tag is what you pay for the convenience of Tai Lopez delivering a whole speed-reading curriculum to your doorstep or desktop.
If you really don’t want to pay $89 a month for the books and lessons, stick with the digital subscription.
But either way, you’re getting a great deal on high-level knowledge; hiring any of the experts that Mentorbox is partners with would be insanely expensive.
Speaking of “hiring the experts”, let’s talk about upsell prices.
The main MentorClass workshops and seminars all allegedly cost $299, while some of the one-off/limited time workshops are priced differently.
However, when I visited the landing pages for some of these workshops, many of them displayed a crossed-out “original price” that was replaced by “$89 this week only!”
I’m sure that’s just a clever marketing tactic to get you to buy at “such a great discount”, but that’s not too bad of a price to be taught by an expert anyways. After all, it’s the same price as one month of Mentorbox’s physical subscription.
On the other hand, Mentorbox doesn’t seem to list a price for their Mentor Network membership. If I had to take a guess why, I’d say it’s because the Mentor Network membership is quite expensive.
I’d tell members to apply and see if they can figure out the price themselves, but you already know about Mentorbox’s habit of charging your card without telling you; perhaps you should only apply to the Mentor Network if money is no object.
Affiliate Program
Tai Lopez has an affiliate program for his personal brand’s products (such as 67 Steps) but Mentorbox does have its own separate affiliate program.
It’s pretty simple. If you’re a paying subscriber to Mentorbox, you can ask them for an affiliate link.
Simply share the link with your friends, write about it on your blog, or spread the affiliate word through other means; each referral that signs up for a subscription earns you a $30 credit.
Recap
Many people are very wary of marketers and companies in the personal development space.
Plenty of business “gurus” like to tell you how they “dropped out of college” and teach you their “secret trick that generates them thousands per month on autopilot”.
Tai Lopez gets these kinds of accusations leveled against him all the time, but I don’t think Mentorbox is a scam like many other self-improvement products; they have a habit of using questionable marketing tactics and one-click upsells, but you do learn valuable information.
First of all, there are some great works by great authors in there who have experienced real success. It isn’t just book knowledge repackaged into a $400 online course.
Well, technically they do repackage books into a course. But that’s not the point of the subscription; the purpose of Mentorbox is to teach you speedreading. All the knowledge you gain from these books is just a nice bonus.
In addition, Mentorbox works with C-suite executives to further enhance the lessons.
And unlike a $400 online course, you aren’t being fleeced of your money; $7 for the digital package is less than a Netflix subscription!
The speed reading skills you gain from the lessons come in handy, not to mention that you’re reading actual books by real people with valuable knowledge to share.
It won’t make you money automatically, it’ll just teach you how to extract the lessons from books much faster so you can further sharpen your skills and achieve business and personal success.
Just remember: you still have to do the work and apply the knowledge to your current skills if you want to reap the full benefits of speed reading.
The same goes for the actual books you read; if you’re reading as a tactic to achieve success, knowing the contents of a book cover-to-cover means nothing.
What you do with the knowledge you gain is what truly matters.
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