How we reached our first 1000 users

We are building PreparingForGRE.com, a platform that helps GRE test takers with vocabulary building and reading practice. Users can read articles from trusted sources and learn important vocabulary words by seeing them in use.

TLDR; we constantly experimented, ignored vanity metrics and relied on social channels to keep in contact with users and stay relevant to their needs.

How did it start?

Back in 2018, I was preparing for my GRE exam and was facing problems with the verbal section, like so many other Asian students. I scanned the ETS website to understand the idea behind the GRE verbal section, and turns out “there is an emphasis on complex verbal reasoning skills” and mugging up scores of words amounts to wasted effort. From this point on, I felt the need of reading editorials from newspapers and articles from trusted sources such as NYTimes, New Yorker, Aeon.co and so on. To my dismay, I couldn’t find any website that helped with daily article reading practice.

First Steps

Having felt a strong need for a product that recommended articles for daily reading practice, my friend and I created a telegram group where we shared articles from said good sources and also a list of essential GRE words found in these articles.

We shared the links of the telegram group on a few Facebook groups and people quickly started to join the group. Within a week, we got around 1000 subscribers to our group. Many were first-time Telegram users, showing that the problem of verbal preparation was so painful that people downloaded an app just to join our group for the bleak promise of help. This was enough to convince us that a product was needed.

Market Study

We researched various products in the market, including the likes of Magoosh, Princeton Prep, GRE Verbal prep, GREEdge and many more. Some of them were good solid products that offered complete exam preparation environments. Although all of them were missing the product we had envisioned, a website that helps people get better at reading, targetted for the GRE. Vocabulary.com deserves special mention that helps users with building vocabulary by using and seeing words in context. We ventured out to do something similar.

We rolled out surveys and talked to various users, confirming that users were aware of their problems and recognized that reading articles should improve their GRE verbal scores. Whether they would pay for such a product, was something we had to experiment with and find out.

By now we had validated two important hypotheses:

• verbal was a big problem for a big chunk of all GRE test takers and they were aware of it
• of the users we could contact, more than 90% believed that reading articles will improve their vocabulary retention and their scores in general

Vision

We envisioned our product to be something every test taker should be able to use, supplementing their existing preparation strategies. We want everyone who takes the GRE to practice and get better at reading and improve their vocabulary in sustainable ways, such that the preparation itself makes them better readers and better future grad students. Getting better at critical reading in itself prepares a student for the tough curriculum that requires reading of literature, journals, and research papers and understanding them, all with tight deadlines.

After multiple iterations, our vision was focussed: we want every GRE test taker to use our product to get better at reading and vocabulary.

Development

We drew up initial plans and quickly developed a website that aggregated articles and identified vocabulary words in them. Prior to PreparingForGRE, we had worked on a content aggregation platform called Preadr.com (which has lived its last day) which leveraged AI techniques to aggregated and categorize articles. I extended this tech to also hunt for good GRE related articles.

I also posted on Reddit about the project I was working on and I found awesome collaborators who wanted to work with us on the project. It was win-win, I had engineering experience and could help them learn product development and we formed our initial product team. Soon we were a distributed team with people from the USA, UK, Nigeria, and Croatia.

This gave us another important validation, people from around the world understood what we do and found value in our product.

Journey

In the next few months, we were focussed on providing users a better experience, functionally. We wanted to make sure users felt they learned something every time they logged into our website. We carefully studied what users did on our website, talked to several users to better understand their problems and made sure we didn’t buy into any vanity metrics.

Users gave us decent feedback but we quickly realized that even if users knew reading for good for them, it was difficult cultivating a habit around. Thereafter, our efforts were focussed on improving retention numbers, average session spent on our site and help users help themselves. Since we were short on resources, we had to release features that were impactful and helpful for users.

We gamified reading to some extent; users could now time their reading and compete with others based on their read times. The average session durations gradually began to increase and we eventually saw higher retention rates. A lot of work remains on this front yet though.

Within months, we hit a milestone of over 1000 users who signed up and used the product. Moreover, users were happy with the product and sent us messages acknowledging our efforts and thanking us for the service. A few users also offered to work with us to spread the word and one kind under-grad student even offered to make a mobile app for us!

Conclusion

Learning from prior startup failures, we decided to embrace the following learnings:

• start small, find a niche: we want to focus on the GRE exam preparation market
• start innovative: we found a gap and decided to make that our strong point
• stay in constant touch with users: we are in constant touch with our users and potential users. We study users on our platforms as well and learn from users on other platforms, implicitly and explicitly.
• ignore vanity metrics: we let go of all vanity metrics and decided to measure real retention and usage numbers and obsessed over them. We are value-focused and believe revenue will follow eventually.
• be more patient: since all of us have full-time jobs, progress is slow sometimes. Delays tend to cause quarrels which ultimately are even more detrimental to productivity. I have learned to be more patient which has helped me persevere better.

Some problems were solved, many yet remain solving and slowly, commit by commit, we are working towards building something useful for users and fulfilling our startup dreams!