Product Improvement — GradSpace
GradSpace is an exclusive study abroad community that allows aspirants to get connected with fellow aspirants and seniors. The app aims to assist students in planning, managing, and fulfilling their dream of studying abroad. GradSpace also helps in the discovery of graduate courses offered by universities in the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia. They also have services to assist students with education loans, finding roommates, and getting their visa issues resolved. Their closest competitor is Yocket which has been in the same business for the last 6 years and has a user base of more than 350,000 users.
In this article, we breakdown the offerings of the app and suggest improvements that can help GradSpace increase its user base and revenue. The article is structured as follows :-
1) Target Audience
2) Existing User Problems
3) Product Suggestion Matrix
4) Explanations of Product Suggestions
- End objective of the suggestion
- Current solution
- Suggested solution
- Ease of implementation
- Success metrics
- Impact on user
- Impact on revenue
5) Summary
Target Audience
MS/MBA aspirants usually go through the following phases before flying to their dream universities abroad. Each phase can be considered as one user segment.
· Users exploring the possibility of higher studies abroad –These students have neither attempted any standardized graduate admissions tests like GRE, GMAT, TOEFL nor have they started drafting their Statement of Purpose (SOPs)
· Users who have started preparing for GRE/GMAT but haven’t attempted any of these exams
· Users who have attempted at least one of the standardized graduate admissions tests
· Users who have submitted their completed applications to graduate schools of their choice
· Users who have received admits from colleges they had applied to
· Users who have finalized their college
As of now, the majority of the users on the GradSpace app belong to the first three segments. Therefore, we shall be focusing our attention on these three segments.
Existing User Problems
· A good number of aspirants decide to pursue higher studies abroad after getting inspired by their close friends who are already studying abroad or working at top companies abroad. While these peers often help the aspirants with their first-hand experiences, there are still plenty of questions in the aspirant’s mind that remain unanswered. Here are a few examples —
i) Is my profile good enough for the colleges where my peers are studying?
ii) What are the career opportunities (job roles, salaries, organizations) after the completion of the course which my peers are pursuing?
· Aspirants often have difficulties in preparing for GRE or GMAT
· After attempting these exams, aspirants sometimes find it tough to do university shortlisting
· Aspirants also face difficulties in drafting their LORs, SOPs, and other application related essays
Product Suggestion Matrix
Explanation of Product Suggestions
Out of the problem statements mentioned above, GradSpace is only solving a few of them. We have broken down them into their granular components and compared GradSpace’s approach with our approach.
1. Profile Evaluation for Desired Courses
End Objective :- Give users a list of courses that are Ambitious, Moderate, and Safe as per their profile
Current Solution :- NA
Suggested Solution :- Users should be given an option to fill in their profile-related details like GRE/GMAT score, undergraduate GPA/percentage, years of work experience, number of journal papers published, volunteering work, etc. After this, users should select the courses in which they want to pursue their graduation (ex :- MS in Business Analytics, MS in Mechanical Engineering, etc). Once GradSpace has created this database, they can follow two approaches -
a) Build a group of verified mentors (students who are presently pursuing graduate studies) who can judge an aspirant’s profile strength after going through her profile details
b) Create a database having similar profile related details of present graduate students and perform a similarity-match with the aspirant’s profileEase of Implementation :- Tough. While the first approach will require a significant marketing effort, the second approach will require strong efforts from engineering, analytics, and marketing teams. The accuracy of the similarity-match algorithm of the second approach has to be high.
Success Metrics :-
i) Activation : Number of Monthly Active Users vs Number of unique users who filled in their profile details
ii) Engagement : Number of unique users who filled in their profile details in a month vs number of unique users who received course and college suggestions in a month
iii) Retention : Number of Monthly Active Users vs Number of users who accessed the above-mentioned suggestion-page more than once in a month
iv) Qualitative Feedback : Interviews with customers to understand whether their expectations from this feature were met or notImpact on Users :- High. Profile evaluation along the above-mentioned lines is already provided by Yocket. However the efficacy of Yocket’s algorithm is questionable and users have often complained of in-accurate suggestions. Apart from Yocket, there is hardly any other app which helps aspirants zero down on the courses of their choice. Therefore, this feature can be one of the USPs (Unique Selling Proposition) of GradSpace.
Impact on Revenue :- High. If executed seamlessly, GradSpace can think of a Freemium model where basic services will be provided free of charge and advanced features like Profile Evaluation must be paid for.
2. Job opportunities after course completion
End Objective :- After users enter the name of their desired graduate programs, users should see a table having the following attributes :
i) Name of the companies which hired students of this graduate program
ii) Name of job roles
Current Solution :- NA
Suggested Solution :- GradSpace can do a small pilot project wherein they can choose specific courses which attract a lot of students (ex — MS Programs in Computer Science, Analytics, Data Science, Electrical engineering). After finalizing these courses, GradSpace can extract the company names and job roles of the alumni of these courses. The final dataset will look something like this :
Ease of Implementation :- Medium. For the pilot phase, the effort needed to create this database should be manageable. Since extracting data through LinkedIn APIs is tricky, this task will have to be done manually. However, because of the manual nature of the task, this will block a significant amount of time of the analytics team in the long run. The GradSpace team should only think of continuing this exercise if the data from the pilot experiment is encouraging.
Success Metrics :-
After creating the above database, GradSpace team has to actively monitor how many users are referring to this database. Following metrics can be created to monitor the usage :
i) Activation : Number of Monthly Active Users vs Number of unique users who opened the page having the above database
ii) Engagement : Avg time spent on the app vs Avg time spent on the above page
iii) Retention : Number of Monthly Active Users vs Number of unique users who opened the above page more than once in a month
Impact on Users :- Very high. This table will give tangible information to users about placements and give them further confidence in zeroing down on courses.
Impact on Revenue :- High. Just like the previous suggestion, GradSpace team can think of this database as an advanced features and keep it in the paid-version of the Freemium model.
3. Exam preparation
End Objective :- Users who need help in the verbal or quantitative sections of GRE/GMAT, should get relevant study materials. If study materials are tough to source, GradSpace team should connect users with mentors/tutors who will be willing to solve the doubts of the users.
Current Solution :- The admin team posts “GRE Word of the Day” every day. Every post contains the meaning of the word followed by a sentence example, synonyms and antonyms.
Suggested Solution :-
Describing GRE words in this fashion is inefficient because of the following reasons :
i) A user has to scroll through the entire “GRE/GMAT Preparation” space to learn new words
ii) Even if users are able to learn new words by scrolling down, revising words in this manner will be very cumbersome
Magoosh Vocabulary App is one of the best mobile apps for revising Vocabulary on the go. The GradSpace team can take some design inspirations from the app and build one.Ease of Implementation :- Medium.
Success Metrics :-i) Activation : Number of daily active users vs number of users who use vocabulary section daily
ii) Retention : Number of users who opened the Vocabulary section atleast once in a month vs Number of users who opened the Vocabulary section 5 times or 10 times in a month
iii) Impact on Users : Moderate. If the presentation of words and sentences is user-friendly, users will have a good reason of logging into the app multiple times in a week.
Impact on Revenue :- Nil. This feature should be available for all the users.
4. University Shortlisting
End Objective :- Even without opting for a profile evaluation, users should be shown a list of colleges from where they can pursue their graduation. For this to happen, users have to first enter their desired graduate course names. After this, they should be presented with multiple filters as shown above to zero down on the colleges of their choices.
Current Solution :- The University section of the app presently displays information in the following manner.
Suggested Solution :-
i) On clicking the search bar, users should get an advanced filter page wherein they can mention their preferred course type, University Types, Tuition Fee etc. The final view should be something like this :
ii) After choosing any specific college, the page that gets displayed shows the overview, admitted/rejected students, and quick facts. Facts such as Founding Year, Male:Female ratio can be done away with and only the following facts can be kept :
i) QS Ranking
ii) Type of University (Private or Public)
iii) Tuition fee of the course
iv) Application fee of the course
v) Deadlines for submitting the application to this course
vi) Average or Median accommodation expenses
vii) Name of the companies where alumni of a specific course are currently working
Success Metrics :-
Can be created along the similar lines as mentioned for earlier product-improvements
Ease of Implementation :- Easy. All these details are available on the university websites and extract relevant info from such pages should not be tough.
Impact on Users :- Moderate. At a basic level, university suggestions can help users zero-down on the courses of their choices.
Impact on Revenue :- Nil. This feature should be available for all users.
Summary
Based on the above suggestions, the PM team of GradSpace can begin by executing those tasks which are easy to implement and have moderate/high impact on users. Post this, they can focus on those tasks which have the potential of bringing revenue or increasing retention of users.
