business

Store That Landing Page

mathew January 5, 2010

We are seriously into split-testing at Grockit. For all of our split-tests, we generate a standard report for each bucket of users that includes a whole suite of behaviors like these:

2010-01-05_1546

Once you’ve bolted-on visionary inspiration and beautiful design to achieve a high degree of product/market fit for your web application, it’s time to optimize the business and split-testing is one of the most powerful tools you have in your arsenal.

Our custom split-test reporting lets us really get a good handle on the lifetime behavior (and -value) of a particular group of users who have a specific and explicit Grockit experience. This goes above and beyond the more standard ‘did more people click through on this variation?’ flavor of split-test reporting.

But wait, there’s more:

Segmenting your users by source & acquisition channel is a widespread best practice, most often done by tacking on custom URL parameters to the end of, say, an Adwords destination or email newsletter URL. We do this too. In fact, you must be smart about segmenting your users when you get to the scaling step of the Startup Pyramid in order to develop your marketing channels.

At Grockit, we’ve connected this type of off-site channel segmentation with our on-site split-test reporting. When you land on Grockit as a new visitor, we create a guest account for you, which is then populated with all of your user data if you choose to signup, and continues to track your usage of Grockit, so we know how well we are serving you.

One of the bits of data that we store for each user is the original URL that you landed on the first time you came to Grockit. This lets us run a split-test comparison report on any group of different landing URLs/URL parameters. Using this tool, we can analyze both off-site variables like advertising channels, and also on-site factors like landing pages that position Grockit differently for different groups of users.

All this is, of course, in the service of ironing out the kinks in your scalable startup equation, and not just for the sake of metrics alone.

Grockit 2009 Year in Review

brian buser January 1, 2010

2009

Whew. What a year! 2009 will be remembered by us as the year Grockit went from a basic practice tool for the GMAT to full-feature learning environment that supports many types of curriculum including GMAT, SAT, ACT, and GRE test prep. We are quite pleased with the growth in the product, customers, and team this year. There is much work left to do, we know. But let’s take a moment to celebrate our progress in 2009.

It was only February when Grockit came out of private beta and into the public with the GMAT group. With that came the launch of leaderboards. Leaderboards show off the top players and added a new layer of competitiveness within the community. Of course, students are always most interested in their own performance. With that in mind we created diagnostics which provide students an initial ability estimate. In addition to diagnostics, skill specific perfomance analytics were added to provide students with precise knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses.

Skill specific analytics opened the door for other features. We were able to add custom games and custom review sessions so that students could focus their study time on areas of most need. Games were also made adaptive to the students. This was significant because it allowed us to show the questions to students based on their ability level that would benefit them most at that time.

Tutors were also introduced to the Grockit learning environment in 2009. With this addition students are now able to study in the three ways they naturally study; alone, with peers, and experts. Tutors were a welcome addition to the Grockit community and students will have more ways to study with them in the coming months. Towards the end of the year we added more achievement badges to games. Badges are symbolic rewards for accomplishments in Grockit. Students see them as a fun way to share their activity with friends.

Such progress would not be possible without the hard work of a talented team. In fact, the Grockit team doubled in size this year and is up to 23 full-time employees. Feel free to get to know us a little better from our Facebook office photos.

By the way, did I mention that 1.7 Million questions were answered in Grockit in 2009! This activity level by our early users has been very encouraging. And we’re thrilled to help them achieve their educational goals.

Now it’s time to look to the future and we’re excited to do so. 2010 will be a big year as we release Grockit 2.0 and expand beyond test prep into K-12 curriculum. Stay tuned, the journey has just begun.

Happy New Year!

Beating Standardized Tests With Their Own Magic

angela tombari July 8, 2009

Diagnostic Linking Pattern (not to scale)

At Grockit we believe in collaborative learning and continual improvement. This is an ideal we encourage both in our users and in ourselves. Towards this end, we continually research and develop more exact methods for estimating question difficulty and student ability to enhance the Grockit experience.

Grockit diagnostics indicate current capability level for our users by capitalizing on the mathematical tools of item response theory. These are the same methods used by major testing companies to create computer adaptive tests (CAT) such as the GMAT.

Our capacity to estimate current capability for the individual depends upon the belief that if item A is more difficult than item B, item A should be more difficult than item B consistently across people.

Getting the item difficulty estimates was one of the early keys to providing better feedback for our members. Early on, this was a fairly arduous process because data from practice questions left us with a sparse data matrix that required many levels of data filtering to ensure reliable estimates. As an example of the filtering, people were only included in these calculations if they had both correct and incorrect responses to practice questions. We could not include data from those people because the information did not help us determine which questions are more or less difficult.

In addition to our desire to get away from the intensive filtering, we also wanted a way to get difficulty estimates for the new questions that we publish on a continuous basis.

Our new approach entails making our diagnostics dual purpose. Not only do the diagnostics serve to estimate members’ current capabilities, they also increase the accuracy of our estimation process. We have implemented a shifting diagnostic schedule in which certain questions serve as links from group to group, enabling us to place all of our data on the same metric. Newly published questions are also included so that every question on Grockit gets a difficulty estimate as soon as possible.

More importantly for our members, we already have solid difficulty estimates on enough diagnostic questions to generate the ability estimates necessary for targeted quests. With the new shifting diagnostic plan, we are now able to rapidly turn out new content with scientifically-based difficulties and experience points. Take a diagnostic on Grockit and see where you rank!

Techcrunch50 2008: Final Thoughts

farbood nivi September 13, 2008

Well, it’s been a few days since TC50 wrapped up and it was quite a ride for Grockit. We placed in the Top 6, winning a Jury Selection honor.

We wanted to share a bit about the experience, and event, from our perspective.

How TC50 Affected Grockit

We didn’t anticipate this, but the deadline and goal of working towards the TC50 demo had a powerful affect on us as an organization. Setting a goal and deadline around sharing what we’ve been up to actually did a lot to the product, beyond just motivating a presentation of it.

The deadline forced us to continue to think about our product in critical ways that helped us tweak, add, and remove features. On paper, it may sound strange that a conference deadline would affect your decisions about your product, but given that after each choice we felt better and more internally satisfied by our decisions, we are excited about the calls we made.

Dealing With The TC50 Team

While we are, of course, super excited to have been chosen as a Jury Selection honoree, this is even more special given that we were all but disqualified from Techcrunch50 about four days before the conference started. We were unable to make either of our scheduled rehearsals and this resulted, understandably, in an unhappy TC50 organizer. After a phone conversation that I highly recommend future presenters do their absolute best to avoid having to have, we were given the opportunity to rehearse our demo the Friday before the event. We managed to get back into the good graces of the TC50 team.

The Event

Techcrunch started as a tech blog, they added things like Crunchbase, a conference (with Calacanis), and now even a Tablet PC. This is a great start-up energy and it permeates the TC50 event. The event is low on pomp and, instead, all about the people. Everyone treated us with serious regard and concern. Dan Kimmerling, especially, made us feel like we were the only presenters there.

We could probably have done without so many F-bombs over the mic though. It’s one thing when a presenter’s demo goes awry and one slips out, but Calacanis and Arrington make Al Pacino sound like your kindergarten teacher. That said, I laughed pretty hard. On a side note, and as a foodie, I was actually pretty impressed by the VIP event food.

The Aftermath

Well, firstly, we saw about a 50x increase in traffic to our homepage and an equal increase in Beta requests. Our marketing director, Borat, had this to say “Niiiiice! High five!” But, more importantly, the feeling around the office was really the best part. We were pumped after our presentation Wednesday morning, and this was hours before the winners were announced. The feeling of group accomplishment and a greater transparency with the public were really worth the hard work. Being honored by a Jury Selection winner made a great feeling even greater. We’ve also had a lot of folks reach out to us with great encouragement and support for what we are developing, some requests for interviews and more than a few blog posts and articles around the web.

Final Thought

Hopefully we’ll have something cool to launch at next year’s Techcrunch50. Hopefully they’ll have us!

Grockit Wins Jury Selection Award At Techcrunch50

farbood nivi September 11, 2008

Michael driving Grockit demo at Techcrunch 50

We are super excited to announce that we were honored as one of Jury Selection winners at the Techcrunch50 conference today. The company Yammer took the top prize and Atmosphir, FitBit, Goodguide, and Swype were also Jury Selection winners.

Congrats, as well, to all the companies presenting at the conference.

We’ve spent a lot of time and energy getting ready for this event and it’s great to see that it connected with foiks judging the event as well as some of the press.

On a personal note, I want to commend the entire Grockit team for their unbelievable commitment and efforts.

Stay tuned for more from us….

Here is our presentation if you missed it!

Grockit at Techcrunch50

farbood nivi September 10, 2008

Today, we are excited to be showing the world some of what we’ve been working on at Grockit!

We are presenting at the Techcrunch50 Conference.

You can watch it live.

Thanks to the Techcrunch50 team and best of luck to all the Finalists!

Grockit On The Street

farbood nivi June 3, 2008

We were recently written up in some cool blogs, so we figured we’d share them with you.

Kare Anderson’s blog, Say It Better, featured us in a post about attracting employees.

Massively, a news site that covers the MMO market, gave us a short write up.

SeedWatcher, a blog about early stage start-ups by one of our angel investors, interviewed me in connection with our latest financing.

Grockit Raises Series B

farbood nivi May 30, 2008

We recently raised our Series B financing. We couldn’t be more excited about the firms we are working with. The press release is below.

Grockit, a San Francisco Learning 2.0 Start-Up has raised its Series B financing. Integral Capital Partners lead the $8M round with Benchmark Capital, who lead their Series A, participating as well. Grockit is creating a MMOLG (Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game) where people can connect to learn from each other. The company was founded by Farbood Nivi, a long time teacher, and Michael Buffington, a well known Rails developer. Grockit will use the latest financing to expand their development team and they plan to launch their first product this fall.

You can also check out our post on TechCrunch.

Grockit Launches MMOG Test Prep Game for Fax

farbood nivi April 1, 2008

Although our web-based Learning MMOG platform is still in development, we thought this would be a perfect time to launch our first foray into the Learning space. That said, we couldn’t be happier to announce the launch of our GMAT Learning Game for Fax. That’s right a MMOG for fax machines.

You probably didn’t think this was possible or even made sense, but you’d be wrong on both counts.

Fax technology has done for decades what the Internet has done for barely 10 years. Connect people. In fact, most of the Internet protocols that we love and talk about every day came directly from Fax technology.

Here’s how it works.

1. Fax Grockit your fax number.
2. Wait to receive your first Grockit GMAT question.
3. Answer the question (include your work) and fax it to the next student. You will find the next student’s number at the bottom of your GMAT question that we fax you.
4. When you receive a Fax question from another GMAT player, answer the question and keep faxing.
5. If you’re the fourth person to answer a question, fax all four answers back to Grockit, and we’ll fax you all your scores for this round.
6. Rinse and repeat.

It’s really that simple, and before you know it, you’ll be learning and teaching GMAT in a live MMOG. Don’t be fooled by the Internet’s fancy promises to connect you with other learners when the tried and true is just a dial tone away.

If you don’t have a land line and can only connect to the world through the Interweb, Internets, or Tubes, don’t worry. Our web-based Learning MMOG will be coming soon. Drop us your email if you’d like to know when.

Oh, by the way, Grockit is in no way affiliated with the GMAT Test or the GMAC.

Doing Things The Wrong Way

david marino May 9, 2007

Here is some insight from James Dyson, the inventor of the amazing Dyson Vacuum.

In Fast Company, He advocates doing things the wrong way.

I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it
right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s
how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always
thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures
they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of
failures to get there is probably more creative…

We’re taught
to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that
other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a
failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty,
dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely
different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a
bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.

It makes you realize that so much of our world view is shaped on “winning.” The war in Iraq, the war on terror, the war on drugs. You wage war to win. War has a winner and loser. Are we setting ourselves up to be losers?

The same is true for education. We all have our childhood horror stories about the way our teachers mishandled situations leaving us slightly jaded. We all have studied for tests, did our best, but come up short and lost. It is a feeling that leaves you wrecked. It wasn’t the actual losing that hurt, it was the implication. In school, you lost credibility, you lost your ranking, you might be downgraded amongst your peers…or your mentors might see you as a loser.

Despite the same path to success, we don’t give enough attention to the lessons that Thomas Edison taught us about the importance of failure. Although, after just a short time working with Grockit, I don’t need to use the ugly word failure. I have seen the light. I have been enlightened to what this really is….

This is called Learning.

Failing and working to first understand the failure, and then to secondly correct the mistake all in the pursuit of learning.

We need to stop being afraid of failure. It is at times the first step in Learning. It is an indicator and guide for “Grok-ing something.”

Allow yourself a chance to fail, it feels good. It reminds you that you are human…and that what makes humans so damn special is our desire to learn, improve… and one day walk on the moon…(again.)

(Here is a personal note:)
After watching my beloved Pistons win the Championship in 2004, I watched them come close for 2 straight years…both failing to win the coveted prize. The mistakes they made over two years have become a roadmap this season. It is exciting to watch this team play so well together knowing that this cohesion is because of a shared philosophy to learn from prior mistakes. I catch myself waiting for a mistake to be committed, the way they did last year — and I am pleasantly surprised every time. Do you think they liked losing? Do you think they liked swallowing the reality that they were talented enough to win, but not organized enough to win? They could have quit, they could have stopped caring. Hell, even Ben Wallace left because I think he got bored, lost faith, didn’t want to learn from mistakes in the past, but instead thought a change of scenery might make it all better. I hope he enjoys his new view, because I think that with this road map which is landmarked with failure the Pistons will be sending him packing in a few short games.

business

Store That Landing Page

Grockit 2009 Year in Review

Beating Standardized Tests With Their Own Magic

Techcrunch50 2008: Final Thoughts

Grockit Wins Jury Selection Award At Techcrunch50

Grockit at Techcrunch50

Grockit On The Street

Grockit Raises Series B

Grockit Launches MMOG Test Prep Game for Fax

Doing Things The Wrong Way

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