About the Author: Rusty Greiff is Grockit’s Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer and a resident of the greater Washington DC area.  Rusty has an extensive background in politics and education.

For over a year Grockit has developed and managed private-label and co-branded products for K-12 schools, virtual schools, charter school networks and major online Universities.  Today, I’m proud to share that Grockit and Georgetown University have partnered to provide premium online test prep and collaborative learning for Georgetown undergraduate students, and we will co-market Grockit premium subscriptions at a significant discount for Georgetown alumni.

As one of the most selective academic universities in the world, Georgetown continues to drive online strategies and initiatives that improve student success – we are excited that they have chosen Grockit as a solution for their students and alumni.  Georgetown will leverage Grockit’s personalized assessment engine, adaptive and social learning platform and gaming mechanics to drive superior student engagement.  Like us, they believe in the power of social and collaborative learning to prepare students.

We’re looking forward to working with like-minded universities in the future.  I promise to update Grockit followers with posts every time we create new relationships with Universities, so that you can know when your school has joined the Grockit community.

Just in case you’re wondering, here are just a few reasons why Grockit is attractive to major universities:

* Over the past few years, more than a million students all over the world have used Grockit to practice and study together online to achieve their best scores on standardized tests

* Grockit’s social learning has proven to help students learn more, faster and perform better

* Grockit has figured out how to add and move massive amounts of content, check and curate that content quickly

* Grockit already works with accomplished, forward-thinking schools with strong support and broad awareness

* Grockit is a leader in developing for the most pervasive and important platforms for students and teachers

* Grockit is actively trying to improve learning outcomes for millions of students in under-resourced communities

Grockit has integrated with Facebook to help you ace your next exam with your friends. In the coming weeks, Grockit will make it easier for students to create online study groups within Grockit and solve problems with friends. What this means is that you’ll be able to find friends to study with, create permanent Grockit study rooms, and share your team’s progress on your Facebook profile.

We’re excited about this for a couple of reasons. First, this solves a big problem for people that use Grockit. Many people want to study with friends they interact with in other parts of their lives, and we haven’t had a great way of doing that within Grockit. Now, with our new Facebook integration, students can quickly select-and-add study partners from among their friends, even if their friends aren’t using Grockit today.

Second, this was a result of amazingly fast design and engineering work. Thanks to the fine folks at Facebook who delivered this API, we’ve been able to build something we think will be beneficial for our users in just a couple of short weeks.

The result is something that we think will make online social learning a lot easier to use. And this cross-team work matches up with our Grockit core value of Collaborteam — our made-up word to describe the transparent, selfless way we work together.

Here’s the press release from F8, the Facebook Conference.

Grockit Announces Facebook Integration to Make Studying More Social

SAN FRANCISCO – September 22, 2011 – Today at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, Grockit, a social learning company, announced a new integration with Facebook that will make it even easier for students around the world to create Grockit study groups with their friends. Now people using Grockit can quickly create “Study Rooms”, invite their Facebook friends and prepare together for college entrance examinations, such as the SAT, ACT, LSATs, GMATs, GREs, and more. Students can also track and share academic progress and milestone achievements towards their academic goals on their Facebook profiles.

“Millions of students are on Facebook, but they aren’t just socializing. They are helping each other with homework, sharing school resources, and in general hacking together a social learning experience online,” said Farbood Nivi, founder and Chief Product Officer, Grockit. “The cool thing about our new Facebook integration is that students can create, control, and access Grockit Study Rooms right from their Facebook profiles. Study Rooms include tons of content to help with studying, from practice questions, to video lessons, and even personal tutoring.”

Earlier this year, Grockit released research showing that students who study together on Grockit do twice as much work — and get answers correct more often — as students who study alone.

In addition to creating new study groups, people using Grockit can share the total number of hours spent studying, the total number of questions attempted, and their progress studying within Grockit via their Facebook profiles. People can control how their activity is shared with friends on Facebook from their Facebook privacy settings.

To learn more about Grockit’s Facebook integration, please visit: Grockit.com/social

TLAB Adopts Grockit’s Social Learning Technologies for Test Prep

Detroit-based organization to provide students with access to Grockit’s online ACT prep tools

DETROIT – August 17, 2011 – The Technology Laboratory and Professional Development Center (TLAB), a Detroit-based non-profit accelerated learning program, today announced an agreement with Grockit that will enable the organization to offer Grockit tools to students preparing for the ACT, which is a mandatory test for all 11th-grade students in Michigan. Students will be able to access Grockit’s ACT preparatory tools from their own computer or at one of TLAB’s dedicated computer labs.

“Grockit is one of the few providers with keen insight and a solution for educating people in the 21st Century. Grockit is leveraging the power of the web in helping students get the tools and the guidance they need to perform at exceptional levels academically and especially on standardized tests,” said Dr. Clarence Nixon, Jr., founder of the TLAB program. “We’re excited to be working with them in helping our students prepare academically, master the ACT, and do so in a way that’s more effective and more affordable than the other methods out there.”

With Grockit, students work online with other students and with tutors to learn key concepts, solve practice problems, and develop test-taking strategies. More than 1 million users have used Grockit to date, and the service’s highly interactive and collaborative social learning model has proven to engage students: Compared to Grockit’s average independent studier, the average Grockit group studier spends three times as much time solving problems per study session; solves more than twice as many problems per study session; and is 10 percent more likely to answer questions correctly.

“Grockit helped me connect and learn with other students my own age, and with that help I improved my score on the ACT from 18 to 30 in less than three months,” said Jayleon Davis, a TLAB student in Dearborn Heights, Mich. “Grockit makes studying fun, and it’s helping me gain confidence as I work to achieve my dream score of a perfect 36 on the ACT.”

TLAB centers use data-driven software applications and the support of experienced tutors to help accelerate learning for students ranging from kindergarten to college. Their core academic programs are ACT prep, math, reading, vocabulary, writing, language, public speaking, research and development and leadership development.

About TLAB

TLAB is a faith-based, nonprofit, accelerated learning center founded in Detroit in 2007. It is focused on creating extraordinary academic achievement, among any and all  students, to prepare them to assume leadership roles in careers as entrepreneurs, physicians, nurses, research scientists, and other professions. The majority of TLAB’s 300 students come from Michigan, but we have attracted students from Atlanta; Phoenix; Jacksonville, Florida; Ohio, Minnesota, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, and Lake Providence, Louisiana.

About Grockit

Grockit was created to improve academic achievement and extend learning outside of the classroom. By applying adaptive learning algorithms and innovative social networking and online gaming technologies, students experience a fun and engaging way to master academic skills and achieve personal best scores on standardized tests. The diagnostic, prescriptive and adaptive nature of the underlying Grockit platform ensures that each student receives a personalized learning experience, designed to help them overcome areas of academic weakness. Founded in 2007 by Farb Nivi, a former Teacher of the Year for The Princeton Review and academic director at Kaplan, Grockit is headquartered in San Francisco and has received funding from Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Integral Capital Partners and prominent angel investors including Reid Hoffman (founder, LinkedIn) and Mark Pincus (founder and CEO, Zynga). For more information, please visit www.grockit.com.

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.

Professor Steve Blank

Yesterday I had a chance to pick Steve Blank’s brain for about an hour and get some thoughts on customer development and start-up marketing.

Here are some take aways.

1. Think about if your start-up is entering an exisiting market or creating a new one. For example, the marketing for Handspring and the marketing for Palm were very different. Handspring had to differentiate itself in an established PDA market while Palm had to educate the world about the existence of product that was not well understood. If Palm had implemented Handspring’s ‘differentiation’ marketing efforts, it would have made zero sense to customers. Why would I care about a PDA with more memory when I’m not yet even aware of what a PDA is?

2. Think about if you are differentiating on price or features. Understanding what your customers want is key to understanding how to communicate with them.

Steve Blank teaches Entrepreneurship at Stanford and focuses on agile customer development in start-ups. Here are some good sources for more things Steve Blank.

1. Fours Steps to the Epiphany – by Steve Blank available at Amazon

2. Audio from his Stanford Course on Venture Hacks blog post

3. steveblank.com

Thanks again for the time and advice Steve!