Reading about these routines reminds of something Malcolm Gladwell said in a recent WYNC Radiolab podcast about why he thinks Tiger Woods is less an exceptional athlete than he is an exceptional follower of routine. Tiger Woods is good at following a rigid and consistent practice routine. Gladwell jokes (I hope) that Tiger Woods is good at routinely hitting 10,000 golf balls every morning, emphasizing the benefit of being obsessive about practicing.

If you’re studying for the GMAT, playing practice games with your peers at Grockit is something you should do on a regular basis. Find people within your local community who can study with you and meet and play together daily. As a group, not only will you encourage each other to keep the routine alive, you’ll collectively learn more and help solidify your individual practice routines.

Start well in advance of your GMAT test date and learn how to be consistent, even obsessive, about practicing. Be like Tiger!

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!

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!

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!