June 17, 2013

The Beat The GMAT Story: How a simple blog transformed into the world’s leading MBA social network

Jun. 17, 2013 at 07:59 AM | By Marlysa Connolly | Comment Count

Badgeville's Adena DeMonte recently spoke with Beat The GMAT co-founder, Eric Bahn, on Beat The GMAT's journey from a simple blog used for GMAT prep to the world's largest social network for MBA applicants. Here's what they discussed.

Tell us a bit about Beat The GMAT, how it came to be, and what your goals for the company were when you first launched?

Beat The GMAT is the world’s largest social network for MBA applicants. We serve over 2.5 million people each year as they research and actively participate in the MBA admissions process. Beat The GMAT has many resources, but we’re most known for our expert-written articles, GMAT discussion forums, and MBA Watch (a social media platform for current applicants).

I started Beat The GMAT in 2005 from my dorm room at Stanford—initially as a simple GMAT study blog. My goal was to create a free GMAT study plan that people could follow day to day, to self-study and succeed on this business school entrance test.

My blog quickly gained a following and a community began to form. Over the last seven years, Beat The GMAT has gone through many iterations into eventually becoming the definitive community portal on the web to help MBA applicants through the MBA admissions process, from start to finish.

On October 9, 2012 Beat The GMAT was acquired by Hobsons, a leading education solutions company. At the time of our acquisition, Beat The GMAT never received any outside funding and had enjoyed a very profitable business model.

When did you add gamification to your community and how did it help your program?

The Beat The GMAT team began to experiment with gamification in late 2010. In our first experiment, we built our own technology to reward badges to users for engaging in our content, as well as offering simple games involving points/leveling up as visitors discovered new content and took “pop quizzes” on our site.

At the time, our team was interested in discovering new ways to help our users feel more deeply engaged in the GMAT/MBA prep experience, and ultimately feel more motivated to study.

Our early gamification experiments were a dramatic success. Time on site sky-rocketed, and not only that, our site went viral: we received over 22,000 Facebook likes the first 3 weeks of launching our gamification features. These results were a wake-up call to our team that we should invest more in gamifying the entire learning experience at Beat The GMAT.

Why did you decide to look for a gamification technology to add to your community? Why did you choose Badgeville?

At first our team thought that we could build the gamification technology ourselves on Beat The GMAT. But we quickly concluded that while we were great at building education products, we had a lot to learn about building gamification tools.

Fortunately, before we invested too much down the gamification path ourselves, my business partner David Park happened to watch a TechCrunch Disrupt presentation by Kris Duggan, founder of Badgeville. Our team was floored by Kris and his team’s vision for building gamification platform that could easily plug in to other communities and websites. Our team scoured our networks to get an introduction to Kris and Adena (current Director of Marketing), and Beat The GMAT became one of Badgeville’s first clients.

How has Badgeville helped you grow your company?

Had we gone down the path of trying to build our own gamification tools, our development pipeline and subsequent product releases would have stagnated. So much time and money would have been needed within our team to research/build our own gamification tools.

Instead, we are fortunate to have found a partner who is 100% focused on building awesome gamification technology, allowing Beat The GMAT’s team to be 100% focused on building amazing educational experiences.

As a result, we’ve enjoyed tremendous growth since launching our partnership with Badgeville.

MBA Watch also has been extremely successful. What role did Social Mechanics play into this?

MBA Watch is a unique social media platform for current MBA applicants. This is the place where applicants who are actively applying to business school can safely and anonymously pool their applicant stats data together and discuss the admissions process with other applicants, MBA students, and school administrators.

We launched MBA Watch just over a year ago. In the first year for the top US business schools in our directory, we found that 15-20% of all full-time MBA applicants used MBA Watch during their admissions process. A tremendous market penetration for the first year!

The reason why MBA Watch is successful is the fact that we leverage social mechanics well. This community is only successful if people are motivated to contribute their stats into the applicant data set and discuss their MBA admissions issues openly with each other.

To achieve the social dynamic we’ve designed on MBA Watch, we rely on Badgeville’s Social Fabric platform. We use this technology to power custom leaderboards, notifications, and personalized content for each member. I think that Social Fabric has been one of the best releases by Badgeville to date.

Tell us about the acquisition.

As I mentioned before, for our entire history Beat The GMAT has been a bootstrapped business. We have been able to grow our business, products, and team solely through retained earnings.

But earlier this year, our team began to see our business evolving into other educational arenas with very different types of products in the future. We concluded that in order to supercharge our growth and achieve our vision, it was time to seek outside funding and/or big partnerships in education.

In the process of talking to various partners, we were introduced to Hobsons. Both teams at Hobsons and Beat The GMAT immediately saw a complementary fit.

Hobsons is the premier education solutions company on the planet. The company has been around for almost 40 years, and has done exceptionally well in pursuing an educational mission of maximizing student success and institutional effectiveness, along with building a very healthy business.

Hobsons is behind some of the most successful technologies and products in the education industry today, including: Hobsons Connect and Intelliworks (CRM solutions for universities); the Common Application for Undergraduate Admissions; Apply Yourself (the leading online application management solution for universities); and many more products.

One of the areas Hobsons is particularly strong in is educational online communities. Hobsons owns College Confidential, which is the largest online community for undergraduate admissions on the Internet. Beat The GMAT is a great complement for Hobsons as the company expands its online community footprint and also invests in new technology for user engagement.

What's next for Beat The GMAT?

It’s business as usual for Beat The GMAT—except now we have a lot more resources available to us. Our team has some exciting projects lined up to improve the user experience in our community and expand the footprint of MBA Watch.

More details to come about our plans soon.

What's next for you?

I’ve had an amazing ride as the founder and president of Beat The GMAT. I’m excited about the next chapter for our community and business. I will be joining Hobsons as a director in the Product Management group, where I will oversee Beat The GMAT along with a number of other exciting new projects.

My business partner and VP of Marketing, Beatrice Kim, is also joining Hobsons as the director of Customer Success.

And finally, my last business partner, David Park, has found an amazing role at another startup called Nextdoor, where he is now the vice president of Products. He will still be focused on building communities, but among neighborhoods instead of educational niches.

What should other entrepreneurs know about gamification?

Gamification is a lot more than just badges. Really, it’s a product management mindset of finding the right ways to motivate your visitors and customers to keep engaging with your products.

As you develop your consumer web products and websites, I highly recommend that you speak with product managers or other experts who really understand game mechanics. Doing this early in your product development can go a long ways in helping you develop products that are sticky, engaging, and insanely loved by your customers.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Badgeville has been such an amazing partner to Beat The GMAT. What makes Badgeville so incredible is not just its fantastic products and technology—it’s also the amazing team.

Badgeville offers the best customer service and support of any vendor I’ve worked with. The team is incredibly passionate about gamification, and they work very hard to help their clients succeed.

Speaking on behalf of Beat The GMAT, I want to thank you guys at Badgeville for being a big part of our journey! Thanks for letting my team work out of your office during our critical launches, working late into the night to address bugs we’ve discovered, and celebrating our wins with sushi. I look forward to continuing our partnership for many more years!