Interview with Rajat Sadana & Payal Tandon, Co-Founders of e-GMAT [Show Summary]

Do you need to prep for the GMAT? Dreading having to go to class? Unsure about online test prep? Our guests today are GMAT online test prep experts. We’ll be speaking with the co-founders and CEO and COO of e-GMAT, the GMAT prep company that has 1,818 reviews on GMAT Club and a 4.7/5 rating.

An inside look at e-GMAT: The innovative test prep company that MBA applicants are raving about [Show Notes]

Our guests, Rajat Sadana and Payal Tandon are the co-founders of e-GMAT, which they started in 2010. Today they are also CEO and COO respectively of e-GMAT, which has 1,818 reviews on GMAT Club as of 2/19 when I prepared for the podcast, and most are 5 stars.

Rajat and Payal, how did you get involved with GMAT test prep? [2:10]

We were very fortunate as kids to have had great educations. We both had personalized attention and were provided the opportunity to learn anything we wanted to learn. We are technologists at heart and realized that not everyone is fortunate enough to have a private tutor, so we wondered if we could provide instruction similar to a private tutor but at the price of a book. The idea was to build a learning platform to provide this private-tutor-like instruction, and we had to start with something. With the GMAT there was clear demand, and we felt we could carve a niche. Our engineering background was key. We came at it from an ed-tech perspective as opposed to a GMAT perspective.

There are lots of test prep companies out there? What does e-GMAT bring to the marketplace that it previously lacked? [6:25]

The existing learning architectures were book-based or private tutor-based. For online courses, you learn a bunch of concepts, but there is no feedback on how well you’ve learned. A few people can excel in this type of format and are able to build on the foundational work. Others continue to try and learn a few more times and many give up. What we wanted to do was provide immediate feedback when you are learning a concept. So, you learn a concept with a 10-15 minute video, and then take an embedded quiz. If you haven’t learned any aspect of the concept well enough, you get that feedback and try again.

It is very structured. With each concept there are typically three different objectives to fulfill, and the quiz will test whether you know them all. If not, you go back and learn again and take the quiz again.

An example of a concept to learn about is modifiers. The three objectives are to learn what a modifier is, whether it is serving the intent of modifying a noun or clause, and placement of the modifier. At the end of the concept you take a 5-7 question quiz.

When you work with a private tutor they are able to tell you how to attack a problem step by step. When you make a mistake, they help you explicitly on where you made the mistake. With the other learning architectures you don’t learn where in the thought process you diverged from the correct answer. The goal of e-GMAT is to provide a private tutor experience at a more effective cost.

How is e-GMAT structured in terms of its products? [13:30]

We have two kinds of products that serve slightly different needs. We have an on-demand product for someone who needs a private tutor-like set up, but has enough discipline not to need to interact with another person. They want to be on their own to have flexibility to set their ...