Mark Smith
Achievable exam preparation guides learners through a personalized learning experience, reinforcing what they’ve learned as they study and giving people certainty that they’re ready to ace their exam.
The platform uses advanced learning science methodologies and an advanced personalization engine to automatically optimize the learning experience for optimal results.
Achievable currently offers a GRE exam course, FINRA exam courses, ACT exam course, USMLE Step 1 exam course, and AMC exam courses. Achievable is most prominent in the finance industry, where employees need to pass FINRA licensing exams like the FINRA SIE exam in order to get jobs and expand the scope of their role.
Tell us about yourself?
I am an entrepreneur and marketing professional with over 12 years of experience in startups, mobile gaming, and education. I’ve brought dozens of products and services to market that generated hundreds of millions per year in revenue at firms like Electronic Arts and Anaplan.
I’m now the co-founder and CEO of Achievable. I got into marketing because I found myself enjoying watching the ads on TV as a kid, and I am inspired by connecting customers with products that they love and that help them.
I see marketing as the messenger, and communication between a brand / company and its audience and customers. Communication is incredibly important, especially today, and I think marketing is just as important as a function of the business.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Buy all the bitcoin you can and sell it once it hits $60k 🙂 But in all seriousness, I think the best advice I could give myself would be to put more time and effort into trying new things on the marketing front.
In the last 7 months, Achievable has tried a ton of new channels and methods for our business, and in many cases I am asking myself “why didn’t I try this sooner?” It’s easy to get wrapped up in what you’re already doing, but you should always make time for new experiments.
What problem does your business solve?
Millions of people take high stakes, opportunity-gating exams this year. They can range from general exams for college admissions like the ACT, to specified industry licensing exams like the FINRA Series 7.
All of these exams are a barrier between the learner and a goal that they have, whether it’s getting into a better college or increasing their scope in their finance role.
The test preparation materials for these exams did not live up to this reality – learners got a generalized, outdated experience that did not have their goals in mind.
Achievable’s platform is different from the ground up. Everything we’ve built has been deliberately designed to help the user reach their goal.
Our platform guides people through a personalized learning experience, reinforces what they’ve learned through spaced repetition, and gives them certainty that they’re ready to pass their exam.
Achievable reinforces what they know and trains them on what they don’t – until they’re ready to hit their goal.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Through his work in education technology, my cofounder Justin saw the power of adaptive learning first hand, specifically a memory-based method called spaced rehearsal.
He saw how this method, integrated properly into a learning experience, dramatically improved outcomes for students. Spaced rehearsal is popular in the language learning community and used ad hoc in the classroom, but has not been widely applied to test preparation.
He saw the opportunity to build a vertically integrated solution that gave total control over the learning experience for maximum benefit to the student. That’s why Justin started Achievable and brought that vision to life.
What is your magic sauce?
Our magic sauce is that we have vertically integrated the entire prep course – textbook, chapter quizzes, practice exams, scheduling algorithm, and our adaptive learning algorithm – into a single, guided user experience.
From the user’s point of view, everything is simple: they show up, study what we put in front of them, and stick to the study schedule.
But behind the scenes, Achievable is using AI and machine learning to adapt the course material and schedule to best match their individual needs. No other exam prep platform does anything close to this.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our vision is to become the #1 way that learners prepare for the most important exams of their lives.
In order to achieve this, we will need to expand our exam catalog to cover all major exams, improve our platform to become even more effective, and get the word out about us through marketing and word-of-mouth referrals.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
The biggest challenge that we have faced so far took place in 2018, when a major change to the test that we were focused on ended all of our B2B deals and cut our revenue to zero.
We were crestfallen, but also recognized that the change presented a new opportunity if we pivoted our focus to B2C individual customers.
We worked tirelessly to update the platform and value proposition for six months, and relaunched with our new B2C-focused course in early 2019.
Since then, we’ve been off to the races, as our new approach has been a huge hit with customers, and enabled us to create courses for 8 other exams in multiple verticals.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Readers, if you are looking for test prep materials for the GRE, USMLE Step 1, ACT, AMC, or FINRA exams, we’d love to have you try our courses.
Every Achievable course guides you through a personalized learning experience, reinforcing what you’ve learned and giving you certainty that you’re ready to pass your exam.
Achievable courses are all you need to succeed, and include an easy-to-understand online textbook, chapter quiz questions, and plenty of full-length practice exams.
Visit https://achievable.me to learn more and see if we are right for you.
