NMT.academy

The idea came from our history teacher. He asked us to build a small platform to help his students prepare for the NMT. For about a year it was a simple LMS.

Then we decided we wanted to earn more from it and rebuilt it as an adaptive platform, where everything adapts to the student, because we live in the era of customization.

Not because I didn’t prepare. I get so afraid that it almost turns into a panic attack. My nose bleeds when I write exams, and sometimes I can’t even see the sheet in front of me. I saw a psychologist about it as a teenager.

That forced me to work out early that an exam doesn’t only measure what you know. It measures how you perform inside a narrow format, under time, once. That is a separate skill, and almost nobody teaches it.

This is what pushed me to build NMT.academy: so that students walk into the exam knowing the subject and knowing how to handle the exam itself.

Now every question is picked for the student, their weak spots are found, and that carries into the study materials they go through.

We took the NMT ourselves. Ihor got two 200s.

I came up with all of it: the name, the green, the mascot. The mascot was meant to be the logo and turned into a mascot. Green because it fits and is calm enough to study with.

I also manage our B2B leads and our first clients. My co-founder Ihor builds the platform and the algorithm.

We decided not to go to the B2C market. We bring in teachers, and they stay with us for a long time, because we raise their students’ results a lot. That’s where our first paying students came from.

Teachers have signed on and are starting to build their own courses on our platform. Three tutors want to join. Exam-prep centres are next.

The hard part was arguments inside the team. That’s it.

I’d build the adaptive platform from day one, and go B2B from day one. People need a lot of customization to get high results today.

Next: foreign markets, like the SAT, or getting inside a large number of private schools.