Driving 12x Revenue Growth with Education Platform Expansion

Challenge

Bar exam students regularly hit dead ends mid-study — a concept that isn't clicking, a rule that won't stick, an essay outline that feels incomplete. Human tutors are expensive and unavailable at 11pm. General-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT can help, but they don't understand how the bar exam is tested, what the graders are looking for, or how BarMax instructors actually teach. The opportunity was to build something that could fill that gap — not a generic chatbot, but an AI study companion that thinks and explains the way a BarMax tutor does.

Approach

Working closely with the CEO and head of engineering, I helped shape the conceptual architecture of the agent system — including the decision to route queries through jurisdiction-specific vector stores rather than feeding a single agent the full course corpus. This keeps responses accurate and focused while reducing token overhead. The content structure and training approach were a collaborative effort across the three of us; implementation was handled by engineering.

My primary design and engineering contribution was the in-course integration. I designed and built a dedicated chat UI — a fixed chat bubble in the lower right of the screen, consistent with familiar patterns like Intercom, that opens into a full chat overlay without pulling students out of their study flow. The interface connects to the Solomon API endpoint I integrated into the web product. The system surfaces context-aware responses informed by the student's current lesson, so explanations stay relevant to what they're actively studying rather than requiring them to re-explain their question from scratch.

I also designed and wrote the Solomon landing page in full — including the visual design, positioning, and the differentiation argument against generic AI tools that sits at the core of how the product is sold.

Solomon by BarMax — Introduction

Solomon Landing Page

Solomon vs. Generic AI Tools

Solomon Chat UI

Solomon Chat Widget — In Course

Impact

• Beta launch at $99 for 2 weeks converted approximately 15% of eligible students — with resoundingly positive feedback that directly informed product improvements before general release
• Launched as a standalone subscription product with two usage tiers and monthly and yearly billing, creating a new recurring revenue line independent of course purchases
• Included as a free trial benefit and bundled with full course purchases, strengthening the core product's value proposition and supporting conversion

Challenge

When I joined TestMax, the existing mobile app had a heavily skeuomorphic design. The visual style, inspired by early mobile trends, relied on excessive textures and shadows, making it feel cluttered and outdated. More importantly, the navigation and content structure were unintuitive, creating friction in the learning experience as evidenced by low uptake as well as feedback from our users.

While the mobile app provided a convenient way for students to take their prep with them on-the-go some lesson modalities lent themselves better for larger screens that only a web platform could provide. With research also supporting this idea a push to offer our courses on web was needed. Additionally, selling our courses on iOS meant that we were giving 30% of all sales to Apple which is not sustainable from a margin perspective.

Approach

I began modernizing the design of the mobile platform by shifting to a flat, streamlined aesthetic that prioritized clarity and ease of use. Beyond visual updates, I restructured the information hierarchy to ensure students could navigate lessons, practice exams, and study plans effortlessly. Additionally, I expanded the platform's architecture to accommodate multiple exam types, which enabled the introduction of the LSAT prep course.

After the successful launch of new iOS experience we began our expansion to both Android and web. During this phase I worked directly with the in-house dev team to ensure that experience parity was maintained across platforms while any platform specific UX requirements were respected.

Impact

• Web sales grew to $13M within 5 years of launch
• Bar course conversion rate reached 15.3% — over 3× the industry average
• LSAT course scaled to 75,000 users with conversion rising from 1.5% to 7.5%
• Bar course saw 75% user growth in year one following the mobile redesign
• App Store ratings improved meaningfully following the redesign, reflecting higher user satisfaction

Interface/Navigation Updates

Course Home & Paywall

Module Assignment List

Diagnostic Review / Question Explanations

Performance Analytics

Challenge

After achieving proof of concept for private tutoring with MVP tests we sought to fully integrate a new tutoring service into our existing course product. The goal was to design an intuitive portal that seamlessly connected students with our vetted tutors while managing scheduling, payments, and communication in a frictionless way. We also wanted to upsell existing students who stood to benefit from private tutoring to that new offering.

Approach

This was one of the most complex UX challenges I tackled at TestMax, as it required designing distinct interfaces and experiences for students, tutors, and administrators in order to manage the tutoring coordination process. Key design decisions included:

• A simple, familiar scheduling interface inspired by best practices from tools like Calendly.
• Integrated messaging to facilitate direct communication between students and tutors.
• An administrator dashboard for TestMax staff to oversee and manage sessions efficiently.
• Seamless integration with the main TestMax learning experience to keep everything within a single ecosystem.

Impact

• Generated $2.5M in revenue in its first year, becoming one of TestMax's most profitable verticals
• High adoption rates validated the low-friction scheduling and onboarding experience
• Improved student outcomes through personalized support, strengthening retention across the platform

Student Tutoring Dashboard

Tutoring Scheduling Form

Challenge

While TestMax initially focused on self-paced learning, we recognized a growing trend of online live class instruction that was amplified during the Covid pandemic. We sought to add this service not only to meet that demand but also to help showcase our course and tutoring talent as a way to generate leads and increase revenue.

The challenge was to design a live class system that would seamlessly integrate into the existing platform while providing a compelling experience for both live attendees and those watching recorded sessions later.

Approach

To ensure students could easily engage with live instruction, I focused on:

• Designing a clear, intuitive schedule display that highlighted upcoming live sessions.
• Implementing an easy-to-access way to join live sessions to minimize barriers to participation.
• Creating a well-organized archive of past sessions, enhanced with robust filtering and categorization to ensure students could quickly find relevant content.

Impact

• Increased LTV and average order per user by nearly 30% by driving students toward private tutoring
• Free live sessions became an effective top-of-funnel lead generation tool, converting prospective students at meaningful rates
• Added a competitive moat by offering live instruction alongside self-paced learning — a combination no competitor matched at the time

Live Class Dashboard

Class Session

Challenge

The original message board was a simple discussion tool tied to specific content like video lessons and practice questions. While functional, it lacked the features that foster organic community interaction — open discussion threads, upvoting, instructor highlights — and it had no SEO value, since discussions were siloed within the app and invisible to search engines.

Approach

I led the full redesign and built the system end-to-end in Rails — from schema design through deployment. The core technical challenge was that TestMax serves multiple distinct user populations (LSAT students, Bar students) each scoped to their own course and jurisdiction data across separate databases. The message board needed to connect posts, threads, and user identities across those databases through a set of non-trivial cross-database queries, while ensuring students in one course couldn't access or surface content meant for another.

Beyond the architecture, I redesigned the discussion experience itself: introducing a new general discussion space alongside the existing course-specific boards, adding modern engagement features like upvoting and pinned threads, and structuring public-facing URLs to make every thread indexable by search engines.

Impact

• The new board generated 10× more indexed thread pages and 9.4× more organic sessions than the old board accumulated over its entire lifetime
• 45,106 new visitors acquired through organic search in the new board's first ~5 months
• New board threads now account for 90%+ of all community organic traffic

Community Message Board Index

Message Thread

This project represents the fullest expression of what I do: joining a product early, owning the design end-to-end, and building something that compounds over time. Starting from a single outdated iOS app, the decisions made over a decade — platform expansion, new verticals, community, conversion optimization — added up to 12× revenue growth and category leadership.