the summer fog burns bright in the san francisco bay. overcast, cloudy skies are no match for the light that shines inside of magoosh. we’ve been radiating stoke all summer long!

 

 

after two months, not much has changed here at magoosh, except for maybe even more stoked students than before! as you can see in these responses, our students have maintained a steady level of super high stoke. 😀

 

stoke — by the numbers

we’ve been busy. we are seeing more and more questions each month, and we are even expecting it to peak in october. (as i write this in mid-august we are already at 3,500 questions.)

june numbers

july numbers

 

even more exciting than the new tickets and solved ticket numbers, we passed a milestone recently! we’ve answered over 50,000 student questions. i couldn’t be more excited about this — and neither could the celebrities that hang around the office. 😀 (i think they love stoke as much as they love lamp.)

 

 

magoosh turned 5 this year, so it seems fitting that we cross the 50,000 mark this year.

 

student stoke

this was mind-numbingly hard to do this time. usually, i have a month of student happiness and stoke to choose from. i have to cull all the happiness down to smaller and smaller groups until there is a shortlist of stoke to share, which is hard enough already. but this time i had two months of stoke, which meant i had to make an even shorter shortlist for this post.

 

many, many great euphorions — that’s a unit of euphoria if you’re wondering — were left out this time, but hopefully that means we have a happiness report with the most concentrated levels of stoke ever seen! 😀

 

couldn’t have done it without you

in going through all this happiness, i was struck by a common theme: many students said that they wouldn’t have been able to do so well on the test without magoosh.

 

it’s tempting to revel in such praise, but i always like to remember that we are only a small part of our students’ preparation. the students are the ones who puts in hours of preparation. so i always thank them for their kind words, but remind them that they did the hard stuff. we merely lent a hand along the way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

strong product + smart algorithms = stoke + score improvement

over the summer we released a free app for students who are looking for new ways to study vocabulary. the vocabulary builder has turned into quite an addictive app for students.

 

 

 

 

magoosh experts: purveyors of knowledge and stoke

one thing is clear after looking over two months of questions and answers. we have some smart people working at magoosh. and not only smart, but also fun, friendly, and awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

it’s not customer service—it’s student stoke

magoosh is successful for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is the sympathy and care that all magooshers put into listening and responding to students. we don’t really think about what we do as customer service, even though that’s what it would be traditionally called. we see it as helping students reach their goals. for that reason, we care more and develop closer connections with our students.

 

this first message is a perfect example: a student did really well on the test, and she wanted to tell amy about it because she knew amy cared and was interested in her success. we don’t do customer service—we do student help! 😀

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

having a blast studying

let’s face it — studying for a standardized test is not fun. the test itself is not very fun, setting time aside to study is not fun, and paying for study materials is not fun either. magooshers know what students are dealing with so we work hard to make it fun. the more fun that we can have answering questions and making lesson videos, the more success students will have when they study.

 

one thing i learned as a teacher is that students naturally learn if they are having fun. magooshers know this, and we want our students to know this too.

 

 

 

 

 

staying stoked

most the time, i am talking about students and making them stoked. but often, we are stoked by our students. most of the time i find myself smiling when i interact with our students.

 

when reading about customer service around the web, you can’t help but wonder if there is ever a good, dare i say, great interaction with a customer. at magoosh, we are blessed to have these every hour. a lot of my time is spent hearing from happy, stoked students. it’s also not uncommon to hear magooshers giggling in the office as they work through questions.

 

i’d like to leave you with one of these gems, when we open up a student question and find this:

 

 

be excellent to the universe, good people! keep the happiness high and the stoke level at eleven.