India’s first artifact-verified GMAT/GRE coach directory, with ratings that can’t be bought
Every GMAT coach scores 4.8 to 5.0. The ratings tell you nothing.
I trusted them anyway, and the coach I picked turned out to be a fraud.
So I built a directory where every review is backed by a real score report and a payment receipt.
Could integrity alone, with no ad spend, pull a directory off the ground?
I picked my own GMAT coach the way most aspirants do. I read the reviews, and every coach I looked at scored near-perfect: 4.8, 4.9, five stars, on Quora, on the forums, everywhere I checked. So I paid up on faith. It is a strange way to spend ₹30K to ₹1.5L, on a rating you already suspect you can’t trust. I learned the hard way: the centre I picked turned out to be a fraud, and it did almost nothing for my prep.
Once I was closer to the coaching world, the reason was obvious. Ratings are easy to curate, buy, or astroturf, and nobody verifies anything. Aspirants choose blind, and the coaches doing genuinely good work have no way to prove it. So the fix had to be structural: every review backed by proof. A score report and a payment receipt behind each one, so a rating can’t be bought or faked.
- Role
- Co-founder across product, design, and engineering
- Customer & GTM
- Aspirants and coaches · supply via founder network, demand via SEO + Reddit, ~₹0 CAC
- Timeline
- Wix v1 (2024) → full Next.js + Supabase rebuild in 3 days (Jun 2026) → live same day
- Status
- Live · post-launch iteration
- Business model
- 0-CAC lead funnel for MBA essay consulting. The platform earns no direct revenue
The problem & who had it
- MBA aspirants in India can’t trust GMAT coach ratings on GMAT Club or E-GMAT.
- Every tutor scores 4.8–5.0, and the reviews look curated, bought, or astroturfed.
- So aspirants spend ₹30K–₹1.5L on a coach blind.
- And there is no way to check that the person who left a glowing review was ever actually coached by that coach.
The call
Every directory I knew scaled the same way, on reviews nobody checks. GMAT Club and E-GMAT run on open star ratings, and the easy version of my own idea was to let coaches gather and upload their own testimonials. Both fill a page fast. Both are exactly how I got burned. Ruling them out left me building the one thing that makes a marketplace harder to start: I asked reviewers to prove it, with a real score report and a payment receipt behind every verified review.
That is friction in the worst possible place. A new directory lives or dies on review volume, and I was about to make leaving a review harder than anywhere else. The way through was to stop treating verification as a gate. Anyone can leave a review. Only the ones backed by proof earn the Verified badge and rank on the coach’s profile. Credibility became opt-in, so the trust came without strangling supply.
That same choice is the moat. A competitor can clone the layout in a weekend. What they can’t clone is a growing corpus of artifact-backed reviews, and the verification behind it. Self-declared ratings stay a commodity. Proof compounds.
What shipped
- Coach profiles and an embeddable review link.
- Artifact upload: score report + payment proof.
- Admin moderation and auto-coach-creation on approval.
- A consulting CTA at peak intent.
Structural integrity turns each coach’s profile into a 0-CAC funnel into a ₹25K–1.2L consulting sale, growth that compounds without ad spend.
Pre-traction; model based on coach-network distribution.
The outcome
- Live, with all Wix data migrated and the core integrity mechanic working.
- Coaches can share a copy-able review link anywhere.
- Validation is in progress via the first organic applications. I won’t invent traction it hasn’t earned yet.