2400 Expert, an SAT and ACT preparation company, entered the Shark Tank in Season 7. They teach 6-week SAT prep courses in 20 cities and also offer online classes.
We interviewed founder Shaan Patel, who as a high schooler, took it upon himself to increase his SAT score, and wound up with a perfect one! The young entrepreneur told us about how he started, what makes his service unique and his future plans. Here is what else he told us about..
How He Started
The idea for my company actually came out of failure. I never planned to start an SAT preparation company. After I raised my score from average to perfect in high school, I always wanted to write an SAT prep book to help other students prepare for the SAT the way that I did in high school. So I put together a book proposal and pitched it to over 100 literary agents and publishers. However, every single one rejected my book proposal citing that the SAT prep market is too competitive or that I didn’t have a platform to write such a book. That’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands. Instead of wasting all of the material I had written, I though I could teach an SAT prep class the summer before I went to medical school in my hometown of Las Vegas. The average SAT score improvement in the first class that I taught was 376 points (or the equivalent of jumping from the 50th to the 90th percentile). While it was extremely difficult to get enough students to enroll in the first class, I had parents calling my phone non-stop asking for more classes. But I was going to medical school in California at USC. I simply couldn’t teach more classes. So I trained qualified instructors to teach my material, and 2400 Expert was officially in business.
How He Practiced to Get a Perfect Score
Focused preparation and a lot of trial and error. For example, I tried all kinds of different methods to answer SAT reading questions. Do you read the passage first? Do you read the questions first? Do you skip the passage altogether, and only read the lines cited? I tried everything. Finally, I found that a ‘chunk approach’ worked best for me. This means reading the passage in small chunks, or pieces, at a time. For example, if a the first line-cited question cited line 10 of the passage, then I read from line one down to line 10, then answered that question. If the next line-cited question cited line 20 of the passage, then I read from line 10 down to line 20, then answered that question. Reading the passage in chunks helps students avoid information overload, which often happens when you try to read an entire passage on a standardized test at once, and keeps them goal-oriented. This is the reading method that we teach students at 2400 Expert. Most other test-prep companies don’t give students a specific approach to read passages.
How His Approach Is Different From Others Out There
I’m just like most students. Most test-prep curriculum writers are English and Math PhDs or tutors that are naturally good at standardized testing. Because I had so many flaws in my own testing approaches, I show students how to correct their own mistakes. I’ve spent thousands of hours writing SAT prep curriculum while deeply thinking about how my mind used to approach problems incorrectly, and how to fix those mistakes. I then try to deliver my material as simple-to-use strategies for students. For example, one strategy we teach is that the word ‘being’ is almost always incorrect on the SAT Writing grammar multiple-choice portion of the exam. Simple strategy? Yes. Effective strategy? Yes.
His Appearance on ‘Shark Tank’
I started watching Shark Tank in early 2015 pretty religiously. My friends in business school at the Yale School of Management saw me watching it so much that they suggested that I should go on the show. It was kind of a “haha” thing at the time. But in April of 2015, I saw that Shark Tank was having an open call audition in New York City. So I decided to take the two-hour train from New Haven to New York to go to the audition. I stood in line for nine hours with 500 other entrepreneurs for a chance to give an ABC casting producer a one-minute pitch. Although the odds were stacked against me, I can now look back and say that it was the best decision of my life!
Plans for the Future
In the ideal world, I would like to choose a flexible specialty that allows me to practice as a physician three times a week and work on my business the rest of the time. Of course, I know that when a business is really picking up steam and growing fast, I may not have that luxury. If this is the case, I would have to reconsider my dream world. Until then, I believe I have the unique opportunity to do something impactful both as an entrepreneur and as a physician, and I don’t plan to squander that.