Author: Don Reynolds
The course became one of the top five TREC-ranked providers in Texas, competing with accredited colleges and generating over $2 million in ARR from this single product. The custom proctoring system not only gave the Texas course a competitive edge but was later deployed across other pre-license programs, delivering a 400% ROI and helping us expand into new markets, including insurance pre-licensing.
Challenge
During my time with At Your Pace Online, we identified real estate pre-licensing as our most profitable vertical. Texas represented one of the largest potential markets but also one of the toughest. The Texas Real Estate Commission (TREC) requires 180 hours of training, the equivalent of nearly two million words, and ranks providers publicly based on how well their students perform on the state exam. To succeed, we needed a course large enough to meet the requirements, rigorous enough to produce high exam scores, and attractive enough to draw students away from established competitors despite having no initial ranking.
Approach
We faced three major hurdles: building the course at scale, ensuring its quality, and earning a foothold in the market.
Building at scale
The state’s word-count requirement meant this course would be more than three times the length of War and Peace. Devoting the entire writing staff to it would have stalled production on other profitable courses, so I worked with the management team to determine exactly how many writers we could allocate and how to hit milestones without sacrificing the rest of the business. We reused and adapted high-quality content from other courses where possible, supplemented it with new material, and designed activities that met time requirements efficiently. This approach allowed us to launch in under two years while continuing to grow overall output and revenue.
Ensuring quality
We began with a literature review of adult education research, identifying proven techniques to improve learning retention and exam performance. We then tested these methods in our existing courses, measuring results before applying them to the Texas curriculum. I developed specific quality standards based on Bloom’s Taxonomy levels and implemented both manual and automated review systems to enforce them throughout the project. Writers received targeted training to meet these standards, and because we were enhancing existing courses during the process, our quality improvements had an immediate ripple effect across the catalog.
Gaining market traction
Launching without a TREC ranking meant we had to win students’ trust quickly. Our first move was to offer the course at a steep introductory discount, nearly five times cheaper than competitors, after calculating how low we could price it while maintaining profitability. The second came when TREC changed its rules to allow online proctoring for the seven mid-course exams. Within months, I oversaw the design and development of a custom online proctoring system, making us one of the first in the market to offer this far more convenient option at a lower cost than competitors.
Impact
The course became one of the top five TREC-ranked providers in Texas, competing with accredited colleges and generating over $2 million in ARR from this single product. The custom proctoring system not only gave the Texas course a competitive edge but was later deployed across other pre-license programs, delivering a 400% ROI and helping us expand into new markets, including insurance pre-licensing.
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