Zistre - Scaling a Global Test-Prep Platform

Overview

What Zistre is, and what I did here

Zistre is a pre-employment test-prep platform that helps candidates and working professionals prepare for cognitive and behavioral assessments - CCAT, Wonderlic, Predictive Index, Watson Glaser, SHL, and personality tests - along with GRE and TOEFL prep. Candidates rely on it to clear assessments used for promotions and as live interview rounds. To date it has served 100K+ candidates across 60+ countries.

As co-founder and Product Head, I set product strategy and owned the growth and monetization roadmap end to end - under real startup constraints, with a lean team - collaborating directly with curriculum developers, engineering, and candidates.

Industry

EdTech / Test Prep

Model

Global D2C courses + tests

Assessments

CCAT, Wonderlic, PI, Watson Glaser, SHL (GRE/TOEFL via subdomain)

Stack touchpoints

Stripe, Razorpay, AI chat

Focus

Conversion & monetization

The Problem

Strong global demand. A funnel that leaked revenue.

The question that defined my work: how do we convert healthy global demand into revenue with a small team? Traffic was strong and evenly spread, but the defaults leaked money - a long one-month course few wanted, a single global price, a multi-step checkout, and a free-trial offer that quietly lost buyers.

I treated the funnel as the product and made three deliberate bets, sequencing them by where we were losing the most revenue first.

My Role

How I operated

I operated as both owner and builder: as co-founder I chose which bets were worth making; as Product Head I instrumented each stage of the funnel, prioritized by highest leakage, and shipped with a lean engineering team. Every change was a measured bet, not a guess - I read behavior, acted, and held each decision to the data.

• Product strategy & expansion
• Multi-market pricing & localization
• Payments architecture
• Experimentation & A/B Testing
• Upsell & monetization
• Cross-functional delivery (curriculum, engineering)

Bet 01 - Packaging & Product-Market Fit

The right product

Our best-converting product came from rejecting our first instinct. We launched with a comprehensive one-month course, but uptake was weak. The insight that reshaped the business: candidates sit these assessments on short notice, for a promotion or a live interview round, so they need to be ready in days, not weeks. I rebuilt the offer around that urgency.

• Made a crash prep course the flagship product, matched to how candidates actually buy → conversion +20%, revenue +20%
• Added 1:1 mentorship as a paid upsell once candidates began asking for personalized help → higher-margin revenue, +30% AOV

Bet 02 - Global Monetization

Priced for every market

A single global pricing model was limiting conversion across international markets. While traffic was evenly split between developed and emerging regions, customers in price-sensitive markets were significantly less likely to convert. I led a monetization initiative focused on localizing pricing, currencies, and payment infrastructure to better align with regional purchasing power and buying behavior, unlocking growth across key international markets.

• Introduced market-based pricing across developed and emerging regions, tailoring price points to local purchasing power and increasing conversion rates by 20% in high-growth markets including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and parts of Africa.
• Launched localized currency pricing across major geographies (GBP, EUR, SGD, AUD, INR, and USD), reducing checkout friction and improving price transparency, resulting in a 10% lift in conversion.
• Re-architected the global payments stack by optimizing providers based on regional performance and transaction economics, implementing a hybrid Stripe-Razorpay model that improved payment authorization rates and increased payment success by 20 percentage points.
• Launched an abandoned-payment recovery program that identified users who exited during checkout and re-engaged them through automated, incentive-based campaigns, recovering ~15% of payment drop-offs and improving overall revenue conversion.

Bet 03 - Conversion

A frictionless path to purchase

Every step between purchase intent and conversion represented potential revenue leakage. I approached the checkout funnel as a product in itself, using behavioral analytics, experimentation, and customer research to identify and eliminate friction points across the buying journey. By simplifying the purchase flow, reducing decision paralysis, and increasing buyer confidence, we significantly improved conversion rates and overall funnel efficiency.

• Simplified the checkout experience by consolidating a multi-step purchase flow into a single-page checkout and eliminating unnecessary navigation, reducing checkout abandonment by approximately 20%.
• Removed acquisition and onboarding friction by replacing mandatory pre-purchase account creation with automated account provisioning at checkout, while also validating through experimentation that removing free test offerings reduced decision deferral and increased overall conversion by ~10%.
• Increased purchase confidence through a combination of a 30-day money-back guarantee and real-time pre-purchase support, including an AI-powered assistant and optional expert consultation, driving a combined ~13% increase in purchase intent and conversion.

Product Thinking

Key decisions & tradeoffs