Nathan Fox of LSAT Demon: How Pivoting to Virtual Learning and Leveraging Smart Algorithms Can Scale Niche Education

There are millions of apps out there. Many are very successful, but most are not. What are the steps taken by successful app makers that distinguish them from unsuccessful ones? In addition, many people have ideas for an app but don’t know where to begin. What are the steps you need to take to create a successful app? As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nathan Fox, the Co-Founder of LSAT Demon.

Nathan Fox scored 179 out of 180 on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and co-founded LSAT Demon with Ben Olson. He graduated from UC Law San Francisco in 2011. He is the author of Cheating the LSAT and five other highly-reviewed LSAT books. He feels extremely fortunate to teach LSAT for a living — it never feels like work.

Thank you so much for joining us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

I’m from a small town in California’s Central Valley. It’s only a two-hour drive from San Francisco, but it feels like it’s 50 years back in time. I’m the first person in my family to get a four-year college degree (UC Davis, B.S. Managerial Economics 1998).

My grandparents were forklift drivers, factory workers, truckers, and farmers. They all worked so hard! My dad worked in sales, then warehousing. My mom became a registered nurse when I was in high school. I worked just enough Saturdays in my grandparents’ small almond orchard to know that I wanted to use my brain, not my back, to earn a living. I didn’t have amazing high school grades, and I went to a tiny high school with no real pre-college advising. Fortunately, I did well on the SAT, which helped schools see my promise.

Most of us have been around a lot longer than apps have. What were your hobbies and interests in your youth before anyone knew what an ‘app’ was?

I never used the Internet until my freshman year of college — 14.4K dial-up! — and didn’t have my first cellphone until right after college.

Still, I feel like a digital native because of video games. I grew up in the heyday of video arcades in the mall. I also grew up with prehistoric video game systems like the original Atari console. I’d sleep over at a buddy’s house and play his original Nintendo all night. My family had a Commodore 64 personal computer, which was used only by me and exclusively for a planet-settling game called M.U.L.E. and One on One featuring Dr. J vs. Larry Bird.

I also loved baseball. I never played higher than Little League, but I had a serious baseball card collection. I spent endless hours organizing hundreds of cards by team, then alphabetically, then in numerical order. I checked their prices every month in Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. I thought I was going to get rich!

It has been said that our mistakes are our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or takeaways you learned from that?

Not only are mistakes our greatest teachers, it can be great when your teacher makes mistakes. At least that’s what I tell myself when I goof in front of a class.

In my years of teaching Zoom classes within the LSAT Demon app, I’ve made every imaginable mistake of misreading, misunderstanding, and bad logic. Over time, I’ve made all the same errors my students do! I try my best to acknowledge these mistakes and use them as teaching moments.

Being an entrepreneur is about overcoming small annoyances. My co-founder Ben Olson and I started our first podcast, Thinking LSAT, in June of 2014. Since then, we’ve done an episode, more or less, every week. We now laugh about the day that we recorded an entire 2-hour episode only to discover that the recording had glitched somehow. We re-recorded the episode the next day, only to have another glitch kill that recording, too. Just goes to show that nothing is ever perfect and mistakes are inevitable. Entrepreneurship, in a nutshell, is that we showed up on the third day and re-recorded yet again — and successfully this time. Stuff like this happens all the time. When it does, we try to take strength from knowing that some fraction of our competitors will drop out at every small setback while we keep going.

I tend to meet two types of app developers: people who are passionate about app development and technology and people who started an app because they saw it as a means to solve a problem. Which camp would you put yourself in, and how did you arrive there?

As the world stopped, COVID forced us entirely online. We had been working on a self-study platform students could use online, but we were both still teaching live classes in person. When COVID shut us down, it forced us to move our live students into a virtual environment, which we then opened up to the world. Much to our surprise, the uptake online dwarfed our in-person businesses.

From that point forward, we have poured 100% of our attention into our websites and our mobile applications. I focus more on the live teaching side — hosting classes online. Integrating technology like chat, resource links, asynchronous classes, and emails have made instruction vastly more efficient. Ben’s more passionate about the technology side. He manages the development teams and is more excited, I think, about technology for technology’s sake. But we are both pragmatic and know that our interests are aligned with those of our students. We implement features that help future law students achieve their goals. The results, in terms of score improvements and scholarships, have more than justified our efforts.

Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint — though I suppose sometimes it’s both at the same time. What kept you motivated to develop your first minimum viable product, and how have you kept your momentum since then?

I’m motivated by the idea that my and Ben’s LSAT teaching and the LSAT Demon app are truly the best preparation available to any LSAT student. Unlike many of our competitors, we will never try to sell anyone the dream. We love talking people out of law school when it’s not right for them, and we educate students about the extraordinarily high costs of legal education, the risks of debt, and the wide availability of discounts from the schools. My job is to save students $150,000 or more on law school. It is pretty easy to get up and believe in that mission every day.

Managing LSAT Demon rarely feels like “work” to me. We have an amazing staff built almost entirely of former students. We have a terrific product that helps students a ton, and we have received mountains of thank-you emails from happy students over the years. People tell us how much we have changed their lives! It is humbling to hear that we have had a positive impact on so many individuals, even in the fraught area of debt-financed legal education.

Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Can you tell us a bit about your app? How does it help people? What do you think makes it stand out? What are you most proud of?

The LSAT Demon app helps people achieve their full potential on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). The app is fast and the design is slick. It is cheaper than expensive in-person prep classes or wildly overpriced one-on-one tutoring, and the content is better, too.

Ben somehow got the guy who helped design Spotify’s “Year in Music” website, Stefan Dufgran, to create LSAT Demon. We built an algorithm that guides students to just-right challenges in their areas of need. They do not need to overthink what to do when they sit down to study — just hit “drill” and the Demon serves you a question that you should work on. Whenever you struggle, our videos and written explanations are right there in the app.

Our content is better for several reasons. Ben and I have been teaching LSAT professionally for about 30 years combined. I wrote six books about the LSAT. Through the Thinking LSAT Podcast, our classes, and the Demon, we have distilled our thinking about the test into the simplest possible terms.

Our main message is “The LSAT Is Easy.” That is the exact opposite of what other prep companies say. We believe that our students can, and will, understand what the questions are asking them. We understand that there is only one right answer for each question and four wrong ones. We believe that our students, once they are in the habit of reading carefully enough, will be able to solve each question on their own. The student journey goes from “Nathan, you make this test look easy” to “Wait, this test is easy” over their weeks or months with us.

Last thing, and it was kind of a surprise to us: The “Ask” button we built into the Demon is a secret killer feature. Our students can access a team of tutors who offer fast support whenever students have questions. We built this as an afterthought, but it’s turned out to be immensely helpful to our students and the dialogues we have opened up have even led to us hiring some of our best staff.

Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?

We cannot share paid subscriber numbers, but we recently celebrated our 50,000th Free account. We are very proud of our free offerings. We built them to provide actual help, not just an attractive sales funnel. We have had many students email us to say that they achieved a great LSAT score using our podcasts and our free account alone. I do not think that means we are giving away too much — I am glad that our free resources are out there for serious students to take advantage of.

Three main steps? Well,

1 . Our Thinking LSAT and LSAT Demon Daily podcasts remain our biggest source of new students. The audiences are not enormous, but listeners and viewers are passionate about our message and engaged in our conversations. We get new subscribers all the time who say “Wow, it’s so great to meet you in person, after listening to you for all these months!”

It is a virtuous cycle because students who have already started to align with our approach via the podcast or YouTube are predisposed to understand and benefit from what we are talking about in class.

2 . Reviews are instrumental. I started my “little” LSAT business by building a great reputation on Yelp. When I was starting out, their review filter was so stringent that about half of my reviews would get flagged for whatever reason — but it did not matter, because I had dozens of rave reviews. It was a bit annoying because I would sometimes have to tell students “Wow, I really appreciate you writing me that review, and I’m sorry that Yelp thought it was fake — but it means a lot to me anyway.”

Over time, LSAT Demon has built up a great reputation on Google, TrustPilot, and elsewhere. Every satisfied student is an opportunity to elicit a review. When they say “Hey, I improved my score by 30 points and got a scholarship,” we say “Thanks — and would you mind putting that into a public-facing review somewhere, to help us spread the word?”

We got shadowbanned on r/LSAT because the moderator thought our reviews looked fake. But I promise you, they are 100% real.

3 . I think honesty and authenticity matter a lot. As a teacher, I have always believed I have to tell the full truth to my students at all times. Otherwise, why would they believe me? This approach allows students who are truly aligned with your mission and your thinking to join forces with you. Ben and I have open, honest, and public conversations every week on our podcasts. Current and future students listen in. We are seeking the truth in every episode — we debate new ideas, we convince each other to change our minds, and we ask our audience to help us understand. It is a powerful thing to believe that our students’ interests are aligned with our own.

For example: LSAT Demon has an option to buy one-on-one private tutoring. But we also try to talk people out of it. We have a blog post titled “Why You Don’t Need Private Tutoring,” and we have repeatedly talked about students wasting money on private tutors on our shows. We would never try to sell someone a package of tutoring hours when they have not first tried at least our free account. For the cost of one hour with a master tutor, you can get a month of unlimited classes and self-study with Demon Live!

I never shut up about how students should start with something cheaper before defaulting to one-on-one. From that position of honesty, we can, in good conscience, provide one-on-one tutoring to students who understand its costs and believe that it is the best choice for them. We talk ourselves out of a ton of business this way, but it results in better-aligned and happier customers.

What is your monetization model? How do you monetize your community of users? Have you considered other monetization options? Why did you not use those?

In the in-person LSAT days, Ben and I each charged fixed prices for our fixed-length classes. But when we started the Demon, we used subscription pricing from the start. I honestly have no idea why we chose those different paths. But it works for us, and our customers are happy!

Can you tell our readers about the most unconventional tactic you’ve used to test, market, or gain feedback on a product? What did you try, what was unique about it, and what was the outcome?

I am not sure how unconventional it is, but we recently learned about the potential for using wait lists to gauge interest in new products. We are working on a new standalone law school admissions course, for example. When we asked people whether they were interested, they said yes. So we said okay, join the waitlist here and while you are at it, answer a few questions about what you are looking for. This wealth of knowledge about customer needs will help us deliver the right product. It is so obvious, in retrospect — wait lists are a great idea hiding in plain sight.

More unconventionally, when I was starting my business in San Francisco, I hand-wrote postcards to every lawyer in town. I affixed them with a postcard stamp and mailed them in batches from the mailbox outside of my law school. I was a terrible law student, but I used my time in class to write these postcards. My theory was that somebody in the mailroom (like Kim Wexler and Jimmy McGill) would spot the postcards and, in their effort to decode my chicken scratch, learn about my classes.

I think I got two or three of them back out of about 500 sent. Success! I believe that those are two or three students I would not have had otherwise, who might now be two or three satisfied former students referring to my LSAT services throughout their long and fruitful legal careers. I was playing the long game from the beginning and I believe that is what many of your readers need to take away from this. Play the long game, you won’t lose.

What are some of the strategies you have used to improve your products and build on their success?

We constantly ask our users for feedback on our classes. I read every word of every class review. When students unsubscribe from our app, we ask them to complete an exit survey. I read every word of these as well, and when students suggest features or talk about bugs, I forward these messages along to Ben and the development side.

We love trying new ideas. For example, a few years ago we added a meditation popup to our drilling tool. It is skippable for students who want to get right back to business. But nobody has ever complained about it, and multiple students have told us that the first time they saw it, it actually made them cry because they felt that we were truly concerned about their well-being. We also added a yoga class a couple of years ago, which was not nearly as successful. We scrapped that one and kept the meditation. We are always doing this — if an idea seems good and it is easy to test, we will implement it. We prune out the stuff that fails and keep only our best ideas over time.

Similarly, students can upvote and downvote our explanations in the Demon. Sometimes I said it better, perhaps more frequently Ben did. Whichever explanation clicks for the most students will, over time, come to outrank the other explanations. This way, our tool gets better and better the more it’s used.

As you can see, we ask for suggestions everywhere. On the podcasts, in team meetings, on Slack, in our student Discord — it’s probably exhausting to hear us constantly ask how we can do better. But people know we are genuine about it, Ben always has a wish list of 100 things we could do to improve the product.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful app?

1. Consistency is huge. You will have to overcome a million small annoyances and keep showing up every day.
2. The more successful you are, the more imitators and copycats you will have. The competition will improve. Welcome the competition and let it spur you to get better.
3. Start with something you love. If I did not have my passion for LSAT teaching, I would not care one bit about creating an LSAT app.
4. Fail fast. Build a minimal viable product and bring it to market. Walk away if it does not work.
5. Bootstrap. We have been fortunate to finance our growth only through revenues. We have no debt expense, we have not diluted our equity, and we have kept full control.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Law schools that allow their students to use debt financing for their education should have their tuition and fees capped at some reasonable amount. They should not be allowed to charge every student a different price, which they currently do via merit-based scholarships. And they definitely should not be able to award merit-based stipends to some students while charging others full price.

Under the current law school system, the government ends up guaranteeing huge loans for the students who are the least qualified, as measured by LSAT and GPA. At the same time, schools quietly give full rides and even stipends to students with the best LSAT/GPAs. Those better-qualified students get higher grades in law school and end up with better jobs. The less-qualified students rack up huge debts while receiving worse grades and job offers. Meanwhile, tuition never stops increasing. It is insane how out of control this is and how many students do not realize this.

If students were paying cash, I would not feel so strongly about it. But the entire thing is built on federal-guaranteed debt financing. Students blindly sign their names for hundreds of thousands in debt that benefits schools and more privileged applicants at the expense of the less fortunate students and taxpayers. At the very least, it is a perverse outcome to a well-meaning student loan system. I think the US Department of Education should step in and limit this debt or make law schools price their offerings fairly and transparently.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Reach out at ThinkingLSAT.com, LSATDemon.com, or @LSATDemon on all social media platforms.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!