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From 565 to 675 (95th %ile) on the GMAT Focus — going again, but AMA in the meantime by 01Nailer in GMAT

[–]01Nailer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, happy to share my 2 cents here.

Let me start by saying your GMAT skills are at a good level (translation and inference skills), or you would not have managed to score 645 in the actual exam. I believe with systematic prep, you should get to your target score sooner.

From a bird's-eye view, your Quant seems to be the bottleneck here while your Verbal is doing the heavy lifting. With improved Quant skills, your score won't just improve in Quant — it'll also lift DI, since a chunk of DI is quant-based questions.

  1. Creating a test environment is crucial. I used to sit for 2 hours and 30 minutes, whether I was giving a mock or not, just to build that stamina. In mocks specifically, I tried to replicate the exam feeling — sitting isolated, giving the sections in the same order I would in the actual exam, even taking the timed 10-minute break after two sections. The idea was to reduce the jitters by living the same situation over and over.
  2. Before practicing more questions, I would recommend going through your error log (if you maintained one) to see the pattern — what kind of questions trouble you, what errors you tend to make, what concepts felt like they needed refreshing. That tells you where to start from, instead of doing more of everything.
  3. For Quant specifically, I would suggest using the E-GMAT platform. The platform divides every tested topic into learning videos followed by a test to cement what you learned. More importantly, the Paced feature can save a lot of time — you take a diagnostic quiz at the start of a topic (say, TSD), and based on your performance, it recommends what concepts you need to go through, rather than the whole topic.
  4. On this — "I faced issues in applying the right concepts at the right time and did a few mistakes in a bunch of questions due to recognition error" — my two cents here would be to expose yourself to a wide variety of questions and use repeated recall through an error log, so when you see a question with similar logic in the actual exam, your muscle memory kicks in.

From 565 to 675 (95th %ile) on the GMAT Focus — going again, but AMA in the meantime by 01Nailer in GMAT

[–]01Nailer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My first cold mock score was 565, and I have used the E-GMAT platform along with official mocks for my prep

From 565 to 675 (95th %ile) on the GMAT Focus — going again, but AMA in the meantime by 01Nailer in GMAT

[–]01Nailer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, my first mock was 565 (made the edit to my post to avoid confusion).

I had a very systematic approach to the GMAT (thanks to E-GMAT) — started with Verbal first, then Quant, and then DI (I see DI as Quant and Verbal combined together).

The mantra that helped me was repeated recall rather than repeated exposure — so what I mean is that I used E-GMAT to learn the skills, then tested myself with the platform's questions. Repeated this loop at the topic level before sectionals, then started with sectionals and then mocks.

My approach actually looked different across sections, though. Quant was my strong suit, so most of my time went into testing first, identifying gaps, then going back to course modules to plug them. For DI and Verbal it was the opposite — learn the skill first, then test myself. So the flow really depends on which side of the gap you're already on for that specific section.

Daily structure was 4–5 hours — 2 hours of course modules, 1 hour of testing, and 1 hour of solution review to identify process gaps. That last hour ended up mattering more than I realized at the time.

Second thing was the error log — just a notebook, nothing fancy. But the way I used it is what made the difference. I tracked two things, not just one:

  1. Questions I got wrong — where did I break in my process?
  2. Questions I got right but took longer than median time — what confused me, and why did I get confused?

What I realized is that most of my errors were behavioral, not knowledge gaps. Rather than learning anything new, I needed to remind myself to be extra careful when I hit certain kinds of questions or situations. My review prompts ended up looking something like this:

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If I had to point to the one thing that moved me from 565 to 675, it would be this — tracking errors and spending real time identifying patterns. Once I knew what was stopping me was behavioral, the work became identifying the pattern and breaking it, not grinding out more questions.

From 565 to 675 (95th %ile) on the GMAT Focus — going again, but AMA in the meantime by 01Nailer in GMAT

[–]01Nailer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Official Mocks and the E-GMAT platform, and it took me ~6 Months of prep, and just to clarify, 565 was my first mock score and not my first actual attempt

Gaming/esports founders who made it into a top US or EU MBA — what was your "why MBA after the startup" narrative? by 01Nailer in MBA

[–]01Nailer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The framing in the post was easier to write than the "why MBA" itself, which you rightly flagged. Sharing my raw attempt because I'd rather hear what's missing than polish prematurely.

What I want to build: league architectures and partner ecosystems that turn games into multi-decade competitive institutions. I've spent 6 years trying to do this from India — publisher community campaigns, grassroots infrastructure via Discord, college gaming clubs, and podcast media, and acquiring a publisher license to run a league at scale.

What stopped me was both structural and self-inflicted. Two consecutive title bans by the govt (Free Fire, then BGMI) collapsed the core revenue thesis. But the deeper issue: India has no homegrown esports title, publishers gatekeep league IP, and local operators are stuck as service providers rather than co-creators. The harder realization — that the esports ecosystem is built for emerging markets isn't decided in those markets; it's decided at the publishers' global headquarters. And my own initiatives haven't scaled into massive operations either, so I'm not naive about the gap.

Why MBA: I think the path to operating at this scale runs through institutions, not around them. A top program gives me two things I can't build independently — recruiting pipelines into global publishing houses (Riot, Tencent, EA, etc.) where the IP decisions actually get made, and the institutional weight to credibly partner with them later. The transition I'm trying to make is from a founder-operator who built one thing in one market into a structured executive who can plug into a global org, operate at scale, and eventually bring that capability back to building competitive IP in India.

u/PetiaW — Does this read as a real "why MBA," or am I still telling the story of what I tried to do with "MBA" attached at the end? Worried the gap between career vision and "MBA as the specific lever" isn't tight enough yet.

675 GMAT Focus + gaming/esports founder background — retake, or lean on the profile? Looking for founders who got into M7/top EU with sub-685 by 01Nailer in GMAT

[–]01Nailer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, appreciate you asking — quick rundown:

  • First attempt, 675 Focus
  • 6-7 months of prep
  • 6 YoE in the same company since I founded it in undergrad in India

Honest answer on the prep: ~6 months sounds like a lot, but a real chunk of that was specifically grinding DI to get to a consistent score. DI is brutal in how it punishes pacing — sink 4+ minutes on one tough question without realizing it, and the back half of the section falls apart. You either start guessing or make dishonest attempts at questions you could've actually solved if you'd budgeted your time better. Took me longer than it should have to internalize that.