Hillsborough-Based Developers Ready for Challenge

Nearly 150,000 students across the U.S. taking the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) each year, and the scores on the test can be the difference between attending a prestigious law school or heading online.

But as Hillsborough resident Alisa Geller notes, tutoring to help prepare for the test can be expensive and often less-than-helpful—that's why she and brothers Craig and Scott Goodman created LSATisfaction, an online test prep course that gives better tracking information for prospective students at a lower cost, through their Great Helm Technologies, LLC.

"We knew there was a need for something that was affordable," she said, adding LSATisfaction uses questions from actual tests and is designed to let students know what their strengths and weaknesses in the actual LSAT are.

Geller—who knows about the LSAT from her experiences enroute to her JD—and the Goodmans have been working on LSATisfaction for about two years. On Monday, the team will present their business idea to a panel of judges in the Start Something Challenge, organized by Rising Tide Capital, which could net them the Challenge's $10,000 top prize.

They are one of 10 finalists in the Challenge, culled from 138 entries from across New Jersey. Of those, 30 advanced to the semifinals of the competition Oct. 23, where they used online and offline marketing tools to drive traffic to view and vote for their videos on the Start Something Challenge website.

Monday's finals in Jersey City will include their PowerPoint product video and a personal presentation on their business plan. 

If they win, Geller said the prize would be used to market their product and spiff up page designs a bit. 

She said LSATisfaction has already been gaining traction among the test's candidates, who began making inquiries as soon as their beta Website went live (the full-featured site will be launched in January).

"I wasn't expecting that—I was hoping for it, but I wasn't expecting it," Geller said.