NCLEX Kingdom is the first product from Kingdom Learning Group, the company I founded with Jay Wilburn. It is a mobile study platform for nurses preparing for the NCLEX-RN exam, live and now in active marketing. It exists because of a frustration I watched for years while building test-prep software: nursing students grind through thousands of practice questions on apps that feel like punishment. Burnout is the default, and every competitor was optimizing for question volume instead of doing something about it.
The premise is different. Wrap rigorous, clinically accurate NCLEX content inside an RPG quest: realms to explore, bosses to defeat, streaks to defend. Not because gamification is a gimmick, but because retention follows engagement, and engagement follows feeling like you're getting somewhere.
My job on this one covers all of it. Product design, the build, the brand, and now the work of getting it in front of the nursing students who need it: landing pages that convert, content that ranks, and a story worth retelling. Jay and I split the business between us by strength, which is part of what doing this with a partner gets you.
Why this one matters to me
I've been building software for 25 years, and EdTech keeps pulling me back. OnoSchool came out of pandemic-era homeschooling; Webster's Classroom served K-12 teachers; and a long stretch of that career was spent building certification-exam prep apps, including for nurses. That domain taught me a hard lesson fast: rigorous content alone doesn't change outcomes. Motivation does. After years of watching test-prep tools optimize for question volume while students burned out, NCLEX Kingdom is what happens when I take everything I've learned in that space and point it at the question I've been turning over the whole time: what if studying for the hardest exam of your career didn't have to feel like punishment?
Where this one stands
The first release shipped and did not get much traction. Rather than move on, we kept working it: major architectural improvements to the game design to improve retention, and further iterations still to come. The work right now is distribution and trust, getting a new brand in front of nursing students who are drowning in study options, and earning the belief that this app is worth their study time.
Looking back across every business on this site, the one thing that stands out consistently is that I quit too soon. I could always solve the problem in front of me. What I did not do was stay: no pivoting, no iterating toward product-market fit, no grinding through the stretch where the work stops being fun. So this one is different on purpose. Kingdom Learning Group is committed for five years, pivots included, and the lessons are still being learned. Every day is about framing the problem so we can learn from it and iterate: the first release shipped, retention needed work, so we reworked the game design, and we keep going from there.