Built and founded by Shahriyar Suhan — 17-year-old developer from Sylhet, Bangladesh — onmock.com
IELTS preparation in Bangladesh meant one of two things: expensive coaching centers with fixed schedules and group classes, or solo practice with no real feedback on Speaking and Writing — the two sections where a human examiner's judgment matters most and self-study fails hardest. Students could drill Reading and Listening on their own, but Speaking and Writing needed someone to actually listen, read, and score against the band descriptors. That someone was either a paid tutor or nobody at all.
OnMock started as an attempt to close that gap with AI — not to replace human judgment, but to make examiner-quality feedback available the moment a student needed it, for a fraction of the cost of a coaching center.
OnMock was built solo, from scratch. No co-founder, no funding, no team at launch. Just a working product and a Facebook account.
Every single one of these came from the same channel: a post in a Bangladeshi IELTS Facebook group, followed by a conversation, followed by manual account activation. No ads. No outbound sales. Just word of mouth and a founder who responded to every single message personally. That hands-on approach converted extraordinarily well — high enough that it became the core growth engine for months, even after it should have been automated.
Pricing started low, with monthly and longer-term packs added once it became clear users were sticking around longer than expected. As the product matured and content depth grew, pricing was adjusted upward — a deliberate decision made after watching a funded competitor launch at several times the price with a worse free-speaking offering. OnMock's pricing advantage and free speaking evaluation became its sharpest competitive edges.
By April, the platform crossed 520+ total historical users, with strong, healthy margins once the business was properly modeled.
Early renewal-rate worries turned out to be a math error — the real number, measured correctly against only the users whose subscriptions had actually expired, settled at a healthy rate for the category. That's expected for an exam-prep product: most students buy once, pass their exam, and leave. OnMock isn't a habit product. It's a transactional one, tied to an exam date — and the roadmap was shaped around that truth rather than fighting it.
A teacher named Arpita became one of the platform's strongest organic promoters, referring students through a personal discount code with no formal arrangement at first — later formalized with a long-term partnership and dedicated content collaboration.
OnMock's first attempt at an international payment processor rejected the platform outright over a blanket policy on an entire product category. The fix wasn't fighting the rejection; it was finding the right partner — one built with international founders in mind and equipped to handle a global, multi-currency user base.
International pricing launched soon after, with local pricing left untouched for the home market. Currency is detected automatically, with a manual option always available.
What happened next wasn't planned: paying users from Mexico and the Philippines signed up with zero targeted marketing, zero localized content, and zero outbound effort. Nobody built anything for those markets — they found OnMock on their own. It was the clearest signal yet that the product had pull beyond Bangladesh, and the team is now actively investigating and building toward that opportunity.
The platform today covers Speaking, Writing, Reading, Listening, a full adaptive Vocabulary builder with active recall, a Study Planner, complete Mock Tests scored against real band descriptors, a shadowing feature for pronunciation practice, and support for evaluating handwritten Writing responses. The infrastructure behind it has matured continuously alongside the product, scaling to keep pace with real student demand.
None of this happened on a roadmap drawn up in a boardroom. It happened one Facebook post, one conversation, and one shipped feature at a time — by a founder who builds because that's the only way he knows how to think.
The next chapter is about depth over breadth: more original content across every module, an even more reliable evaluation experience, and turning the accidental international signal from Mexico and the Philippines into a deliberate, sustainable expansion — without losing what made OnMock work in the first place: a team that actually listens to every student who reaches out.
