uoa mmi prep is getting kinda ridiculous icl (so we made ours free)
been looking through all the uoa mmi prep stuff lately and some of these prices are actually insane. $99, $150, $300, sometimes literally four figures to practise talking into a camera for three minutes.
full disclosure before someone goes through my post history and cooks me, i build cutline. yes, we sell stuff too. our otago hsfy stuff is paid. i’m not about to become marx because i discovered a competitor has a pricing page lol. actual med/dent students spend hundreds of hours writing questions, checking answers, making diagrams, reviewing content and maintaining these platforms. obviously that work has value.
but the mmi ai thing specifically is starting to get a bit funny.
none of us are sitting in a bunker training some forbidden medical interview superintelligence 😭 i’m literally a 20 year old med student sitting at my pc using claude/chatgpt to help build this shit too. most of us have access to the same ridiculously capable foundation models now. connect one to a rubric, transcribe an answer, put a clean ui around it and suddenly you have “advanced proprietary ai interview analysis”.
like okay bro 😭
and that doesn’t mean these products have no value. if anything i think it means the model itself is becoming the least interesting part of the product.
what i actually care about is whether the stations are good. whether med students have actually gone through them. whether the rubric makes sense. whether the feedback can tell the difference between someone who answered the question and someone who just professionally yapped for three minutes. whether practising actually feels remotely like being put on the spot. whether the people building it listen when students say something sucks and actually fix it.
that’s basically the position we’re in with cutline rn.
we’re new to auckland.
i could slap $99 on it tomorrow, run some ads, put AI POWERED everywhere and spend the next month trying to convince 30 of you that ours is somehow the chosen mmi platform.
or i can get 500 of you on it.
if 30 people pay me $100, sick, we made $3k.
if 500 uoa students use it, do thousands of stations, find every weird edge case, tell us which questions are ass, compare feedback with each other and basically stress test the living shit out of the platform, that is worth way more to me right now.
so yeah. fuck it.
if you’re a uoa student and verify your aucklanduni.ac.nz email, cutline mmi is free for this interview cycle.
you get unlimited access to the full station bank + timed camera simulator, and we give you 10 AI-reviewed attempts to start with.
burn through those and want more? invite a friend to practise and you both get more AI usage. if you don’t want to do that, you can also just buy extra usage and support us if you genuinely want to lol. no pressure.
the stations and simulator aren’t suddenly disappearing behind a paywall after your 10 reviews.
go use it before believing anything i’m saying here.
and i don’t mean “free” because we think it’s some cheap little side project. it’s basically the opposite. i’d rather spend this year buying our way into auckland with product than trying to squeeze money out of the first people willing to trust us.
we think what we built is genuinely good.
but i also don’t think you should trust me because i made a nice website telling you it’s good.
actually test it.
give a really good answer. give an absolutely diabolical answer. waffle for three minutes and see if it calls you out. completely dodge the question. say something ethically questionable. test weird edge cases. compare our feedback against what an actual med student tells you. compare it with the official uoa material. compare it with the paid platforms.
if another platform does something better than us, literally tell me.
i want you guys to make this thing annoying to build.
because imo that’s where this whole space is going anyway. the raw ai technology is getting cheaper and more accessible every month. eventually everyone gets access to similarly insane models.
good.
then education companies actually have to compete on whether the thing they built is useful instead of who can make chatgpt sound the most proprietary.
and yes, cutline can still get cooked too.
maybe 500 of you use it and collectively discover we built the world’s most sophisticated yap detector and nothing else. fine. at least we’ll know, we’ll fix it, and you didn’t pay $200 to find out.
i genuinely don’t care that much about selling a few dozen mmi subscriptions this month.
i care way more about getting to the point where someone in the uoa group chat asks “what are you guys using for mmi?” and everyone just says cutline.
use our shit. break our shit. tell us what sucks.
we’ll make it better.
tl;dr: i build cutline. yes, we sell paid stuff at otago. no, i don’t think calling an llm “proprietary ai” automatically makes interview prep worth hundreds of dollars. we’re new to auckland and i’d rather have hundreds of uoa students stress test our product than charge a small group $100 each. verify your aucklanduni.ac.nz email and you get every station + the full simulator free, with 10 AI reviews to start. want more reviews? invite your friends and you both get more, or buy extra usage if you actually want to support us. no pressure.
go break it.
