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This Facet Hustle Highlight Q&A options Dylan Diamond, co-founder and CEO of Saturn. Diamond and his co-founder Max Baron launched Saturn, the calendar app "that helps the complexities of the highschool day — even probably the most chaotic block schedules," once they had been college students on the College of Pennsylvania in 2017.
Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Saturn. Dylan Diamond.
When did you begin engaged on the side hustle that might grow to be Saturn, and what impressed it?
In 2015, I built an app for my college that ultimately turned the muse for Saturn. I used to be a junior at Staples Excessive Faculty in Connecticut on the time, and everybody was obsessive about discovering out who was of their lessons at the start of the 12 months. I initially constructed a schedule-sharing net app the place college students might add their lessons and discover out their classmates.
It went viral at Staples — to the tune of 80% of the 1,800 college students on the college utilizing the app day by day — and since everybody had added their lessons, I spotted it could be a fast enchancment to make it a full-fledged calendar app that supported our insanely sophisticated rotation schedule. I known as it iStaples, and it helped you handle your schedule and see what lessons your pals had been taking.
Three years after I constructed the primary one for my college, my co-founder and I launched comparable apps at a number of close by faculties and began engaged on Saturn.
When did you determine to go away faculty to give attention to Saturn full-time, and what motivated that call?
It was much less of an lively "resolution" than you'd suppose. My co-founder, Max Baron, and I met in 2017 whereas we had been each sophomores at Penn. Max was additionally working full-time whereas being a full-time scholar, having constructed a consulting apply serving to firms like Beats by Dre and T-Mobile develop their advertising methods to succeed in younger customers. By the point we met, he had been recruited by Havas, a world advertising company, to assist lead their efforts with this demographic.
On the similar time, iStaples continued to have very sturdy traction inside Staples Excessive Faculty. Roughly 80% of the scholar physique was nonetheless utilizing the product day by day. We determined to discover if the idea might scale. Three weeks after assembly, we launched one other college utilizing a white-labeled app to see if we might have product-market fit at different faculties. Half of this second college joined in three hours, and we thought of that sturdy validation. Issues shortly expanded to 17 faculties, every with its personal app, earlier than we determined to consolidate to a single app, primarily so we might ship options to customers extra shortly. We known as it Saturn, named after the Roman god of time.
Once we had 50 faculties, we met buyers in California for the primary time, and Basic Catalyst led our Seed spherical. Nearly instantly, we returned to Penn to pack up our condominium — we had moved in collectively by that point. There wasn't a lot of a dialog. We each submitted to start out a go away of absence and have not been again since.
As a school scholar, you had been additionally a Tesla worker. How did that work out?
Throughout highschool, I developed an Apple Watch and iOS utility that successfully served as a distant management for the important thing features of a Tesla — known as Tesla Toolbox. It took off amongst Tesla house owners, and the corporate reached out to me. They wound up hiring me, first as an intern after which as a full-time software program engineer on the corporate's Supercharger Analytics staff.
I used to be primarily based out of Philadelphia whereas finding out at Penn however visited my staff in San Francisco usually. I used to be in a really demanding dual-degree program at Penn and made sacrifices to proceed at Tesla, however I used to be studying extra there than I used to be within the classroom, so it felt like the precise trade-off.
What has Saturn's fundraising journey appeared like?
In 2019, we raised a $9 million seed spherical from Basic Catalyst and Coatue in two levels. In 2021, we raised a $35 million Sequence A from them and different buyers, together with Perception Companions, Bezos Expeditions, Marc Benioff, Dara Khosrowshahi, Impressed Capital, Sound Ventures, Dylan Subject and others.
What had been a few of the greatest challenges you confronted whereas constructing Saturn, and the way did you navigate them?
As we speak, we help greater than 19,000 faculties, however it began with an app I constructed for myself and my college that completely supported our calendar.
As we began launching extra faculties, we realized that having bespoke help for every college's calendar would drive retention. It is extraordinarily tough to ship that have to customers when each college has a novel schedule, runs on rotations and modifications continuously. This truly led us to double down on this technique as a result of we knew if we might clear up it, we might protect our retention as we scaled the variety of faculties we supported.
While you be a part of the product at present, you arrive in an app with each nuance of your calendar. That is a magical experience for users and one of many ways in which we have managed to construct such a retentive expertise for this hard-to-reach demographic.
Capturing that information at scale was difficult. Initially, we relied on our customers telling us we wanted to replace the schedule. As we speak, that information is crowdsourced, which requires important density in every college. Reaching that form of density required years of persistence, not simply with our staff but in addition with our buyers.
As you contemplate Saturn's future, what are you most enthusiastic about?
We have constructed a calendar expertise that we really feel assured can change day-to-day for top schoolers. Not solely does it make it simpler for college students to attach with their friends, make plans with associates and discover occasions of their communities, but it surely additionally helps them handle hectic schedules and units them up for tutorial and extracurricular success.
We have already transitioned from a utility app to a full-fledged social product and delight ourselves on being a social media app that saves time fairly than serves as a time sink like the opposite merchandise in the marketplace.
What do you take pleasure in most about engaged on Saturn?
After I constructed the primary app, it was to solve the problems that my associates and I confronted each day. This previous college 12 months, hundreds of thousands of scholars used Saturn at greater than 19,000 faculties. Seeing how we've iterated to realize that form of resonance with college students throughout the nation is basically satisfying. It is a product Gen Z clearly wants, and we're extraordinarily obsessed with giving them time again of their day as an alternative of taking it from them with yet one more feed.
What's your recommendation for others hoping to start out profitable aspect hustles or full-time companies of their very own?
Construct merchandise that deal with your personal issues. Constructing merchandise for consumer tales you deeply perceive is way simpler. Self-empathizing is a lot simpler than empathizing with others. Even once we began hiring, we centered on hiring gifted younger faculty college students and up to date grads who we thought would deeply perceive the consumer base. Constructing for this demographic is already tough as they've so many nice merchandise, and their expectations are calibrated by the efficiency of the now-mature choices from Snap, TikTok, Instagram and others. We thought this proximity to the goal consumer would give us a big benefit.
This text is a part of our ongoing Young Entrepreneur® collection highlighting the tales, challenges and triumphs of being a younger enterprise proprietor.
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