This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Dylan Diamond, co-founder and CEO of Saturn. Diamond and his co-founder Max Baron launched Saturn, the calendar app “that supports the complexities of the high school day — even the most chaotic block schedules,” when they were students at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Saturn. Dilan Diamond.
When did you start working at side hustle What would Saturn become and what inspired it?
In 2015, I built an app for my school that eventually became the foundation for Saturn. I was a student at Staples High School in Connecticut at the time and everyone was obsessed with finding out who was in their classes at the beginning of the year. I first built a time-sharing web app where students could add their classes and discover their classmates.
It went viral at Staples—with 80% of the school's 1,800 students using the app every day—and since everyone had added their classes, I figured it would be a quick upgrade to make it an app. full calendar. supported our insanely complicated rotation schedule. I called it iStaples and it helped you manage your schedule and see what classes your friends were taking.
Three years after I built the first one for my school, my co-founder and I launched similar apps at several nearby schools and started working on Saturn.
When did you decide to leave college to focus on Saturn full time and what motivated that decision?
It was less of an active “decision” than you think. My co-founder, Max Baron, and I met in 2017 while we were both sophomores at Penn. Max also worked full-time while a full-time student, having built a consulting practice helping companies such as Beats by Dre and T-Mobile develop their marketing strategies to reach new consumers. At the time we met, he had been recruited by Havas, a global marketing agency, to help lead their efforts with this demographic.
At the same time, iStaples continued to have very strong traction within Staples High School. Approximately 80% of students used the product daily. We decided to explore whether the concept could be scaled. Three weeks after the meeting, we launched another school using a white-label application to see if we would have product-market fit in other schools. Half of this second school joined in three hours, and we considered it strong Confirmation. Things quickly expanded to 17 schools, each with their own app, before we decided to consolidate into a single app, mainly so we could deliver features to users faster. We called him Saturn, named after the Roman god of time.
When we had 50 schools, we met investors in California for the first time, and General Catalyst led our seed round. Almost immediately, we returned to the Pen to pack up our apartment – we had moved in together at the time. There wasn't much conversation. We both gave up to start a vacation and haven't been back since.
As a university student, you were one too Tesla employee. How did this work?
During high school, I developed a Apple Watch and the iOS app that effectively served as a remote control for a Tesla's main functions — called the Tesla Toolbox. It took off among Tesla owners and the company contacted me. I was hired, first as an intern and then as a full-time software engineer on the company's Supercharger Analytics team.
I was based out of Philadelphia while studying at Penn, but regularly visited my team in San Francisco. I was in a highly sought after dual degree program at Penn and made sacrifices to continue at Tesla, but I was learning more there than in the classroom, so it felt like the right trade-off.
What's up with Saturn? fundraising did the trip look like?
In 2019, we raised a $9 million round from General Catalyst and Coatue in two phases. In 2021, we raised a $35 million Series A from them and other investors, including Insight Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Marc Benioff, Dara KhosrowshahiInspired Capital, Sound Ventures, Dylan Field and others.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while building Saturn and how did you navigate them?
Today, we support more than 19,000 schools, but it all started with an app I built for myself and my school, which perfectly supported our calendar.
As we started to roll out more schools, we realized that custom support for each school's calendar would drive retention. It is extremely difficult to provide users with this experience when each school has a unique, rotating and constantly changing schedule. This actually led us to double down on this strategy because we knew if we could sort that out, we could maintain our retention while increasing the number of schools we support.
When you join the product today, you arrive in one app with every nuance of your calendar. This is a spell user experience and one of the ways we've managed to build such a consistent experience for this hard-to-reach demographic.
Capturing this data at scale was challenging. Initially, we relied on our users telling us that we need to update the schedule. Today, these data are crowdsourced, which requires significant density in each school. Achieving this kind of density required years of patience, not only with our team, but also with our investors.
As you think about Saturn's future, what are you most excited about?
We've created a calendar experience that we feel can change every day for high school students. Not only does it make it easier for students to connect with their peers, make plans with friends, and find events in their communities, it also helps them manage busy schedules and sets them up for academic and extracurricular success. .
We have already moved from a utility app to a full social product and we pride ourselves on being a social media app that saves time instead of serving as a time sink like other products on the market.
What do you like most about working at Saturn?
When I built the first app, it was like this solve problems that my friends and I faced every day. Last school year, millions of students used Saturn in more than 19,000 schools. Seeing how we've iterated to achieve that kind of resonance with students across the country is really gratifying. This is a product that Gen Z clearly needs, and we're extremely passionate about giving them time in their day instead of taking it away with another feed.
What is your advice to others hoping to start successful side hustles or their own full-time businesses?
Build products that solve your problems. Building products for user stories you deeply understand is much easier. Empathizing with yourself is much easier than empathizing with others. Even when we started hiring, we focused on hiring talented young college students and recent graduates who we felt would deeply understand the user base. Building for this demographic is already difficult since they have so many great products and their expectations are calibrated by the performance of Snap's already mature offerings, TIK Tok, Instagram and others. We felt that this proximity to the target user would give us a significant advantage.
This article is part of our continuity The Young Entrepreneur® series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of being a new business owner.