The Exchanges

Q I think I look at my calendar more than I look at my text messages. Um, just to put some numbers against it, like maybe how many users have you had in total, or how do you measure the kind of success like daily?

A So we've always been a retention based business. And, uh, I think the reason my co-founder Max partnered up with me was he saw the early Google analytics data back in like 2019 from Staples and saw that Step function increase in DAO daily active users over the enrollment, and saw that even after I graduated, the engaged percentage of the student body continued to increase. Um, so we look at a lot of things. We have, you know, our DAO now, the stickiness daily active, the percent of monthlies that are active every day is over 50%. Um, our D-thirty retention of brand new users is well over 30%, um, with 70% Uh, for existing, 90% of new users return every single year. So that's why, you know, freshmen use it as sophomores and kind of grow up with the product. Um, you know, we have millions of users at 18,000 schools right now, but retention is always what we focused on. I think a lot of other products in the space may have focused just on user acquisition numbers, and we probably grow more slowly than some would like. It's not been an overnight journey. We've been at this for five and a half years, but During the summer months, you know, we reach number two on the entire App Store, number one in productivity, ahead of some great tools like ChatGPT and others, TikTok, um, just because, you know, we focus on the K factor, we focus on the user acquisition, but then you must retain th…

AI assessment note: “our DAO now, the stickiness daily active, the percent of monthlies that are active”

Q The most popular newsletter ever. Um, could you just break down what builds that consumer product for you guys? Like what, what is the recipe there?

A Yeah. Um, so for the first couple of years of the product, We didn't even ask the user for their contact book. We had no invite flows. It was all word of mouth. That was slower, but it allowed us to focus on the downstream retention and the core jobs to be done in the product. I think a lot of times people will build a viral flow, but they won't think about retention. And then you will see that reverse K factor effect. Users won't actually engage with the product. And you could acquire users more by either, if daily active users equals acquisition minus churn, increasing your retention reduces churn. But acquiring more users without reducing churn is not, I think, a recipe for success. It's users will invite people to products without knowing what they do. We've seen time and time again products reach the top of the app store for one or two days and then completely die off. There is a playbook to that. Um, we took a pretty hand-to-hand approach With building out the products early in the newsletter piece, we talked about how we would white label each product. So if at Staples, it was called iStaples. Weston was iWeston. Greenwich was iGreenwich. And the app felt really homemade. It was easy to spread word of mouth. It was branded in the app store for your specific school. And that drove us to getting 50 plus percent penetration, sometimes within 48 hours, often within the first…

AI assessment note: “allowed us to focus on the downstream retention and the core jobs to be done”

Q As we think about where you started in high school, how are you thinking about expanding Saturn?

A Like, I mean, we're in 18,000 schools. Those schools continue to grow year on year. The high school market's very important to us because it's the first touch point with the user, and we want to build a relationship with them for the rest of their lives. So rather than pick a different tool, they start calendaring with Saturn when they're 13, and we want them, we want to build a personal calendar for the rest of their lives. So in college, there's no purpose-built calendar. When you graduate college, you, of course, will enter the workforce and use enterprise tools. We think those can be complementary. To the graph that Saturn is best, uh, you know, fit to, to serve, which is, uh, friends, family, the people closest to you. I joke. It's the people in the Apple share sheet, everyone who you care about, whether they go to your college or not. And it's probably a stronger tie graph than it is in high school, where you care about your 30 classmates in each room. Uh, you probably care about, I don't know, maybe five to eight people. It's like your find my friends list. We think that's that list for your calendar. And we are, our competitive advantage is we always build the edge case, extra mile tools that no one else would think to support. So in high school, it's your complicated schedule that you think only your school has, and you think no one else can explain. Kids struggle to e…

AI assessment note: “we want to build a personal calendar for the rest of their lives. So in college”

Q Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. The link is in the description to sign up. Shifting to like the Gen Z perspective on this, how has Gen Z trends affected the growth of virality or at least the adoption of the company itself? I'm sure other products have popped up, but how do you stay relevant with it?

A It's affected the marketing strategy. When we were in high school, TikTok wasn't a thing. Uh, and I'm cognizant that, you know, I built the app with no design team, no UXR team. I would just build for myself. Now trends are a little bit different as you think about the needs of other people. Um, I'll talk about AI in a little bit of just how we've been able to make the calendar a lot more approachable to people who otherwise were put off by archaic traditional interfaces. Um, I think also the, with Gen Z, they're super smart and they have really high standards for products. So if you think about all the products that will be on a young person's home screen, their dock even, the bar is really high. So we're, you know, use 10 plus times a day. We need to compete on that side. And whether it's mobile design, performance, the size of the app, a lot of kids have older phones. They're not, they don't have strong cell service. The product needs to work offline. Um, you need to adapt for all these things so that the product can work, whether you have low, high bandwidth, um, new phone, old phone, uh, and kids are very twitchy. Their attention span's quite short. I think that's also what separates Saturn from traditional calendar and products.

AI assessment note: “It's affected the marketing strategy. When we were in high school, TikTok wasn't a thing.”

Q Yeah. Shifting into the capital raising, you, you have raised a quite substantial amount of money for the company. How did you work with investors to get them comfortable with the cyclical nature of this type of company?

A I think a lot of investors self-selected out who weren't. And, you know, one of my closest mentors is this, um, you know, prolific investor operator, Hadi Partovi. Uh, and he wrote me an email. I remember in 20, 21, when, you know, the crypto craze and you had all these kind of consumer social products that you named, uh, and everyone was saying, grow faster, do what they're doing, ignore high school. And he said, Build the high school infrastructure for every calendar in the country, uh, build a calendar infrastructure for every high school in the country and just keep that as your north star. And, you know, don't worry about anything else until you do that. Don't worry about the seasonality. Your metrics are, you know, very, very strong and just have that confidence. And I was very grateful for that advice because it was a time when a lot of investors maybe didn't have that patience and wanted us to use those shorter term growth tactics over retention Which we refuse to do. Um, so they've been, you know, all the investors on the cap table have taken that bet, and it has been a longer term strategy, but if you look at the year to year data, it definitely was worth it.

AI assessment note: “I think a lot of investors self-selected out who weren't.”

Q Well, you are a big deal. You raised over sixty eight million dollars in funding by very large names in Silicon Valley. I'm gonna name them out. Okay. We have General Catalyst, KOTU, Insight, O-One Advisors, Jeff Bezos, Mark Benioff, Dara, Neo, Elad Gill, Dylan Field, and Inspired Capital, and I'm sure there's more. So Dylan, how did you land all of these great investors?

A I think they're all builders. You look at everyone from Bezos to Benioff to O-one Advisors, which was the Twitter management team. You have Dick and Adam and David Fisher. They were at the helm of some of the most transformational companies ever, and specifically in consumer, they teach us everything. So, you know, whether it was, uh, GC to, you know, Snapchat series B meeting O-one, Um, these people are builders, and in a world where a lot of venture capitalists haven't operated in the field as much, we learn everything from, you know, the go-to-market strategy to building out the first new ad unit in years, which we'll talk about. These advisors, these investors have all been there and done that, and we're super grateful, uh, to work with some of the best and learn from them all the time.

AI assessment note: “I think they're all builders. You look at everyone from Bezos to Benioff”