Co-founded by Dylan Diamond and Max Baron, the app helps high school and college students organize and connect, backed by $62M in funding.

INTERVIEW | by Victor Rivero

Dylan Diamond and Max Baron co-founded Saturn after meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. Dylan (pictured above, lower right, next to Max) was pursuing a dual degree and working full-time at Tesla, while Max had a full-time marketing job. They left college in early 2019 to launch Saturn, an app that helps high school and college students coordinate their calendars, connect with classmates, and track events.

Saturn has raised $62 million from investors like General Catalyst and Ashton Kutcher and is used by millions of students monthly, and they’re live in 17,000 schools. The company aims to build community around the calendar and is collaborating with Snapchat to enhance its platform. At 22, Dylan has been recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. He credits Staples High School for fostering his interest in technology and has led several independent tech projects from a young age.

Today, Dylan leads a talented team at Saturn, focused on helping students manage their time and stay connected. Saturn’s success reflects the vision and hard work of Dylan, Max, their team, and their investors. In this EdTech Digest exclusive, Dylan sat down to answer some basic questions that every edtech founder wrestles with, provides some key advice to other aspiring entrepreneurs, along with his take on the future of learning. 

What is Saturn? Why do high schoolers need a calendar app? 

Saturn is the first calendar built specifically for high school students. It has been designed from the ground up to support all the irregularities of high school schedules, whether those are lunch waves, block schedules, or unusual rotation patterns. The app helps students become more productive and engaged members of their communities by better managing their class schedules, after-school activities, and community events – all while connecting with their friends.

‘The app helps students become more productive and engaged members of their communities by better managing their class schedules, after-school activities, and community events – all while connecting with their friends.’

Today’s high school experience is truly overwhelming for students. Many schools have complex rotation schedules, and students are expected to juggle their academic lives with an ever-expanding set of extracurriculars. None of the calendar apps out there actually support the unique attributes of a high school schedule. Every one of them “thinks” in terms of weekdays; ours is the first capable of “thinking” in rotation days.

The hardest part of high school shouldn’t be managing your schedule, and Saturn has set out to solve this.

Why did you start Saturn? What problem is it solving? 

Saturn evolved from a calendar app I originally built for my own high school to manage my own complicated schedule. When I met my co-founder and we decided to expand the concept to other schools, we found real traction among other students with similar problems to those we faced as high schoolers. We named the app Saturn after the Roman god of time.

Saturn is a utility, first and foremost, and we provide unique value as the only calendar that was built explicitly to support the modern high school experience. Today, we support students at more than 19,000 schools across the country.

The social value of the product comes from being able to share calendars with your friends and connect to your community. Saturn is grounded in the belief that students’ most important community is actually the community closest to them – their high school. 

Unlike other social platforms that serve as time sinks via an endless feed of content, our mission is to give students time back in their day so they can focus on spending more time doing things they love with the people who matter most to them.

You started Saturn as a high schooler—what has the founding journey been like? 

In 2015, everyone at my high school was obsessed with finding out their classmates’ schedules at the beginning of the year. Seeing that behavior, I realized this could easily be transformed into a calendar app designed specifically for my high school. The app was called iStaples and it went viral within our high school – to the tune of 80% of the 2,000 students at the school using the app every day.

Three years later, I was a sophomore at Penn, and working full-time for Tesla as a software engineer on the company’s Supercharger Analytics team. I met my co-founder, Max Baron, a classmate who was also juggling a full-time job at global marketing agency Havas, where he was helping them develop their strategies to reach young consumers.

We started discussing our own experiences with high school schedules, and decided to roll out a similar calendar app at a school near my alma mater, to explore whether the concept could scale. Approximately half of that second school joined in three hours, and things ramped up quickly from there. Soon we had 17 schools, students loved it, and we consolidated to a single app (called Saturn) to enable us to move faster: both in launching schools and shipping features.

When we reached 50 schools, we went to California to meet investors for the first time, and General Catalyst led our Seed round. We left school to operate Saturn full-time, and haven’t looked back since. 

How do you interact with high schoolers? 

We have always considered ourselves a product created for high schoolers, by high schoolers. Ever since the beginning of our journey, we have been solving a problem that was very familiar to us. From day one, our approach was to make Saturn feel personal – like it was built just for your school.

When we first launched, a key part of our strategy was working with “ambassadors,” students at the schools we supported, to help us understand the intricacies of their individual schools and their schedules. Collectively, they allowed us to build a product that was tailored to each school’s calendar and needs.

These users naturally became advocates for the product and ended up helping Saturn grow through word-of-mouth as they shared it with friends. Even today, we are constantly talking to our users to understand their needs and incorporate their feedback to build a product that is deeply valuable to them.

‘…we are constantly talking to our users to understand their needs and incorporate their feedback to build a product that is deeply valuable to them.’

What features are resonating most with high schoolers on the app? 

We are constantly working to ensure that Saturn is the best calendar it can be. We’re regularly listening to our users through user interviews, which has informed some of our recent feature launches. This is especially true in the case of recent improvements to the calendar’s core interface, as well as smaller features like widgets for the home screen and lock screen that make it easy to access your calendar on Saturn.

We focus very much on the “single-player” value of Saturn. The reason is simple: if you find the product useful as an individual, you’ll keep coming back, earning us the opportunity to continue iterating and making the product even better over time.

Why is time management an essential skill for high school students to learn? 

We strongly believe that time is your most valuable resource, and managing it is a critical life skill. That said, high school schedules are unimaginably complicated today, which makes time management that much harder for students.

We believe that effective time management will not only make students more successful in the classroom and with their extracurriculars, but will empower them to spend more time doing the things they enjoy most.

What’s your advice to other young edtech entrepreneurs?

Build a product that solves a problem you’re deeply familiar with. We built Saturn because we had experienced the challenge of managing our own schedules in high school, and we knew why the alternative calendar products weren’t compelling for us.

Our own personal experience has always been at the forefront of how we develop our product roadmap. It’s much easier to self-empathize than it is to empathize with others, so if you’re in need of an idea, start by building something for yourself and then see if it can scale.

What trends are you looking at in the near and medium term future, why those?

We believe that the next generation of social platforms will inevitably be more utility-oriented. Countless studies and anecdotes are making clear that today’s users are inundated with content from a landscape of feed-focused social products that suck your time. We are very focused on building social value around a utility you rely on every day.

‘We believe that the next generation of social platforms will inevitably be more utility-oriented.’

For too long, social media products have emphasized the breadth of your social graph instead of the integrity of that graph. A core part of Saturn is that we are catering to a real community in your life – your high school. We see that by connecting that smaller, more intimate community, we can drive better connections.

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Victor Rivero is the Editor-in-Chief of EdTech Digest. Write to: victor@edtechdigest.com

The post Young Visionaries Seek to Transform Student Life with Saturn App appeared first on EdTech Digest.

Today’s high school experience is overwhelming for students – many schools have complex rotation schedules, and students are expected to juggle their academic lives with an ever-expanding set of extracurriculars. The hardest part of high school shouldn’t be managing your schedule, and this cool tool, Saturn, aims to solve this.

Saturn is the first calendar built specifically for high school students. It has been designed from the ground up to support all of the irregularities of high school schedules, whether that is lunch waves, block schedules, or unusual rotation patterns. The app helps students become more productive and engaged members of their communities by better managing their class schedules, after-school activities, and community events – all while connecting with their friends.

Saturn was founded on the belief that students’ most important community is actually the community closest to them – their high school. Unlike other social media platforms that serve as time-sinks via an endless feed of content, Saturn’s mission is to give students time back so they can focus on spending more time with the people that matter most to them. Features include countdowns, communal bulletin boards, and the ability to upload class schedules with just a photo.

Dylan Diamond (look for an upcoming interview with him in EdTech Digest) first built a calendar app in 2015, when he was a high school junior. He was in search of a tool to help manage his high school’s complex schedule, telling him where he needed to be and when, and also where his friends were. Three years later, Dylan and his co-founder launched a similar calendar app for other high schools, and the results were clear. This was a product that high school students badly needed. Today, Saturn is a leading mobile app, supporting students at almost 20,000 schools and millions of students used it during this past school year.

Saturn is designed to prioritize student safety throughout the product. Saturn employs multi-layered verification processes aimed to connect users to their specific school community on Saturn. Saturn also maintains Community Guidelines, and monitors content and user reports on the app to facilitate  content that upholds a vibrant, informative, and safe environment for all users. When Saturn or its users identify inappropriate content, Saturn may report it to the relevant school or law enforcement. Learn more.

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