Interview, Fireside Chat
Taking on an $80 Billion Dollar Market with Gen Z | Dylan Diamond
- Investor Backing & Capital: The company, Saturn, has secured over $68 million in funding from high-profile investors and operators, including General Catalyst, KOTU, Insight, O1 Advisors, Jeff Bezos, Mark Benioff, Dara Khosrowshahi, Neo, Elad Gil, and Inspired Capital.
- Investor Strategy: The founders attribute their ability to secure these investors to their shared background as "builders" with direct experience at transformational consumer companies like Twitter, Snapchat, and Tesla, allowing for deep collaboration on go-to-market strategies and ad unit development.
- Origin Story: The product originated as "iStaples," a manual schedule-sharing tool built by founder Dylan Field at Staples High School, which evolved into "Saturn" after identifying a need for a daily-use calendar derived from the schedule graph.
- Growth Metrics & Positioning: During summer months, Saturn ranked #2 on the entire App Store and #1 in the Productivity category, edging out competitors like ChatGPT, TikTok, and Tick-tock.
- User Retention Data: The product maintains a daily active user (DAU) retention rate of over 50% among monthly users, with a D30 (30-day) retention rate exceeding 30% for new users and 70% for existing users; 90% of new users return annually.
- Cyclical Acquisition Model: The company acquires over 100,000 new users per day during the "back-to-school" window, with the average user inviting four to five friends, creating a high viral coefficient (K-factor) concentrated in specific seasonal windows.
- Long-Term Cohort Growth: Early cohort data from the first 50 schools shows a shift from 7% weekly active user penetration to 60% in subsequent years, demonstrating significant organic growth over time rather than immediate dominance.
- Viral vs. Reverse K-Factor: Unlike social apps where friends stopping usage causes churn, Saturn utilizes a "net positive" K-factor where the product remains valuable for the individual even if friends leave, ensuring stability in the user graph.
- Onboarding Evolution: The onboarding process was reduced from eight minutes to under two minutes by replacing manual data entry with AI-powered schedule scanning (e.g., taking a photo of a physical schedule).
- Adoption Strategy: The company shifted from a manual "ambassador" model (hiring high schoolers to hard-code schedules) to a demand-led waitlist system and eventually launched all 18,000 U.S. public high schools automatically via AI crawling, significantly lowering operational costs.
- Monetization Pivot: Saturn launched its first consumer ad unit in years, moving beyond traditional ad models to integrate time-sensitive, event-based recommendations (e.g., movie releases, NBA games) directly into the calendar feed.
- Ad Performance Case Study: Nike successfully distributed a Super Bowl advertisement and free merchandise offer to millions of high schoolers via Saturn, resulting in inventory depletion within minutes due to high click-through rates.
- Targeting Capabilities: The ad platform allows for granular targeting based on school, specific sports teams, or geographic location, leveraging the calendar data to serve hyper-relevant, real-world events to shared audiences.
- Gen Z Behavioral Insights: The product adapts to Gen Z's short attention spans and high standards by optimizing for offline functionality, low-bandwidth performance, and lightweight app sizes, while leveraging AI to structure unstructured time rather than requiring manual entry.
- Future Roadmap (Post-High School): The strategy focuses on retaining users beyond high school by transitioning from a school-centric graph (classmates) to a personal relationship graph (friends, family, college peers) that remains relevant through college and into the workforce.
- AI Integration: AI agents are now used to automatically scrape and maintain school schedule data, while in-app AI assistants allow users to query their calendar via voice or text to automate scheduling and provide daily summaries.
- Team Composition: The core team includes former Snap engineers responsible for AR and ad units, a former Tesla youngest software engineer (Field), and a marketing lead with a background in data science, emphasizing a blend of technical and consumer product expertise.
- Strategic Advice: Mentor Hootie Partovi advised the founders to ignore short-term growth pressures and NFT trends, focusing instead on building the "calendar infrastructure for every high school in the country" as a long-term north star.
- Product Focus: The company intentionally jettisoned non-core features like bulletin boards and "likes" to reduce surface area and maintain focus on utility-based single-player and multiplayer calendar tools.
- Market Positioning: Saturn positions itself as the antithesis to TikTok's passive scrolling, aiming to be a proactive "productivity partner" that structures time and fosters real-world social interaction rather than digital consumption.