Breaking Down Classroom Walls with Saturn’s Dylan Diamond

On today’s episode of For Your Innovation, hosts Andrew Kim and Nicholas Grous sit down with Dylan Diamond, the brain behind Saturn, a calendar app that’s taken over 17,000 U.S. public schools. Originating as a basic web tool and now an iPhone essential, Saturn goes beyond just planning your day—it’s a social network that informs you about your friends’ current and future locations. Join us as Dylan unpacks the journey of Saturn, detailing how artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing time management and social planning. From custom features tailored to individual schools to the key alliances that have accelerated its expansion, we’ll uncover how Saturn isn’t just a utility—it’s a community.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Overview of Dylan’s background, and the origin of Saturn
• How Saturn evolved from a web app to an iPhone app
• Lessons in building personalized, unscalable apps for schools
• Scaling quickly by utilizing organic growth and student ambassadors
• Organic growth fueled by user demand, teamwork
• AI in Saturn focuses on solving real problems, like auto-updating school calendars and fostering social connections
• Saturn focuses on students, not faculty, and aims to be a lifelong calendar
• Focusing on high school to build a strong user base, while also seeing potential for expansion into college
• Saturn combines social and utility, aims for steady growth, and expects more social platforms to add utility features