As college students revel in satisfying their SnapChat and Tinder addictions; earning homepage real estate on their cellphones is best understood as a feat reserved for Katniss Evergreen in the Hunger Games.
While Mary Yang and Matthew Murphy are far too kind to participate in the Hunger Games, they’ve successfully integrated their group chat application, QUAD, into 4,300 out of the 4,500 U.S. colleges making it appear that the odds are ever in their favor.
QUAD is a group messaging platform for students – think sororities, clubs, and service organizations – to communicate with up to 500 friends in a group chat. Added features include sub-groups, the ability to mute group chat (yes, you may rejoice), as well as integrated games.
The founders are seasoned app designers; they recently sold their voice messaging app Dubbler to Yappie, and they used our conversation to highlight the three forces driving QUAD’s success.
The team has achieved an exceptional understanding of their core user through their brand ambassador program.
QUAD Squad is an internship opportunity for college students to market the app and run school events to bring on new users. The program has proven immensely popular with over 900 students applying and 35 making the cut.
The competition is worthy of the opportunity as Mary and Matt are deeply committed to helping interns gain beneficial experience working with the team. The students may participate in company group chats where the team communicates daily, evaluates quick feedback and shares photos.
Next, Mary opened our eyes to the importance of evaluating customer feedback with an extreme emphasis on each customer.
Whether a new location feature or a request for additional private messaging, the QUAD team delves into each inquiry individually to uncover the root of the user’s suggestion.
Once the team collects feedback, they designate time to dissect it and discuss engineering costs and impact before making any decisions.
Lending to Mary’s product management style, QUAD evaluates new features based on the number of potential users, tests, and conversation rates.
Most importantly, if it disrupts the central communication feature of the app the team uses their mission to stay on track.
To learn more about Mary and Matt’s journey building QUAD, tune into their 33founders episode and download the app here for iPhone and Android.