Remind.com
Background
Remind is a text messaging application that allows for real time messaging and alerts to anyone in a group similar to other messaging applications. However, they are primarily targeting the school and district market by providing “meaningful communication for every student, teacher, and parent”.
The communication tool allows for real time messaging, scheduling reminders for a group of people, text translation, and planning tools for school and districts. The remind application allows for teachers to remind their students about upcoming homework assignment and tests which have seen success.
When we visited their headquarters in Silicon Valley we learnt about the motivations behind the creation and focus of the Remind application. When David , one of the co-founders, learnt about how his friend in college was having difficulty turning his assignments in on time he had the idea to create a little script that would remind his friend and a couple of others about upcoming due dates. While it was primitive and buggy it was the birth of company known as Remind.com even though he didn’t know it at the time.
Innovation
Input
At remind.com any individual within the company can pitch their idea to their supervisor or to the project manager. If the idea receives support then they will have to see if the idea would be beneficial to their core market, teachers, students, and parents. There is another factor to take into account when going through with a new idea and that is the size and scope of the idea. If the idea drastically changes the functionality of the product then there needs to be some oversight from the executives, however smaller changes can be handled by the project managers because remind.com believes in hiring people that you trust to do the right thing for the product and the company.
Process
Remind has vertically stacked teams with full-stack developers on specific technology. In terms of project management Remind follows Parkinson’s Law: “The amount of time a project takes is correlated to the time allotted.” During development the company is very test driven, they rely heavily on reviewing code making sure feature additions follow their company values. Their main values are:
- Teacher obsessed It is important to foster the teacher and student relationship.
- “Find a way” When the company faced with a troubling situation there is always a solution to the problem and the company must find this solution.
- Simplicity, the company tries not to overcomplicate things on their platform and try to remain and streamline and forward as possible.
Output
The feedback is an important metric for success since it will give information about how the application is beneficial/valuable for its users as well as helping the users, especially students, to improve in school – the main vision of Remind. Remind.com focuses a lot on its users by trying to obtain various feedback from different users in order to improve their product. Also, other measurements such as revenue is important to measure success at Remind. Therefore, the key measurements of success for Remind are:
- Customer feedback – feedback from teachers, students and parents
- Number of users
- Revenue
Moreover, Remind is strongly focused on understanding the data in order to improve their product. This will further lead to higher customer satisfaction and higher revenue. Therefore, creating a successful company.
