How A 24-Year-Old Built A $44 Million Business From His Laptop

"I said I'm about to start senior year of high school. And they're like, ‘Woah, you're young!’”

Dylan Diamond was in the final stages of an interview with Tesla. Yeah - at 17! But wait, it gets even crazier…

Not only did Dylan become Tesla’s youngest intern in the WORLD, but by 24, he built an app that blew up, with millions of users. Here's how it all went down:

Q: What was the story behind Saturn and how did you get it to reach the top charts on the App Store?

It started as a schedule-sharing website.

There was a moment twice a year in homeroom where you would get your paper schedule for the upcoming semester. People would take a picture of it, post it on Facebook, and say, “Like, or comment if you have class with me.” 

This was a common ritual across every high school in the country. Even before Facebook, people were comparing notes about who they were sitting next to in class.

So, I built a web app that would auto-complete your courses and teachers. You'd input the period number, and it would match you with your classmates. This was a rudimentary calendar schedule sharing tool and friend finder for my community.

I posted a link to it in the school Facebook group, and every kid got on that web app.

Q: Around this time, you joined Tesla and became their youngest intern ever. How did that happen?

Around the same time that I was building this schedule sharing product, my parents had gotten a Model S. I thought of it more as a computer on wheels than a vehicle.

And I'm not a car buff, but I was a huge nerd. So it was really exciting for me to see this sexy vehicle with an API and an interface to the internet. 

I hooked it up to my Wi-Fi network and did a lot of reverse engineering.

At the time Tesla's app was pretty simple. No map, data, sharing or anything of the sort, but the API had all that data.

So I basically built Garmin for Tesla on the Apple Watch. You could track where you're going, share rides with friends, talk about energy consumption, max speed, and display fun stats.

At the time the community was really tight knit and everyone was sharing in an online forum called the Tesla Motors Club. So I hacked together this app called Tesla Toolbox and posted it in the Tesla Motors Club. It went viral - 20,000 people bought the app in the first month. 

Q: How did Tesla originally reach out to you? 

I think it was an email. I got on the phone with a recruiter and my age did not come up until the end when I said, “I'm about to start senior year of high school” and they were like, “Whoa, you're young!”

When I first got to Tesla, I was able to take a lot of their backhouse data software and build it into internal tools. So things like inputting your destination into the supercharger network and seeing the nearest charging stations along the way.

I had such free reign. If I had an idea they just let me run with it. You were able to build whatever you wanted.

We were expanding so quickly at the time: Tesla was launching Model 3, the supercharger network was doubling year over year, and it was a really exciting time to be at the company during hyper growth - especially when the entire world was betting against us.

We were building cars on the weekends trying to hit 5,000 vehicles a week. It was so scrappy and taught me a lot, but the people I worked with were incredible.

Q: What were the most important things you learned at Tesla that you took with you when starting your own company?

Tesla didn't have excess capital, so you had to really be scrappy and when Saturn started we decided to self fund it. Max and I learned to really be scrappy and focus on one problem at a time. 

Secondly, at Tesla, when I was building software, there was no designer. I was the designer. I was the tester. I was the user. It was a one man show for at least what I was building.

So I took a lot of that with me and was able to make sure that it’s a best in class product.

Teslas look really good, but they're also best in class engineering, and oftentimes you have one or the other. Working there taught me the marriage of those two values.

Q: How did you meet your co-founder, Max?

He pinged me on LinkedIn and said, “Hey, I'm the youngest Managing Director at Havas, a big marketing firm, and worked with brands like Coca Cola, Beats, T Mobile…”

He was also not in a frat and prioritized his work over school and thought we would bond.

So he invited me over and we just talked for hours, spitballing ideas back and forth, talking about each other's different careers, and we had a very complimentary skill set.

He was all marketing and I was very much an engineer. It was a good mix.

We didn't know right away what we were going to build, but eventually we started looking at the Google Analytics data for that scheduling product. He saw that step function of 50% daily active users over enrollment to about 90% and he said,“Dylan, you have to bring this to another school.” 

It took some convincing because I was doing the dual degree and working at Tesla.

But on the weekends we would build this and we decided to take it to my cousin's high school. We got a signal that we had something when half the school downloaded the app on the first day. 

Q: When did you decide to drop out of Penn and leave Tesla?

I was coding day and night, trying to keep up with school, Tesla, and what would eventually become Saturn. All of this was taking up increasingly more time and Max had started to talk to a lot of VCs.

We took a trip out to California, with no intention of raising capital, went to LA and then SF and just started pitching.

We made a deck before and worked on that in the hotel room late at night before we raised.

We were really fortunate to meet General Catalyst and Niko Bonatsos there. They invested Snapchat and were one of the really good consumer investors.

When we met him, we just had a good conversation. It didn't feel like a pitch meeting. And the next day, he gave us a term sheet. It was for $2.5 Million. And that was like “Wow! We did not expect that.”

When we got that term sheet, it became clear that we have a big opportunity and we thought that we couldn't hire a team around us if we weren't fully committed.

Q: What tactics did you leverage to scale to millions of users across the country?

We didn't really do any paid marketing for the first 2-3 years of the company.

We leveraged an ambassador network for both user acquisition and user research.

When we would go to a school in a new market we didn't empathize with the users as much as the northeast public schools where I grew up. So we would work with them, we would understand what is important about the product for them.

Then those students would plant the seeds and Saturn would grow year over year.

So that's why the schools grow year over year.

It took us some time to identify that growth model as part of our business, but we really leaned into it.

For Dylan Diamond’s full story you can listen to my interview with him on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or by clicking the image below.