Rush: The App for Community
December 2019
What was Rush?
Rush was a social networking app for local, curated communities. As small communities evolved online, Facebook, Twitter, Discord and Reddit simply were not cutting it. Those apps were designed for broad use cases, hence opening a void for niche community building (5k-50k members).
The top 3 most used social apps by university students were Instagram, Snapchat, and GroupMe (WhatsApp, Messenger, and WeChat internationally). Although those apps are great for communicating with your top 10 best friends, they are not great for connecting you to your local community.
Product
Rush helped students discover what was going on around them, get involved in groups on campus, and feel more connected to their community. The app served as a digital bulletin board showcasing the events, people, and communities within a specific university. Rush was the homepage of college life.
Onboarding
To onboard onto the app, users had to authenticate their account with their student edu email account and enable their geolocation to be in proximity to their university. After authenticating their identity and student status, users would add their date of birth, name, setup their profile, add their class schedule, and choose basic interest categories so that we could recommend them clubs, events, and friends to add based on their interests.
Events
Once a student had registered and onboarded, they were able to see all upcoming events at their university. Events could be made public to all students or private and only able to join via an invite link from the event organizer. The event page showcased the date, time, location, guest list, and automatically created a group chat with all attendees.
Clubs
The distinction between a club and an event was that an event only occurred once, whereas a club had events that would occur frequently. The design of the two were similar in that they showcased meeting date, time, location, attendees, a group chat etc. but a club page had a forum where participants could post relevant content.
Classes
Students were able to join class groups, which functioned similarly to a club. All of their classes would be presented on their calendar in time sequence so a student could plan out their day in advance. Students frequently met other students through their class attendance list and could share material about their class, homework, professors, etc.
Profile
Each student created a profile during registration which showcased their university, class year (freshman, sophomore, etc.), profile picture, friends, interests, and classes. Privacy settings were developed so that users could select what information they showed to other students. The Instagram API was integrated so student’s Instagram photos could be showcased on their profile so they wouldn’t have to repost their images to Rush.
Metrics
In the first year Rush was online, we had:
- 14 campuses in the North East, United States
- 34K DAU
- 65k MAU
- 88% of users sent messages once per week
- 6.4K unique weekly visitors
- 32K users join at least 1 event and 1 group
- 4.9K weekly friend requests
My sentiment is mixed. However, Rush was still early in its development. Many features that drive engagement (like push notifications, and a native notification management center) weren’t built yet.
From my understanding, the MAU/DAU indicates that Rush wasn’t sticky enough for explosive growth. There was an issue with scaling due to the fact that colleges have high intrinsic turnover — 50% of the total student body joining and leaving every year (incoming freshman and outgoing senior classes).
But I leave further interpretation to you.
Lastly, there was a high degree of work required to onboard a new campus. We needed to scrape the class schedules for each new school and pay for brand representatives to bring the app online.
Takeaways
Rush was taken offline in early 2020 due to the pandemic. Investors were interested in our engagement metrics and relative success, but struggled with understanding how Rush would scale outside of universities and eventually develop a path to revenue.
Starting and running a company is no small feat. A few of the positive learnings I walked away with were:
Be obsessively focused on your users and solving their day-to-day problems. Even better to be a user yourself.
When you’re doing the right work, it won’t feel like work. Chase the flow feeling that comes from doing the things you love.
Employees and culture make or break a company. You can’t do everything yourself and shouldn’t even if you think you can. Treat your employees with the utmost respect, foster an environment of transparency, honesty, and comfort. Give them autonomy over their location, schedule, and the projects they take on. The best people work with you, not for you.