Alums launching Emory-exclusive app today

What if GroupMe, Tinder, and Emory mobile all came into one application?

Three graduates are today launching an app aimed at simplifying the lives of Emory students.

My101 is a multifunctional app that students can use to access their classes, groups, private chats, and even swipe right or left on the in-college radar.

It is currently exclusive to Emory students and is officially being launched today. The main purpose of the app is to enable students to have a hands on college experience.

It has a search feature that allows students to access their course material, group chats for executive boards and classes with the features of sharing files, saving a lot of time for a lot of people. It has many other functions that connect students to everything that’s on campus.

The developers of the app are Ladi Fatade, Imad Abusam, and Jacob Little.

Ladi and Imad graduated together from Emory in 2009, and Jacob graduated from Georgia State. In an interview with Ladi, we found out more about My101.

Tell me more about yourself and your connection to Emory

I graduated form Emory in 2009, I was a political science major. Emory was always a work hard play hard school. After graduation, I was thinking of going to Law school but it during my senior year, I saw commercials on TV I liked, and I would take up case studies on them and do research.

I went on the Emory Alumni network and spammed everyone who worked in advertising. Thankfully, one person responded. She told me to check out some books on advertising and suggested some schools for creative advertising. I actually went to one of those schools, Portfolio Center in Midtown Atlanta, for two years

How did you come up with the idea for My101?

A friend of mine who goes to Georgia State said he was living off campus.  He missed a quiz and thought, “We need to figure out a way to stay more in tuned with what’s going on in college”.

Jacob, Imad, and I decided that we needed to fill this void and somehow create a platform to better connect students to their college life.

How did it go the first time you launched the app?

One of the cool things about the app is that it’s really easy to sell. Students see the need for this, and whenever they see it they can’t believe that someone hasn’t come up with it already. We had about 500 users in the first three weeks.

After the first launch, we took all the feedback we got and we made the app so much smoother and better. And that’s what we love about Emory students – we take their feedback and we make it better. One of the features they suggested was the inclusion of subgroups, since Emory students require these groups for exec boards.

What is unique about My101 that other apps don’t have?

If you’re on campus and you really want to take a Salsa class, you can’t just go on GroupMe and search for ‘Salsa’. But with My101, you can just search for Salsa classes and groups. That’s something unique about us.

But the uniqueness, it really depends on which competitor you’re talking about. You can’t share files on GroupMe, but you can share files on My101 since Google Docs is integrated into the app.

Is the app completely free? Or are there certain functions that require a payment to be made?

Yes, the app is completely free. We don’t even have ads. How do we make money? Like I said, we have a marketplace. If you’re trying to sell your books back, you know you’re going to sell them for a loss. But through the app, we will connect you to another college student who wants to purchase the book, and we would charge a small fee on this to make the connection.

We’re trying to find better ways to make money rather than ad money.

How did you come up with the Radar feature or the “Tinder” part of the app?

We know that college is about academics but it is about your social life as well. When I was graduating, a lot of … not a lot but a few girls came up to me like, “Oh Ladi, I had a crush on you, you know back in the day” and I was like, why are you telling me this when I’m graduating?

A lot of my friends had the same experience, so we decided to create the Radar. You don’t have to really put yourself out there, it’s just a way to make connections and at especially when you’re at a school like Emory, a lot of students don’t realise this until they graduate, that you’re in a bubble where you have all these intelligent people that you have something in common with, and once you leave that you’re out in the world by yourself and it’s these connections you make at Emory that’ll matter the most.

Also, the radar only works in your college – so the Emory radar is exclusive to students at the Atlanta campus and the Oxford campus.

Is there something that you wanted to add to the app, but couldn’t?

The way we thought about this app was in the long term. In the long term, students are looking for employers, so what we wanted to do was to get corporations to recruit students through the app.

If you go to the search feature of the app, you can search for people based on their skills and majors.  In the long term, we want to provide a platform on which corporations can give case studies to students while they’re still on campus and that’s a better way to recruit rather than relying on GPAs. Your GPA is just a number.

What is your personal favorite feature of the app?

Definitely Search. Search is the coolest part of the app because you can literally search for anyone, or anything on your college campus. Let’s say you’re a DJ, and if I’m looking for a DJ on campus to work with, I can search for DJs on the app, and it’ll show up the profiles of DJs.

What is the purpose of your meme campaign? Why choose memes?

We want to be able to entertain people while we’re promoting our app. If you’re promoting something, you’re taking time from someone else and we don’t people to think that we’re completely wasting their time so we thought of something fun and quick, and memes were perfect for this.

On March 14th, you’ll see a lot of memes on campus. We’ll be giving out a lot of cool stuff and refreshments too in the DUC and on Wonderful Wednesdays.

 

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