Appsurdity co-founders Matthew Murphy and Mary Yang Talk Quad

A small team with a big vision, Appsurdity Inc. looks to tackle some of the technology problems you may not have ever considered. The startup’s newest project Quad is helping college students discover groups and connect on a large scale, supporting massive group chats up to 500 people. That’s 10x more users than other group chat tools on the market, distinguishing Appsurdity as a company that looks at the bigger picture.

In today’s CEO Series we hear from Appsurdity co-founders Matthew Murphy and Mary Yang on the Quad app, its capabilities and use cases. The duo also shares plans for the future of Quad beyond college campuses.

Q&A with Appsurdity

SA: Group chat has been around for some time. What problem is Quad looking to solve?

Murphy: Quad is our second app — the first app was Dubbler (an app for short-form audio messages). Quad tackles a bigger problem. In working with global teams in China on Dubbler, we often used chat apps. One of the problems we ran into was the 50-person limit, which made no sense because, technically, you can have more than 50 people in a chat. It came down to usability and interface.

With Quad, users can break-off conversations with individuals and smaller groups. It offers event-planning, share voice, location, and images — not video. It supports emoji and allows users to play real-time games, share doodles, and like messages.

Another problem we’re addressing is that most chat apps only let you add people from your contacts or maybe on social media sites. One thing we ran into on college campuses is people don’t always know each other yet. The Discovery option lets users see group chats around them, helping them explore the campus.

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What backend challenges did your team face to be able to support 500 people in a single group chat?

Yang: One challenge is when people start talking, how quickly you can handle those messages. our protocol is completely different.

The biggest challenge is still the number of messages per second. The more people you have, the number of messages is really huge. They could probably send up to 10 different messages per second, sometimes more. It was a challenge to support this type of sending and ensure all messages get delivered.

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How can your technology scale, and what sectors beyond college students do you hope to attract?

Yang: All the messaging capabilities are point-to-point, so the only thing we need to scale up is the groups. If there are a lot of quads, scale depends on the number of points.

Beyond college students, gamers are a huge use case — Xbox gamers want real-time communication while they’re gaming. Also, local groups, like a yoga classes. This is a great way to have that social interaction in a group chat environment.

We do have a few companies using it … professional use cases are even more interesting. College kids will sometimes just chat, but companies need to actually organize people into sub-groups. That’s one thing I personally ran into with a company I worked with. If everyone’s chatting, your messages get lost, but with subgroups it helps [following messages].

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Given the popularity of social apps and mobile accessibility in Asia, how do panAsian trends with mobile chat impact your business?

Murphy: Asia’s ahead of us in chat apps, and we test the features we like in American markets and roll out the best.

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Learn from the Best

You’re an entrepreneur well versed in the startup lifestyle, and have created a group chat tool based on a need you faced during collaboration efforts amongst team members around the globe. Based on your experience, do you prefer chalkboards or whiteboards?

Based on our global team, the tool that we prefer to use for interactive brainstorming is Google Docs, which provides us with a real-time collaborating space that members of the team can add their ideas on a topic while we’re having an international skype call.

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What are 8 things that make you smarter?

1. Exercise daily
2. Sleep enough so you’re refreshed
3. Eat healthy so you have the energy to perform at your best
4. Break up the work day with some time to have fun with your colleagues (i.e. a game of ping pong)
5. Listen to Audible books during the morning commute (my favorites are biographies of great leaders)
6. Clear your head by spending time with your family / kids, which helps fuel creativity and my imagination
7. Take time to stop and admire amazing accomplishments (i.e. the building of a bridge)
8. Stay organized and focused with tools like Evernote, Omnifocus and Quad. I make it a habit to write everything down that I need to work on so my head is clear, focused and not worried about forgetting something.