Big Ideas That Might Change The World: “An App that connects you to your future and past classmates” with Dwight and Angelique Morrison of PS Remember
We feel a tremendous sense of responsibility in helping people to remain connected and hope to play a part in reducing teen suicide and rates of depression among our youths by installing confidence. Facebook has had a lot of hiccups in this area over the past three years. Social media should be for the purpose of getting people together to connect and to bolster a sense of achievement. What we have seen instead is a breeding ground for bullying, harmful ideologies like racism, cult like behavior, pedophelia in some cases, political info wars. People outside of America can’t connect well and there are real frustrations that people are dealing with on this front. People want to come to a space that isn’t rife with bots, while at the same time seeing their culture represented exist in a setting where free communication is honored without censorship. We work very hard to achieve this balanced ecosystem through diligence, research and technique.
As a part of my series about “Big Ideas That Might Change The World In The Next Few Years’ ‘ I interviewed Dwight and Angelique Morrison. Dwight and Angelique are a husband and wife team of developers for PS Remember, a new app that connects past, present and future students together in over 100 countries around the globe. The app allows you to track who you may have gone to school with, as well as to network with people at various institutions you are thinking about attending or may have already attended.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
The idea surged while Angelique was doing research at the University of Guelph where she had been working for a number of years with scientists to come up with a cure for cystic fibrosis, which generated a lot of press for her. At around the same time, I was working in music and for some reason or other I hooked up with a guy who started a tech company in Los Angeles. I went out there and found that the business relationship began to fall apart as my work was not being recognized by the founder, so I left the company. I spoke to my wife about starting our own tech company to help people in some significant way. We came up with a lot of ideas that night but the one that stuck was the concept that would connect people in different countries that had gone to various schools, colleges or universities. We started the painstaking work of contacting the Ministry of Education in over 106 countries and got the records we needed, which are far more comprehensive than any research we could produce online. My wife is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and she found it very taxing to reconnect with her buddies from school but with the data research background she had, we were fortunate to have been able to collect the information we needed within 18 months. When we look at the landscape of what is going on right now in social media, people — even, high school students — want to connect. Facebook at this time will not allow for that and Instagram is not capable of doing it, so once you have an account with PS Remember you become visible in terms of what academic institutions you are aligned with throughout your lifeline. It took us about two years to build the platform and to make it better. We launched last month and the emails and messages of thanks have been overwhelming, but the reward of connecting people makes it all worthwhile.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
We get a lot of emails specifically from the country of Nigeria. It is interesting that there is a hunger and thirst for what we are doing. Truthfully the tech landscape in Nigeria has exploded and there is a lot of opportunity for our youth to turn this into their new economy, so now here I am, an African American man and we didn’t plan to be recognized as such in from a press standpoint, but it turns out that we are a black couple and are now the poster kids for successful tech firms owned and operated by a black couple. It happened unintentionally, but if it serves to inspire those who feel that they now have a chance to shine, particularly in our urban communities here in America then that’s awesome. Nigeria is our biggest supporter right now and we are confident that we can hit a critical mass in our first year out the gate, just knowing that there are 190 million people living in the country of Nigeria alone!
Can you tell us about your “Big Idea That Might Change The World”?
Our idea will change the world because this will be a platform that people can connect with on a developmental level particularly if they have been socialized outside of the US and Canada. A pre college or university student can talk about what school they want to attend or decide to mobilize students all around the world in one place to effectuate change. What I like about what we are doing is that if you are currently attending a university and you are a freshman and it is difficult for you to make friends — if you and others like you are attending the same school, you can activate a real connection. Kids these days prefer to meet online before connecting in person, to eventually forge friendships online and create long lasting relationships offline. We learned from our developers in India that there are over 550 million high school students and over 200 million college and university students within our reach in this global initiative.
How do you think this will change the world?
We feel a tremendous sense of responsibility in helping people to remain connected and hope to play a part in reducing teen suicide and rates of depression among our youths by installing confidence. Facebook has had a lot of hiccups in this area over the past three years. Social media should be for the purpose of getting people together to connect and to bolster a sense of achievement. What we have seen instead is a breeding ground for bullying, harmful ideologies like racism, cult like behavior, pedophelia in some cases, political info wars. People outside of America can’t connect well and there are real frustrations that people are dealing with on this front. People want to come to a space that isn’t rife with bots, while at the same time seeing their culture represented exist in a setting where free communication is honored without censorship. We work very hard to achieve this balanced ecosystem through diligence, research and technique.
We will change the world in terms of how people interact on social in three ways;
Process: When you enter the PS Remember platform, the system tells you through a notification “your classmates and friend suggestion”. These are the people that went to school with you. Facebook does not have that tech in terms of a search that will give you the option of presenting all possible students in a given class or given year.
Reach: Facebook can’t seem to connect you with people from other academies in other countries because it’s algorithms are programmed to connect you only with friends of friends and people within the parameter of your physical locations. Yet there are 7 billion people on planet earth and only 1 billion of them are on facebook. That leaves the 6 billion of us to fend for ourselves! India, for example, has 1.3 million schools. If I want to connect with my buddies in Nigeria for instance, which is almost impossible, what we have done, through the registration process, is to identify every time there has been a change in academic status. It asks you: did you complete the degree or program? In what country? What are you doing now? We’ve got people from the country of Barbados, China, India, the Ukraine, french speaking countries like Martinique, the Congo which are recognized on the platform. I could go on.
Flexibility: Other benefits include being able to alter your search by year by country, by high school or by college and university. You can even run a search to find people who have previously attended that particular school. This is not remotely possible for facebook and one of the main reasons for this is that it would mandate every single member to enter their academic credentials and change in status.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this idea that people should think more deeply about?
One of the things that we do not incorporate is third party applications. Candy Crush is an example of the third party application. The reason why companies use 3rd party applications is to generate additional income from the end user, but there are other ways to make money. We also understand that investors would like to make extra money but our method is not to attach ourselves to the user’s credit card data like a parasite. Because in our case protecting the user is paramount, advertisers will never see any information about them, but will instead have access to a distribution of people in a segment of its choosing. The benefit to the advertiser is the market to which it will have access. Our business model includes creating portals for reunions, so in a sense, we see a whole new business emerge from the events planning side of the application. And while we have laid out the entrapments of social media communications to the dark side in our former examples, we do not allow anyone under the age of 16 to come onto the platform. Little girls cannot be having conversations with grown men. When it comes to the issue of misinformation, we believe strongly that everything should be vetted correctly. This was the purpose of having completed the painstaking groundwork of acquiring registration rolls from ministries of education. We believe that it is possible to work with every country but we are cautious as to which countries we will be staying away from based on when sanctions will be lifted.
What do you need to lead this idea to widespread adoption?
We need to get 1M members in 24 months. If we can get to 500,000 in our first year, that would be awesome. We bootstrapped the company and financed everything from our personal accounts. That works out to about $280,000 in two years. Most of our funds have gone into developing the app, getting it to the point at which it is functional now. We raked through the savings account to make this happen. We want every student in the world to be connected and to have an account with PS Remember.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why.
5 things that I wish someone told me before I started are:
- Have a large amount of cash aside for marketing. We hired too many developers. We didn’t know a lot about the tech terms and the technology. We are constantly learning and this takes capital. We are fortunate to be working with our publicist at Zebra Public Relations who will be able to help us with our marketing needs. To this point, we have personally hired at least two different development teams.
- Educate yourself about the space you are in. If you are bootstrapping, it is very normal that you may not have a guide or a mentor in the beginning. As you chart forward, you may seek information by those who have forged a path ahead of you. Take every opportunity to learn from those who have made it before you. If you need someone to motivate you to do this, I would suggest that you are in the wrong business.
- Trust yourself to assess who you will engage. We would often get emails from others interested in joining my venture. Many will share how they can help us on our journey. Eventually, we found that most of them are there only to receive the financial benefits but are less interested in the grunt work attached. Be cautious of these kinds of people offering to be a mentor or partner. It was only when we put our faces on the brand that we started to engage a wider audience, but we had to learn this from marketers and before we could connect to authors like Yitzi Weiner.
- Be Consistent Some days will be good and others not. You have to ride the wave. Don’t get depressed when you don’t experience immediate results. Every day requires diligent work. In business, there is always something you can do everyday to make your company better.
- Stay focused. You have to believe very strongly in your vision . You were out on this earth to do something bing and it is up to you to deliver it. We don’t believe in plan B.
Based on the future trends in your industry, if you had a million dollars, what would you invest in?
Marketing and promotion, is what we would invest in as we want to share this innovative platform to former, prospective and future students. Also we want to advertise in the language of all of the countries that we serve around the world. We also want to invest in new technologies to improve user experience.
Which principles or philosophies have guided your life? Your career?
For us, especially because of our faith, we are bound by certain principles. This means that we must go by our honor and by our words. If we take something, we have to also give back. Living the work of integrity and following through on doing what you say you will is of paramount importance. If we are bound to an agreement, financially or otherwise, we do not care if it takes our last penny to resolve. We have to do what we said we would and we have also come to understand that if one is not able to follow through on their word, then it means that they cannot be trusted.
Can you share with our readers what you think are the most important “success habits” or “success mindsets”?
Never giving up is extremely important to us. If you believe something at the core of who you are, even if you can’t find funding or don’t have the money to do something, keep pushing forward. Just go hard or go home! And there should be no plan B. Having a plan B only means that you aren’t confident in your ability and there will be some sort of disaster to follow. Giving up means being selfish. Stay motivated to continue based on the people who are waiting for you to succeed. If you have an idea that you know is going to change the world and shift the Universe in a positive way and you feel it within your core that that it will be successful, you have to adopt a stance of never giving up. Can you imagine if there were no Steve Jobs or if he had given up after the first iteration of his Apple computer? Where would we be today?
Some very well known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say?
I would say that we should go ahead and change the world together. No other company in the world can reach this group of people in this way and the opportunity lies in connecting people together at one of the most fundamental times in their lives. The technology for the reach in number of students is a testament to our success and keeps us at an advantage as now we are available on Google Play. The other thing is that we are people of integrity with vision and technical background, so no question exists as to whether we will make a fantastic partnership! Soon every student in the world will have a PS account to stay connected. Along the journey, we would like to urge the IPO. We want the prize so that we can use the resources to upgrade the technology.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can follow us on www.psremember.com (@psremember) to stay up to date on our work.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational. 🙂
Big Ideas That Might Change The World: “An App that connects you to your future and past… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
