RoundPier: High School and College App - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

No, but we have a development team responsible for the product.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

The most challenging part is finding the right content and features to help our users who are mainly 13-18-year-olds, as they look to build their skills and profile.

_{Greg Zavorotniy - CoFounder RoundPier}

The interviewee, Greg Zavorotniy, is one of the co-founders of RoundPier, an extracurricular community and resource center for middle and high school students. He comes from a family of educators and has been involved in a number of education projects. Greg started his career in finance working with both large and small-cap companies in the US, Europe, and Africa across M&A and fundraising assignments in a variety of sectors. After stints as an investment banker in New York and London, he moved into emerging markets and spent 6 years investing in and managing companies in Eastern Europe and Africa. Greg holds an MA degree in Statistics from Columbia University.

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

I think LinkedIn, not just as an app but the platform as a whole, is a great example of how social media apps can add value to people. Similarly, what we are building at RoundPier isn’t just an app: it is an after-school community and resource center for middle and high school students.

How long have you been working on this app?

We formally launched the app in mid 2018.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

We spent a lot of time talking to students, schools, and educators before we launched. Our goal is to become a go-to extracurricular platform for students, allowing them to discover a range of opportunities from internships, competitions, to projects for their school clubs.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

We don't really have competitors who do what we do in this academic space, simply because our audience is young and it isn't a demographic a lot of developers are interested in helping. This is what makes RoundPier unique: it isn’t just the product itself, but the quality of content and the members.

We built RoundPier to become the largest depository of extracurricular opportunities and competitions. We are also proud to have a very active member base of the most talented and motivated school students globally. In terms of product, RoundPier is not just a place to build a profile and find opportunities, but a community that supports a variety of school clubs, events, and competitions. RoundPier's team itself hosts a number of student pitch competitions, poetry contests, and more. Third-party programs use RoundPier to introduce their events and competition as well. All this in one single place: RoundPier.

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

We are scaling our school club platform within RoundPier with the idea to become a place for any club or chapter to be able to use the platform to expand, connect with other similar groups and promote the work they are doing. With that, we are adding group chats/channels for those clubs to communicate internally. There are also a number of features related to events and competitions. Finally, we are rolling out new features for organizations and institutions to make it easier to recruit students and promote their programs.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

If you are a high or middle school student join RoundPier to connect with others and find new opportunities as well as bring your school clubs, projects and organizations onto our unique platform.