Iamschool

Recognizing the Purpose

Before Iamschool, I founded BAD Company and released apps like LoopMonster. That taught me how the App Store works, and how many apps chase short-term downloads. I wanted to work on something that lasted. Iamschool, a young startup from KAIST, was replacing the paper newsletters that schools sent home every week, cutting waste and making sure every parent got the same information. I joined as one of the early members.

Researching school communication

My first job was to evaluate the early prototype. In 2012, UX was still new in Korea, so I audited UX courses at KAIST and applied what I learned, like journey mapping and affinity diagrams, directly to the product.

Over two weeks, I interviewed 12 students, 8 parents and 12 teachers about how school communication worked for them and what they expected from an app. I mapped each group’s pain points and found both usability problems and a bigger opportunity: students were the most engaged users, but the product wasn’t built for them.

Redesigning the experience

Users saw Iamschool as a copy of the school website: formal, text-heavy and easy to ignore. The reason was simple. The app crawled content from school websites, so it looked like them.

So we stopped crawling and built an admin tool for partner schools, so teachers could post announcements and class updates written for mobile. I trained teachers and staff to use it, visited schools regularly to collect feedback, and fed fixes back into the product. During my time, partner schools grew from fewer than 10 to more than 50.

Making school feel personal

We also changed how schools and parents felt about the app. For Teacher’s Day, I ran a campaign where students sent video messages and flowers to their teachers through Iamschool. It turned a school notice app into something people shared and talked about.

Finding the business model

Once the parent network was in place, we needed revenue. Ads from after-school academies didn’t bring in enough. Parents were already using the app every day for school news, and many were looking for activities for their kids. So I planned a hands-on learning program service inside the app: field trips, workshops and camps from outside providers, with Iamschool earning a commission on each booking. A year after launch, it brought in more than half of the company’s revenue.

Reflection

Iamschool is where I learned that a good product also has to be a good business. My research pointed to students, and I pushed for features built around them: polls, lunch menus and activities. Leadership chose to focus on schools and parents instead, because that’s where a sustainable business was. I disagreed at the time. But it pushed me to look for ideas that served users and also made money, which is how I came up with the hands-on learning program service. The company kept growing and was acquired by NHN in 2017.

Working next to founders from KAIST also showed me how much research and education matter in building trust, and it’s part of why I went back to school.