Vancouver-based startup Reach offers postsecondary students efficient way to tackle group projects

This past Tuesday marked the dreaded first day back to school for many young Vancouverites, and even more daunting for postsecondary students: the start of a semester packed with multiple group projects.

Whether you’re the kid who shamelessly shows up tardy to last-minute meetings or the one who selflessly volunteers to review (read: edit the fuck out of) the final product before submission, it’s a prospect worsened by the fact that you’ll likely have to put up with an outdated learning-management system because that one dude in your professor-assigned group refuses to use Facebook.

Two Vancouver-born entrepreneurs, however, are hoping to alleviate the pain of forced academic group work—at least by a little—with the introduction of Reach Social Inc., a streamlined communication platform in which postsecondary students can connect with one another.

“As students, technology is completely integral to our lives every single day,” Sarah Main, cofounder and CEO of Reach, tells the Straight by phone, “but when you get into the education space, there’s no software that’s actually a pleasure to use or easy to use.”

Frustrated by the lack of effective messaging channels available to students during her time at McGill University—the school’s learning-management system was an eyesore and social-media platforms like Facebook just seemed unprofessional—the sociology and economics grad joined forces with longtime friend, designer, and Reach cofounder and CPO Brent Hussey to fill the void.

The result is a sleek online platform tailored for efficient student collaboration and equipped with arguably the best of Slack and Snapchat, two communication outlets popular with young adults. “We love the simplicity of Slack,” says Hussey, “so we’ve always wanted to model our product after that.”

Students register with Reach by entering a name and e-mail. They then select their postsecondary institution from the provided options before being taken to a list of “episodes”.

“Episodes”, in the Reach world, are groups or teams with a predetermined expiration date. Students can create a new episode by providing a name (“Group A in BIO101”, for example), a course’s title, and a password, or join an existing one by entering the key provided to them by the group’s creator.

There, users may send private or public messages to select groups of people or real-time direct messages to individuals. Once an episode reaches its expiration date—at the end of a semester, for example—the group becomes inactive and its members are wiped clean. Content uploaded to an episode, such as spreadsheets, Word documents, or images shared through the integrated Google Drive or Dropbox functions, may be saved as needed.

“We wanted the idea of an ephemeral connection,” explains Main, “so basically, a workspace where you go in and you get your work done, but you don’t have to hold on to any of the people you work with because you might never see them again.”

But don’t expect Reach to contain the filters, GIFs, and friend requests—or awkward un-friending processes—inherent in other social-media platforms. “When you log onto Facebook to do schoolwork, the problem is you’re bound to these classmates for as long as you have Facebook,” says Hussey. “With Reach, there’s no personal information—you’re not seeing people’s photos from spring break.”

“We really wanted to distance ourselves from the whole idea of that, where you go in and get distracted and you spend a lot of time on there,” Main adds. “This way, you have more time to do whatever you want.”

After earning a spot in the 2015 cohort of The Next Big Thing, a Vancouver-based charitable organization that offers budding entrepreneurs mentorship, tools, and support, Main and Hussey were able to secure enough funds to develop a preliminary model of Reach.

The beta version of the platform opens to students at the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, and the British Columbia Institute of Technology, this Thursday (September 8).

Interested students may create an account with the platform online. Main hopes to have Reach fully developed for an official launch next fall.

“It’s been a lot of learning every single day,” she says of the lead-up, “but we’re excited to finally get it out there.”