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Private network Drund gains popularity with school districts
Photo
Lee Yi, Drund founder
By ROBERT CONNELLY
rconnelly@vindy.com
BOARDMAN
Local technology company Drund continues to expand into other parts of the country and has begun adding more employees as it expands.
Drund founder Lee Yi said the company hired on four more employees three months ago and at the same time shifted into a bigger office in their strip mall location, Parkside Place, located at 945 Boardman-Canfield Road. That move increased the company’s space from 1,200 square feet to 4,000 square feet.
“Hiring in technology is a difficult process ...[they have to] fit culturally, fit skill-wise, and fit in vision,” Yi said.
He said the four new hires have been working through a three-to-six-month hiring process for new employees. Yi added that new hires have come as demand for Drund has grown and the two go hand-in-hand.
Drund is a private mobile application, with similar features of social-media platform Facebook, that is used by school districts to encourage community engagement by creating a platform where teachers, students, and parents can interact by posting pictures or assignments that are going on in the classrooms daily.
The program is free, and the company makes money by selling sponsorships to local businesses such as back-to-school sales.
Austintown School District was the first to use Drund. Yi said Drund is saving districts money — 5 to 10 percent savings per district building, by teachers posting handouts online.
Yi said they currently have demand from 45 of the 88 counties in the state and have drawn interest from other states, such as Florida and Texas.
He explained: “Education professionals coordinate and talk. If you do a good job somewhere ... you get referred to other people in other states.”
The small tech start-up had nine employees before the recent hiring of four more. Of those nine, four have been with Drund since its beginning, including software engineer Kevin Krpicak and lead software engineer Mike Helmick. Of the 13 employees, six went to Youngstown State University.
Krpicak said that he knew a lot of his coworkers when he began at Drund from classes at YSU or knowing them from the area. His focus is working on the different versions of Drund and working on the website. When asked whether he’d like Drund if it would have been around when he was in high school, he said, “It would have been really nice ... would have been nice to see pictures” of the band and other school groups. He said it would have helped with school pride.
Helmick’s focus at Drund is writing the software code for new features of the program, such as when they brought in the ability for users to “like” a post. He said he is currently working on creating an administrator feature for groups related to teams or activities, such as football and cheerleading.
Helmick said he hopes to have that finished and launched on Drund by mid-June and available for the start of next school year.
He did say the time frames change on different projects. “You have to take into account infrastructure and if there’s any amount of data being migrated and how long it takes me, the back-end guy, to write it and then” others develop it and tests are done, Helmick said. It takes Drund anywhere from two weeks to months, depending on how tests go and how the system holds up to launch a new feature.
Both men said new hires can add more to Drund with new ideas and a new set of eyes.
Krpicak said, “You can always learn from new people.”