Will Edwards sits in his new office describing a situation we all know far too well: You’re standing in front of someone you know you’ve met, but you can’t remember his or her name. It’s an awful feeling, but Edwards says his startup has the solution.
MetKnow, a 2017 Arch Grants winner, is a “flashcard and quizzing” mobile application that helps users keep track of acquaintances’ names.
Keep up with local business news and trends
Subscribe to the St. Louis Business newsletter to get the latest insights sent to your inbox every morning.
When Edwards was in college, he often struggled to remember the names of his 200 fraternity brothers. “We would call each other ‘man,’ ‘bro,’ ‘guy’—anything other than their names, because we didn’t want to mess up,” he says. So he created a mobile flashcard set and related quizzes that he and his brothers could use to brush up on names. The early application was widely used at the fraternity; soon, they were referring to each other by name. Edwards filed for a patent, but even then he didn’t plan on it becoming a career. So he went to law school instead.
When his patent for “electronic quizzes and flashcards for the sake of knowing people” was approved, Edwards closed his torts book and dropped out. He described the moment as exciting but scary, “because I had no real plan. We needed to [rebuild and] refine it. But I had a lot of support from my parents, my family, and some of my very best friends.”
“We would call each other ‘man,’ ‘bro,’ ‘guy’—anything other than their names, because we didn’t want to mess up.”
Edwards and his business partners’ first step was to ensure working professionals would be comfortable using flashcards and quizzes in their careers. To test that market, Edwards created MetKnow Political, which included every state representative and U.S. representative. They offered the app to lobbyists, staffers, and politicians and received enough positive feedback to move forward with MetKnow Business, their current product, which launched last January.
MetKnow sells the product through companies’ human resources departments. “Companies want their new employees—whom they spend a lot of money on—to feel comfortable, to know each other,” says Edwards, adding that it’s already used in multiple companies and others are in the works.
Right now, the app is primarily business to business, though MetKnow is launching a new product for individuals this Tuesday, January 23. Anyone can download the app for free, create a group, and make a deck. Each group can be as large or small as you want and link to LinkedIn and Google Images. While the app will be free to download, it won’t be completely free to use. You can share the groups that you create with others, but they’ll need to pay 99 cents to accept a shared group.
Edwards and his colleagues came to St. Louis for the first time in early 2017 to participate in the Midwestern Digital Marketing Conference and were “just blown away,” says Edwards. It was then that they learned about Arch Grants and visited Venture Café. “Right then and there, we went home, applied for the Arch Grant, and waited for the good news,” recalls Edwards. “Being able to say you are an Arch Grant recipient is incredible.”
With the help of Arch Grants and St. Louis, Edwards and his colleagues have high hopes for their company. They hope that MetKnow will quickly become a full-fledged company here and employ more people, with revenue streams from different products. As Edwards says, “We see MetKnow as being more than just an app.”
