Loopin Origins

I have been meaning to write this for a while now. Just wanted to pen my thoughts about how Loopin came to be ??

When I moved in my career, from coding to an Engineering Manager and subsequently a Product Manager - I noticed a recurring problem. When working with multiple teams and on multiple things - I struggled to keep up with all the meetings (and there were so many of them!). I used to go into a meeting without past or updated context, and status of pending items. I found myself spending a lot of time figuring out "what did we discuss the last time", "why did we take this decision", "didn't we say person 'x' had to do this?", "am I even needed for this meeting?" And not only before the meeting, even after it's over, sharing what we discussed with clear next steps and action items, tracking them to completion, and infinite follow-ups. A lot of them eventually ended back on my calendar!

The problem just compounded as I started relying on my calendar more and more. It started dictating when I needed to do my meetings and tasks but lacked context about what, how, and why. That context resided in emails, meeting notes, to-do apps, personal thoughts scattered across places, communication channels, etc. I realized humans have amazing short-term memory but shitty long-term memory (validated by how Twitter reacts to all news and events across the world ??) and I found myself constantly trying to search for my notes, my emails, my slack messages, etc to join bits together.

I still got up every single morning and looked at my calendar, reluctantly, knowing there are leaks here - magically hoping it will change one day to give me a richer context around my day's work. I wanted elves to come at night and fix this for me.

It didn't happen! :(

Would you imagine calendars in the current form to be driving your day forward, as work evolves? Calendar isn’t equipped to do that and wasn’t built to dictate your day. Calendar, in its current form, can’t support modern-day workflows. It doesn’t help you plan and navigate your day/week. It has essentially been reduced to storing meetings.

Yeah, I get it - that you can still collate all the data around meetings and to-dos and notes in another place and then schedule them on your calendar. It's essentially asking people to remember to put everything on their calendar if they want to be more productive. It feels forced due to a lack of a better option and ends up becoming a mess! It's like storing your notes as email drafts or pouring your whiskey into a wine glass…. . you can do it, but it just doesn’t go!

Phew! Did we honestly ever stop to think why calendars are so messed up!!

Well, Parth, Mehul, and I did and we thought - ‘There has to be a better way!’ Instantly heard out of nowhere - “And there is Kevin!” (Realised F.R.I.E.N.D.S is etched in my memories - I could derive past context here. Wish calendars were able to do that automatically for me ??)

So we started a while ago on this fun and daunting journey to build Loopin! 8 months in - we have never been more convinced about a problem.?

With Loopin - we want to define the relationship between your work and time by helping you plan better and giving you context about your work at the right time. Loopin is bringing in all the elements required to give our users a better experience to reduce work of work.

We define work as W = Meetings + Tasks + Notes

And we define Loopin L = W + Time. Loopin provides you with all the context about your work to be done at a certain point in time. We are doing to calendars, what slack did to chats. We aim to propel calendars to the forefront and create calendar first workflows for busy professionals, enabling them to focus on unadulterated work. No more thinking of calendars as an afterthought or a secondary integration to some other work app.

We are on a mission to become the ‘Driver of your Day’

With an amazing set of early users, we are racing towards the solution to this problem.

Loopin is now in private BETA and I invite you to come and join us in this journey to re-imagine your calendars

Fortunately for us, there were people, from the very start, who resonated with the problem statement and were willing to back us. I thank all our early users and believers/investors (Venture Highway, First Cheque, and our amazing angels - Maneesh, Adit, Rohit, Ankit)