Meetings are essential to helping teams, especially remote or hybrid ones, stay in touch. But too many meetings can become unproductive, as shared information and action items get buried underneath all the other stuff workers have to do. Productivity platform Loopin wants to help by integrating with work apps and gathering information from across multiple meetings, making it easy to find and share. The Washington State-based startup announced it is launching out of stealth mode today after eight months, during which it worked with 450 companies in the United States.
The startup, backed by Venture Highway and angel investors, was founded in April 2021 by college friends Anurag Varma, Parth Pareek and Mehul Dudi. Before Loopin, Varma was a product lead at Venture Highway at Upgrad, Pareek was a product lead at Samsung and Dudi worked as an engineering manager at Freshworks.
The startup came about because the three realized their meeting hours had increased at the start of the pandemic, but felt the meetings became less productive. They had trouble keeping on top of what decisions and updates had been made in different meetings and action items that needed to be done.
During a call, the founders went down a “rabbit home of discussing unproductive meetings and how our work is scattered in the number of apps we use at work,” said Varma. “This ultimately led us to think what if we had a super-app that could pull information from all the apps and provide us the context we needed at the right time—the stuff to discuss in meetings, pending tasks that need action, or follow-ups with other team members. This would massively ease the cognitive overload and free up our bandwidth on low leverage tasks.”
Loopin founders Parth Pareek, Anurag Varma and Mehul Dudi
Varma added that on average, an organization uses more than 250 apps, with each teams using about 40 to 60, leading to information fragmentation. For example, the lifecycle of a meeting typically starts with a calendar invite that may have an agenda from another app. During meetings, team members use various note-taking apps to write down takeaways and next steps, then share those over email and Slack and create tasks in a project management apps. This means that before the next meeting, each person has to refer to multiple apps to prepare and check the status of different tasks.
“In short, the knowledge you created is disconnected from the meeting,” Varma said. “Which leads to loss of context and unproductive, duplicative discussions.”
To fix these issues, Loopin integrates with Slack, Zoom, GMeet, Gmail, Notion, Asana, Trello, Jira and other work apps. Its features include a meeting management component that records and shares meeting outcomes with attendees.
Notes are organized by meetings and previous discussions are resurfaced in future meetings, making sure important tasks don’t get lost. Meanwhile, Loopin’s tasks feature helps each person track their action items by adding tasks to their calendar. If workers are wondering how they spend their time, they can look at Loopin’s calendar analytics. This means all participants are up-to-date before the next meeting, saving the whole team time.
As examples of what Loopin can do, Varma gave a few case studies. For example, a design agency uses Loopin to to track customer calls and share next steps internally at the end of each meeting. The platform tags tasks to meetings, so designers have easy access to their context without having to each for it.
A mentor for a startup accelerator uses Loopin to document coaching sessions, which are mostly ad hoc, so Loopin helps by linking back to previous calls and surfacing past conversations and action items. Meanwhile, the marketing team of an e-commerce company uses Loopin to do asynchronous updates, which meant they could eliminate their status update meetings.
Varma said Loopin’s target customer are founders, senior executives and managers in cross-functional roles who spend a lot of time in meetings, plus knowledge workers in general. The startup is currently pre-revenue. Its early beta users will be free for the next six months, then Loopin will operate on a freemium model starting in the second quarter of 2023. Loopin’s team is currently working on APIs so its users can build their own integrations.
Productivity platform Loopin helps work teams wrangle meetings by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
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