Loopin’s productivity platform helps work teams organize meetings
Meetings are essential to help teams, especially remote or hybrid teams, stay in touch. But many meetings can become unproductive as information shared and actions are buried beneath all the other things workers need to do. Productivity platform Loopin wants to help by integrating with work apps and collecting information from multiple meetings, making it easy to find and share. The Washington state-based startup announced today that it is coming out of stealth mode after eight months of working with 450 companies across 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. Prior to Loopin, Varma was a product manager at Venture Highway in Upgrad, Pareek was a product manager at Samsung, and Dudi worked as an engineering manager at Freshworks.
The startup came about because the three realized that their meeting hours had increased at the start of the pandemic, but they felt that meetings had become less productive. They had problems keeping track of the decisions and changes that were made at the various meetings and the actions that needed to be done.
During the call, the founders went “down the rabbit hole to talk about unproductive meetings and how our work is scattered across the number of apps we use at work,” Varma said. “That got us thinking, do we have a cool app that could pull information from all apps and give us the context we need at the right moment—things to talk about in meetings, commitments that require action, or follow-up with other team members.” This would greatly reduce cognitive overhead and free up our bandwidth on low-reinforcement tasks.”
Loopin’ founders Parth Pareek, Anurag Varma and Mehul Dudi
Varma added that, on average, an organization uses more than 250 applications, with each team using around 40 to 60, leading to information fragmentation. For example, the life cycle of a meeting usually starts with an invitation from a calendar that may have an agenda from another application. During meetings, team members use a variety of note-taking apps to record takeaways and next steps, then share them via email and Slack, and create tasks in project management apps. This means that before the next meeting, each person has to go through different applications to prepare and check the status of different tasks.
“In short, the knowledge you’ve created is unrelated to the meeting,” Varma said. “Which leads to loss of context and unproductive, double-edged discussions.”
To solve these problems, Loopin integrates with Slack, Zoom, GMeet, Gmail, Notion, Asana, Trello, Jira and other work applications. Its features include a meeting management component that records and shares meeting results with participants.
Notes are organized by meeting, and previous discussions reappear in future meetings, ensuring that important tasks are not lost. Meanwhile, Loopin’s tasks feature helps each person keep track of their actions by adding tasks to the calendar. If employees are wondering how they spend their time, they can check out Loopin’s calendar analytics. This means everyone is up to speed before the next meeting, saving time for the whole team.
As examples of what Loopin can do, Varma cited some case studies. For example, a design agency uses Loopin to track customer calls and share next steps internally at the end of each meeting. The platform distributes meeting tasks, so designers have easy access to their context without needing each other to do so.
A mentor at a startup accelerator uses Loopin to document coaching sessions, which are mostly ad hoc, so Loopin helps by calling past calls and bringing past conversations and actions. Meanwhile, the e-commerce company’s marketing team uses Loopin to perform asynchronous updates, meaning they can eliminate their status update meetings.
Varma said Loopin’s target customers are founders, senior executives and managers in cross-functional roles who spend a lot of time in meetings, as well as professional workers in general. The startup is currently on prescription. Its first beta users will be free for the next six months, so Loopin will operate on a freemium model starting in the second quarter of 2023. The Loopin team is currently working on APIs so that its users can build their own integrations.
