Keep in contact with your team members via regular meetings, particularly if they work remotely or in hybrid configurations. However, an excessive number of meetings may be counterproductive since the information that is presented and the action items that are discussed end up being buried beneath all of the other responsibilities that employees have.
Loopin, a platform for increasing productivity, aspires to be of assistance by connecting with work applications and collecting information from a variety of meetings, making it simple to search and share. The company, which has its headquarters in Washington State, made the announcement today that it would emerge from stealth mode and begin operating publicly following an eight-month period during which it collaborated with 450 businesses throughout the United States.
Anurag Varma, Parth Pareek, and Mehul Dudi were all classmates together at the same college when they came up with the idea for the company that would later get funding from both Venture Highway and angel investors. Prior to co-founding Loopin, Varma worked as a product lead at Venture Highway at Upgrad, Pareek worked as a product lead at Samsung, and Dudi worked as an engineering manager at Freshworks.
The three individuals recognised that their meeting hours had grown since the beginning of the epidemic, yet they believed that their meetings had become less effective as a result. This realisation led to the conception of the company. They struggled to keep track of what choices and updates had been made in the various meetings as well as the action items that needed to be completed.
According to Varma, the company’s founders went off on a “rabbit hole of talking inefficient meetings and how our work is spread across the amount of applications we use at work” during a conference call. “This finally led us to consider what if we had a super-app that could take information from all the applications and offer us with the context we needed at the correct moment. This might include the topics to address in meetings, pending tasks that require attention, or follow-ups with other members of the team. This would make a significant dent in the mental strain and free up our bandwidth for low-leverage work.
Varma went on to say that the typical company utilises more than 250 applications, with each team using between 40 and 60 of those applications, which causes information to get fragmented. For instance, the beginning of a meeting’s lifecycle often begins with an invite to the meeting’s calendar, which may include an agenda sourced from another app. During team meetings, individuals utilise a variety of note-taking tools to jot down key takeaways and upcoming actions, which are then communicated through email and Slack and incorporated into task lists maintained in project management software. Because of this, prior to the subsequent meeting, each individual will need to consult a number of applications in order to be ready for the various duties and check on their progress.
Varma said that “in a nutshell, the information that you produced is detached from the meeting.” “Which ultimately results in a lack of context and conversations that are both fruitless and redundant.”
Loopin is able to link with other work tools such as Slack, Zoom, GMeet, Gmail, Notion, Asana, Trello, and Jira in order to resolve these challenges. One of its features is a component for managing meetings that captures the results of the meetings and distributes them with the participants.
Notes are arranged according to the meetings that they pertain to, and past conversations are brought up again in subsequent meetings to ensure that key duties are not forgotten. In the meanwhile, Loopin’s tasks functionality allows each user to more easily monitor their to-do list by allowing them to add things directly to their calendar. Employees who are curious in the ways in which they spend their time might consult the calendar analytics provided by Loopin. Because of this, all participants will be current before the subsequent meeting, which will save time for the whole team.
Varma presented a few case stories as illustrative illustrations of the capabilities of Loopin. For instance, a design firm may use Loopin to keep track of client conversations and communicate next actions to the company’s employees at the conclusion of each meeting. Because the platform automatically links tasks with meetings, designers have quick and simple access to their context without having to manually look it up.
Loopin is used by a mentor for a startup accelerator to record coaching sessions. Since these sessions are primarily ad hoc, Loopin assists with the documentation process by referring back to prior calls and revealing earlier dialogues and action items. In the meanwhile, the marketing team of an e-commerce business utilises Loopin to make asynchronous updates, which has allowed them to discontinue their status update meetings.
According to Varma, the ideal customers for Loopin are company founders, senior executives, and managers in cross-functional jobs who spend a significant amount of time in meetings, in addition to knowledge workers in general. The new company is not yet generating any money. Loopin will provide free access to its early beta customers for the next six months, and then it will transition to a freemium business model beginning in the second quarter of 2023. The team behind Loopin is actively working on APIs so that its users will be able to develop their own integrations.
