The problem
The organisation and management of your social life can be a challenge. It often seems like a great idea to organise a meet-up or an event but the actual task can seem daunting.
The solution
Loop is an app to organise and manage social events. Through a network of partners, we handle the execution of the events in terms of organising the calendar, cost-fronting, music, food and drink, and clean-up. You socialise, we organise.
Acting as a hub for the users’ social life, the app allows people to create meetups with friends and family, get reminders for upcoming events and look back at the past events they have attended.
The company
We all met at Imperial College Halls. When Ali and Saurav were in their first year at Imperial they wanted an app to keep all of the halls’ social events in one place. After multiple attempts at creating the app they got together in their fourth year with an awesome team from Imperial and built Loop .
So far more than 1500 hours of time spent with friends in real life have been powered by Loop and over 900 events have been organised on the platform for more than 2000 people. We are currently raising our second investment round and are ready for a big launch at Freshers’ week.
Advisors and mentors
We are lucky enough to have Emma Watkins, founder of AGORA, as one of our advisors. Ali applied as an intern at her previous company, Fifty, and met her at the interview. He met Fifty at Imperial’s career fair and Ali joined AGORA two years later. Emma loved the idea of Loop and set up a lot of introductions for us then came on board herself.
Another of Loop’s advisors is Simon Vans-Colina who is a founding team member of Monzo and Starling Bank. Saurav met Simon through the Monzo developers Slack when he was looking to interview someone from Monzo about a university project. A year or so later, Saurav contacted him to get some advice about Loop. Simon was so taken with the concept behind Loop that he decided to help out as our advisor.
Enterprise Lab support
We used the Enterprise Lab space for team meetings whilst we were working part-time as students. We also drank a lot of coffee there during exam season.
Successes and setbacks
One of our biggest successes has been building such an incredible team. Raising a large pre-seed round in the summer was also a major success for us as it allowed us to hire a full-time team and get an office. It was also amazing to be interviewed by Michael Seibel from Y Combinator.
It was very difficult when one of our co-founders, Stephan, left the team and it felt like a set back when we had to delay the seed investment round planned for April. Lastly getting scammed by a marketing consultancy was a brief setback.
Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
Start and build a team early when you can support yourself and don’t forget you’re building a business, not a product.
