Loop Social
Founder, CEO
May 2017 - May 2019
The first checkin app that's completely automatic
Loop is a social location app that lets you see who’s there before you arrive. We automatically check you in and out of social hotspots while notifying friends that are near. Use it to see who's at the gym, a restaurant, or a bar you’re thinking about going to before stepping foot outside your home.We are essentially engineering coincidence.
How you say? Instead of sharing everywhere you go we only share when you’re in a social spot – in other words, places people go specifically to gather and hang out with others. You’re automatically checked in and automatically check out.
Notifications are sent to friends nearby depending on the distance they are from the venue.
It’s a way to see the exact location of your various micro tribes and keep you in the loop by being notified when you are within a certain distance of your friends giving you more opportunities to connect.
Concerned about privacy? Remember the only time you appear is when you're in a social place. Still want to be hidden? You can do that too.
Our Mission is to facilitate real life moments and experiences with the people in your life.
KPIs
• Created technology that can automatically check users in and out without having to open the app (went through Apple appeals to get it done)
• Working with geo-location and found the solution to getting super accurate check-ins without draining battery
• Founded the company with a previous investor from Nattr, Daniel Matishak
• In talks with Soho House as they are interested in integrating the technology we have developed into their House Seven mobile app. Soho House members can then see who is at each house before stepping foot outside of their home
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Learnings
• Geo-location requires a handful of variables to work properly. The use of CoreMotion, increasing and decreasing activity depending on the state the user is in
• Filter out inaccurate location updates using horizontal accuracy. Doing this rid us of unnecessary network calls. Users now have accurate check-ins/outs and less battery consumption
• We can control the frequency of location updates thanks to our distance filter (user needs to travel x meters to get update)
• When a user is stationary, we fire very inaccurate, infrequent location updates
• If the app happens to stop firing location updates in the background, our significant location change functionality reactivates the app
• 100m rule: You would have to travel 100m away from your current check-in hotspot in order to officially check out in the app
• 1 hour rule: We limit notifications received to 1 per hour. We don’t want to bother the user too much with notifications, so we don’t notify them they are checking in everywhere
• 3 hour rule: Check-in notifications are limited to 1 per location every 3 hours
• Automatic check out: In cloud code a scheduled job (powered by heroku scheduler) runs and forces a check out when a user has been at a location for ‘too long’. The reason we do this is users can easily check back in, however we can’t say the same thing about checking out when a user runs out of battery
• Loop is currently focused on being a B2B solution rather than B2C
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Main Responsibilities
• Multidisciplinary director in strategy and operations
• Designing the user journey from wireframes to launched product
• Branding and naming the application
• Business strategy and creative
• Fundraising
• User journey design and feature sets including wireframes
• Finding creative solutions for check-ins, checkouts, and battery to work in unison
• Product development including all features and amends
• Iterating and solving issues quickly (e.g. Apple appeal)
• Analysing data from Mixpanel, Crashlytics, and Itunes Connect
• Hiring team members
• Managing all business relationships
• Tech testing - ensuring there are no bugs or glitches before pushing a new build
• Managing legal and accounting
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