Loopd.Life (back story)…
It’s about time I started sharing this experience with more people instead of hiding away in my personal diary where I can relax and indulge in my own safety. It’s just that, there are some things that I want to share with everybody and other things that I want to share with just a handful of people, oh and definitely some other things that I am not ready to share with anyone. I think that is a big part of the evolution behind Loopd.Life, a progressive journey of collaborating with people in your life.
About 5 years ago I graduated from the University of Birmingham which all seems like a bit of a blur now. I think that’s how these milestones appear as we look back on them, a collection of overlapping blurs through time. The funny thing is, each milestone is associated to people and communities rather than time:
- Childhood — family
- Primary School — friends
- Secondary School —new friends
- University — more new friends
- Work — colleagues and even more new friends
I think that is why I don’t like the idea of accumulating a permanent online footprint with unknown content, reach and impact. It doesn’t reflect how decisions takes place ‘offline’. Only you and those you encounter for that specific ‘blurry’ moment in time know your temporary footprint and part-time journey to become a better person. The rest of the world is simply not invited. It’s much easier to take risks in ourselves when we can predict and control the impact.
Publicly exposing so much of our lives, and often associating it to actions from our previous communities slows us down from taking vulnerable steps to change and improve as people.
In the beginning…
Towards the end of university I entered one of those competitions, you know the ones: “Dear students please submit an idea for how technology can help to improve student life.” (My thoughts now are that this sentence would be a whole lot more beautiful if the word ‘technology’ would have been replaced with the word ‘we’ but that’s a story for another blog post.)
So I started to think about this technology improvement and scribbled down a few ideas, noticing one theme which kept recurring: “have fun and use this fun to propel productivity”.
I think this is an instinct we have to train, becasue society teaches us unintentionally to assume that pleasure and productivity work in opposites.
It didn’t really take very long to work out what I wanted to propose as the improvement to student life. A combination of my friends and our shared interests (university community) and my temporary milestone to feel productive (learning objectives). So quite simply I put the two together and designed a technology that was around friendship and community learning objectives.

The theoretical answer was very obvious and I gave myself some rules:
have fun, be productive and make it as easy as possible for everyone in the same blurry group, to acheive their similar blurry goals.
When talking to friends about my new idea there were some clear advantages to this type of technology:
- The technology could be very targeted to the way people live since everyone in the community was striving for a similar goal.
- There would be many emotional similarities between the people creating natural channels of empathy and support.
- It just sounded like a cool idea and so it needed to be done!
The next thing to do was to build it and so I bought a simple wordpress site for £75, uploaded my designs and mocked up a first version of the product in just a few weeks. The competition went well and all of the judges were excited and complementary of the idea. The wordpress prototype had worked a charm to test and tease the market, but now it was time for the real thing…

There was just one slight problem… ‘the real thing’
I didnt know how to code nor did I have any friends that could code and wordpress simply wouldn’t cut it for more than a competition prototype. I tried to learn from “coding for dummies” (no joke) and after a few weeks managed to build an app where two dice would roll and generate random numbers and if the numbers matched up it would tell you your fortune. I was a long way from my dream platform and did a quick bit of maths, I needed help! After winning the competition the university enrolled me on some sort of enterprise program with a bunch of other students all wanting to launch ideas. To be completely honest, these programs are hit and miss…
“The first thing you should do is open a business and write a business plan”.
Really..?
I needed a developer co-founder!
I met with many developers, students and non-students, but nobody that was willing to help seemed qualified and anyone that was qualified wasn’t willing to help. So I started to save money. I had a few sources of income at the time as I’d just enrolled on a masters course at the University of Birmingham, started teaching Brazilian Zouk dance classes in town (something I learnt from that all important “gap-yeaaaar”) and also performed magic shows at Cafe Rouge in Brindley Place on weekends. On March 27th 2014, about one year on from the competition I shook hands with a developer from London and parted with my hard earned cash. I was finally ready to grow the business, what a milestone!!
I thought that I was half way up the mountain, OMG how wrong I was… I hadn’t even reached base camp!
The next three years until today are another blurry memory of fast-tracked learining in how products are designed, build, tested, financed, legally structured, marketed, piloted, negotiated, sold and launched, and failed, and launched again. Every stage is a work in progress and however long or expensive you calculate something will take, aka that business plan of yours, double it AND THEN DOUBLE IT AGAIN! When you write an essay, think how many times you re-write paragraphs in order to make it perfect or to incorporate a new idea. Software is just the same.
Now as a company we have just had our third birthday and can be really proud of our achievements so far. I hope in the coming episodes I can share with you some of the challenges, milestones and learning curves that we have experienced in designing and building a product (now called Loopd.Life) that helps communities to organise their activities and events in a more fun and productive way.
