You know the story: you’re trying to plan a fun getaway with some friends. Maybe a weekend ski trip, a jaunt to wine country, perhaps even some island time? Keyword: fun. A group text with a handful of your buddies becomes an incessant ding! of texts and gifs and emojis.
“Who’s free the weekend of May 27?”
“Memorial Day weekend? No way!”
“I’ve got my kids — how about June 6–10?”
“I’m doing a dry month in June, can we do Tahoe instead of wine country?”
Before you know it, your potential plans are lost in a pile of chatty texts, side conversations, and “oops was in yoga, haven’t read the past 12 messages” replies. Looks like another lackluster weekend at home with Netflix and Halo Top.
Worse yet, you’ve managed to throw together a hodge-podge vacation — at least, you think you sent that “I’m in” text. Then you land at your destination, but you never wrote down the address of the Vrbo that Taylor booked. Wait, was it in a text or an email? Maybe it was a Facebook message? Good luck scrolling through your multiple group text chains and forwarded emails to find it, phone glitching as you try to open all those different apps.
Or how about the one where someone sent a map pin of the restaurant for your cousin’s rehearsal dinner, but it never came through because of humanity’s most epic battle: iPhone vs. Android?
And then there’s the most bummer situation of them all: your brother just started planning your Southeast Asia adventure on Google Sheets. Ugh! Nothing kills your OOO vacation buzz like a spreadsheet.
We could go on, but trust you get the idea.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could gather, brainstorm, and save your group plans all in one easy-to-see, easy-to-share place?
That’s what Wribbn co-founder Sagar Desai thought on a trip to Baltimore with a group of friends. As his phone buzzed endlessly with WhatsApp alerts and text alerts, friends were stranded in far-flung corners of the city, and addresses of meet-up spots were lost in endless message chains. That was the moment Sagar imagined a digital hub that could hold all this information in a way that made sense.
“It struck me that what we needed was a simple place to collect the things we wanted to do,” he says, “something that everyone could easily look at and talk about without the conversation getting in the way.”
So Sagar and his co-founders, Jonas Welch and Jesse Street, set out to solve the problem. The result was Wribbn: an app that allows planning and collaborating, collecting and organizing, dreaming and action all in one spot.
But action is truly what’s at the heart of Wribbn.
Where other list-making and personal idea-collection apps just mimic a regular old To Do List (and if it ain’t broke…), Wribbn can hold all sorts of items in the same lists, from map pins to photos to products and links. Add the map location of your vacation rental and a link to the scuba school your friend recommended and a note about all the Thai food you’re supposed to try, all in one place. Plus, the chat feature makes it easy to have a conversation on the side without burying all your fun ideas.
It took several years and a multitude of iterations to find the sweet spot that Sagar and his team were looking for: an app that helps you get your dreams off the screen and into real life.
