Events for everyone.Accounts for no one.
The problem
Something is shifting. People are quietly logging off, not from each other, just from the algorithms, the endless feed, the strangers, the noise. They're still social. They still want to throw the dinner, the picnic, the Saturday-night thing.
But organising it has somehow got harder. A group chat over here. A spreadsheet over there. A Story for the friends you forgot to text. A separate message to your mum because she's not on the app you used. Half your invites land, half disappear, and the people you actually wanted to see end up finding out the next day.
Why we built this
PopIn started because I kept running into the same problem in two completely different parts of my life. Friend birthdays were being missed. Family events were being half-attended. Work team gatherings turned into Excel sheets. Every single one had the same shape: a planner trying to wrangle a guest list across four different apps, hoping the invitations landed, dreading the moment they'd have to send a follow-up to the people who hadn't replied.
Meanwhile a chunk of the people I actually wanted at these events had quietly left Facebook years ago, never opened Snapchat, never figured out Discord, and had no interest in installing yet another app to RSVP to one dinner. The tools for planning events all assumed everyone you knew lived inside the same social platform. They didn't. They never did.
So PopIn is the answer to a very specific question: what if event planning worked even when half your guests don't use the same apps as you, don't want to download anything new, and just want to know what time and where? Everything else flows from that.
The no-account principle
Every other major social platform makes you sign up before you can do anything meaningful. They have good reasons for it: signed-up users are easier to track, easier to monetise, easier to keep coming back. The cost is borne by the people who don't want to sign up, which now includes a surprisingly large slice of the population.
PopIn flips the default. As a host, yes, you sign up. You're investing in your social calendar and you get a richer experience for doing so. But as a guest, you should never need to. A friend invited you to something. You should be able to RSVP, see the address, add your plus-one, get a reminder the day of, and show up, all without creating yet another account.
This sounds simple but it's surprisingly hard to get right. Every feature gets evaluated through this lens: does this work for someone who doesn't have an account? If it doesn't, the feature needs to be redesigned, or it needs to be opt-in only and clearly secondary to the no-account path.
The insight
Events should bring people together, whether or not they use the same apps you do. Whether or not they use apps at all.
The barrier to being invited to something should be zero. An email address. A phone number. That's it. PopIn is built so the people you actually want at your thing can come: your ten-year-old cousin, your grandma, your mate who deleted Instagram in 2019 and never looked back.
Our promises
We will never require your friends to sign up to come to your party.
We will never sell your data.
We will always make it easy, not complicated. If a feature takes five taps when it could take two, the feature is wrong, not you.
We will keep it fun, because what's the point otherwise.
The invitation
PopIn is new. Some things are still rough at the edges; some features aren't there yet. We're a small team (just one guy) building it carefully, in public, with the people who turn up early.
The best social platforms have always been shaped by the people who showed up first and said this bit is great, this bit is broken, this is what I actually need. That's the invitation. Show up. Throw something. Tell us what's missing. We're listening.
A different kind of social
PopIn is a social network, but an events-first one. It's built around getting your people into the same room, not keeping your eyes on a screen. Use it as your social home or just for the next party. And since guests never need an account, it sits happily alongside whatever else you use: keep your Instagram, keep your WhatsApp, and still pull anyone in with one link.
Your feed is your people: friends and the accounts you choose to follow, not a slot machine of strangers picked to keep you hooked. We're not here to win your whole evening. PopIn is for making the plan and then going and living it, not for losing an afternoon to the scroll.
We don't sell your personal data, and we never profile your guest lists to target you. PopIn is free, and right now ads help keep it that way. As we grow, the plan is to move to a more privacy-respecting, opt-in model for anything commercial, kept well away from your social graph. That last part is the promise that doesn't move: you are not the product.
What we're building
The next twelve months are about making PopIn rock-solid for the core flow: create an event, invite anyone, get them there. Specifically that means richer recurring events (run clubs, monthly book clubs, standing wine nights), better last-minute spontaneous plans, and tighter integration with the things people already use to communicate (calendar invites, group chat share targets, etc).
After that the priorities are around helping hosts manage logistics: dietary requirements, accessibility info, ride sharing, splitting costs. Then community features: the kind of low-key local discovery that surfaces 'people running near you on Saturday morning' without becoming a competitive feed.
Transparency
Every bug and feature request submitted through the in-app feedback button shows up on a public board you can browse. It's our running to-do list: what's open, what's being worked on, and what just got fixed.
Who runs it
PopIn is built and operated by Angus Field, a solo developer based in Queensland, Australia. There is no formal business behind it yet, just one person, building this carefully and openly.
Get in touch any time at hello@popin.events or via the contact form.