There's a quiet problem in modern social life. People are still social, still want to throw the dinner, the picnic, the Saturday-night thing. But organising it has somehow got harder, not easier, and the tools we have don't fit how people actually live anymore.
Here's the shape of the problem. You want to throw a thing. You have a guest list in your head: ten or fifteen people from different parts of your life. Some of them are on Instagram. Some left Facebook five years ago. One of them refuses to use WhatsApp on principle. Two of them won't reliably check email. Your mum needs to know but she's not on the apps. Your cousin is twelve.
To invite all of them you end up doing something like this: a Facebook event for the few people who still use it, a group chat in iMessage, a separate group chat in WhatsApp for the friends without iPhones, a text to your mum, an email to the two people who only check email, and a story on Instagram for everyone else. Then you spend the next week chasing replies across four different apps, trying to get a real headcount, sending the address one more time to the people who missed it.
This is the actual problem. Every existing event tool assumes everyone you invited lives inside the same platform as you. They don't. They never did, and the trend is going the other way, not toward consolidation. There's no single social platform with high penetration anymore. Half the planet is on WhatsApp, but half isn't. Facebook has aged out of the friend groups under 35. Instagram is for performance, not coordination. Discord is for some friend groups and unintelligible to others.
What's needed isn't another social network. It's a layer that sits underneath all of them, just for the specific job of organising an event. Something that meets people where they are: email, SMS, a link in any chat app. Something where the guests don't need to sign up to anything, ever. Something where the host's job is sending invites, not chasing replies.
What we're actually building
That's PopIn. The shape of it is intentionally narrow. Create an event in 60 seconds. Pick how visible you want it to be: public, friends-only, or invite-only. Add a date, a place, a description. Invite anyone by email, phone, or a shareable link. The link works in any context: paste it into iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, anywhere. People who open the link can RSVP without creating an account. They just type their name and an email or phone for reminders, and they're on the guest list.
That's it. That's the whole core product. Everything else, the social feed, posts, stories, friend graph, is built on top of this. It exists because the people who throw events also want to share what happened afterward and see what their friends are up to. But it's optional. If you only ever use PopIn to plan events and never look at the feed, you'd get 90% of the value.
The bet we're making
The bet is that there's room for a tool that does this one thing really well. Not a platform that tries to own your social life. Not an algorithm trying to optimise the time you spend on it. Just a focused tool for the specific job of getting your people to your thing.
That's the bet. We'll see if it works. The early signals from the people we've been building it with say yes, but it's a thing you have to actually use to feel the difference. If you've ever sent a fourth follow-up text two days before your dinner party, give it a try. We'd love your feedback.