The unofficial support plan for the Loop Alpha was: email Chris@.
That was actually written into the product.
We finally had the Alpha in the hands of people who had not been sitting in every product meeting. Getting it there was still very manual. I added each person to TestFlight for the mobile app and to the tester list for the Chrome extension. The extension only worked if they were signed into Chrome with the exact email we had approved.
The first outside user tried a university email. Chrome would not accept it.
I added a different address, sent another invitation, and asked them to try again.
This is what a launch looks like before it becomes a launch. There is an email titled “Loop Alpha is Launching Soon,” followed by a bunch of emails explaining which Google account needs to be open.
We had spent November racing to get a raw Alpha into people's hands. Now hands were on it, and they immediately found the parts we had made too hard.
The next morning, the extension appeared to stop after creating a group. My troubleshooting instructions were not sophisticated. Refresh the page. Click back on the extension. Go forward again.
I explained that the development environment occasionally hit this bug. I also said I liked hearing when somebody found it. That was the reason for the “email Chris@” note. If the product was going to fail, I wanted the failure to get directly to somebody who could do something about it.
The user got through the first problem and found the next one. They could create a group, but could not add the people they wanted to it.
That feature was still being tied together. We had the pieces. They were not yet connected in a way that made sense to somebody outside the team. I said it should be ready after Christmas and offered a quick call in the meantime.
Then we scheduled a screen share.
At almost the same time, the feedback turned into engineering work. Update group functionality in the Chrome extension. Let somebody add a person who was not already a connection. The broad complaint, “I can't do the thing,” became two very specific tickets.
This was the useful part of putting an unfinished product in front of real people. Our internal list said the product worked. A new user showed us the missing actions in about five minutes.
It was not polished. It was real enough to teach us something.
The other half of that week was references and financing. I was trying to get Loop into its next phase and answering questions about who I had worked with before.
Three of my seven startups had been backed by Insight: Beatport, Shutterstock, and Aaptiv. That was the clean institutional answer.
The more personal answer came through Apply.
I sent two reference introductions to an Apply cofounder I had known for more than ten years. I described us as the people who made the best stickers on Earth, because obviously that was the relevant credential.
It was funny, but it was also exactly the point of Loop. A professional network is not only a company name or a connection stored in a database. It is somebody who watched you work, built something weird with you, stayed in your life for a decade, and will still take the call.
The product we were building was supposed to help people remember and use those relationships. Meanwhile, the company itself was moving because of those relationships.
That is a useful test for a product idea. Does it describe something people already do when it matters?
By the end of the week, outside users had the app. They had found bugs. The team had tickets. I had screen shares on the calendar and reference emails moving around.
I was excited to get through the financing work in the new year and back into the next phase of building.
Until then, if anything broke, there was always the support plan.
Email Chris@.