Well, 2024 was a whirlwind year for anyone in the tech industry. If you were lucky enough to be building with AI in mind, it felt like the epitome of building a plane while flying in changing weather patterns. As we head into the new year, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the second full year of Hoop and show gratitude for all the support from our community by sharing some behind the scenes stories:
New Year, New Hoop
At the end of last year, we made the decision to pivot Hoop from a decision making platform to a modern AI task manager that automatically captures tasks across tools like Slack, email and meetings. We kept hearing from users how overwhelmed they were with everything they had to do, and how missing something was keeping them up at night.
In January of last year, we were deep into figuring out whether it was technically possible to get task capture to work well across tools. We dug deep into AI infrastructure tools, learned a ton about prompt engineering, and considered the design for a modern task management interface (based on AI).
Alongside the technical work, we also validated the problem space and messaging by running tests to see how we could market our new tool. Very soon, we had a prototype for auto task capture from meetings. The idea was, could you go to a meeting as usual, and then your tasks that came up for you in that meeting would automatically populate in a to-do list. When we got this to work, it felt magical. Many meeting tools focused on summarizing meetings, but we heard from busy professionals that they cared more about what they were accountable to from a meeting and having everything in one spot.
We also hypothesized that for this tool to be really valuable, it had to work across multiple platforms. We started building task capture from Slack next. Many people talked about missing important tasks in Slack, from the endless scrolling to random DMs they’d wake up remembering. Seeing tasks from meetings and Slack in one spot was a big ah-ha moment for our team and our users. We were on to something!
Building the business
In April, we had our first paying customer. We began to get more and more. We experimented with self-serve onboarding but learned that people actually didn’t believe the product could do what we promised, so we had to show them during live onboarding sessions. We started calling this ‘concierge style onboarding.’ This also created an opportunity to get to know our users directly.
We had an offsite in Nashville and made ambitious goals around building the business. One clear cost to building this kind of business, at least at this time, was going to be the cost associated with using AI to process meetings and chat for task capture. Looking for tasks from meetings requires generating a good transcript, then asking LLMs to evaluate that transcript and pull out relevant tasks for a user. This generates a cost to the business.
We had a hypothesis that these costs would diminish greatly over time, given how competitive the space was becoming.
Announcing Hoop
In June, we had our first big public moment, announcing a $5m seed round for Hoop led by Index Ventures. We finally got to share the incredible people supporting our vision from the earliest days. In reality, we had raised funding a while back, but saved the news for when we were ready for a rapid influx of potential customers.
TechCrunch, Fast Company, and many other smaller outlets shared our story. They were interested in the people behind Trello reimagining task management in the age of AI. It was a fun moment to share our story with the world!
We spent the rest of the summer concierge onboarding people interested in Hoop. We built relationships with our early customers through shared Slack channels and, generally, by being responsive to questions and requests. This is the most fun part of building a product- seeing how users use your product, and how you can make their lives easier.
It was also extremely time consuming and limiting considering the small size of our team. We knew to reach any amount of scale, we wanted to make the product something users could sign up for on their own, without having to jump on a call with someone from our team.
ProductHunt and self-serve
In September, we were ready to launch on ProductHunt. We had built out a self-serve onboarding flow, and we wanted to use the PH launch as an opportunity to start getting more data around metrics like activation, conversion and retention.
From our summer of concierge onboarding we also had a really strong idea around the messaging for Hoop and the problem we were solving for people.
Our Product Hunt launch garnered us #1 AI product of the day, and #2 overall global product of the day. We were blown away by how many people, especially customers, came out to support us by voting and writing reviews.
One of the big bets we made around our self-serve experience was trying to mimic the ah-ha moment in concierge onboardings. During concierge onboarding, we would make sure to have Hoop running in the background. Then, once a prospective customer signed up, we would seed a task, live, in the meeting for the user so it would pop up, live, in their “incoming” task list.
For example, I might say “Hey, can you send me your helicopter pilot’s license by the end of the day?” and then in a few seconds, that task appeared up for them. Time after time, this moment wowed people. We mimicked this experience in self-serve with a mandatory video of Justin, one of our cofounders, showing the auto task popping up “live.” This small video greatly increased activation.
Roadmapping and email
After the launch, the team met up in New York to plan our upcoming roadmap. We knew we had to make some big bets to continue our momentum.
One of these bets was to continue adding sources for task capture. We had experimented with email, and decided this would be the next task source to add. So many people complained about missing important tasks from email, so we had a strong hunch that this addition would complete the trifecta of tools that would make Hoop an indispensable part of a busy professionals’ workflow.
We launched email and saw another shift as people saw the value of Hoop even more quickly.
In November, we welcomed Ben Leader to the team as a senior engineer. Read more about Ben here.
Looking ahead
We’ve been heads down building some exciting, major features to make Hoop more useful and take advantage of new AI capabilities. We’re going to make it easier than ever to manage complex work, leveraging AI to make it easier to know what to focus on and how to maximize our collective efforts.
Thanks to everyone for your support in the second year of Hoop. This next one is going to be even bigger and better.