The first digital product I made was LouLou back in 2013. It solved a very common issue at the time; if I wanted to plan stuff with friends in WhatsApp our conversations would always get filled with messages back and forth about who was available. I came up with a very simple tool to solve this.
LouLou (named after an old housemate) let's your friends quickly show their availability in a poll. By building the entire experience around WhatsApp (pretty novel at the time) I managed to grow the app through social proof over time. By closely listening to user feedback, analyzing usage data and lots of experimenting I've managed to grow the app to more than 8 million users worldwide.
<aside> 📲 You can download LouLou in the App Store or on Google Play.
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About 9 years ago, we started working on LouLou; a simple app to plan events directly in WhatsApp. Last month we reached a million users, so we figured this was a good a time to write about how we got to this milestone! In early 2013, my colleague Jurriaan and I were brainstorming during one of our regular Innovation-team meetings at Triple. We were thinking of small app ideas that could help Jurriaan expand his iOS development skills. However, we didn’t want to create something that would be of little use in the real world. A few weeks before I became annoyed that every time my friends and I wanted to meet up, our shared WhatsApp group would burst into an unstructured message overload. Jurriaan and I set out to fix this problem by creating LouLou; a simple date picker directly connected to WhatsApp.
Jurriaan had just joined Triple and was learning a lot of new languages at the time. He was a fanatic Android user but quickly noticed that he had to start making apps for iPhones if he wanted his innovation prototypes to get any traction within the organization as most people were using iPhones at the time. Fast forward to a week later when Jurriaan presented both an iOS and an Android version which were connected to his own server back at home. Although the design was very crude we could already see the potential and quickly started spamming our friends with LouLou's for every small occasion that needed a date!
