Every week, the same thing happens.
Someone in the group types "who's in for Sunday?" and the thread starts. By Saturday night there are eighty messages, three of them are memes, two people changed their mind twice, and the organizer is manually counting names in his head trying to figure out if we have enough players to actually play.
This is how pickup soccer gets organized for millions of people. Not just soccer — basketball, padel, climbing sessions, running groups. A WhatsApp thread and one tired person doing mental math.
I got tired of being that person. So I started building ImIn.
The actual problem
The problem isn't that WhatsApp is bad. WhatsApp is great at being a chat app. The problem is that organizing an event is not a chat problem — it's a state problem.
You need to know one thing: how many people are confirmed, right now. A chat thread is the worst possible way to track state, because:
- Confirmations get buried under conversation
- "Maybe" is a valid answer and it ruins your count
- People reply to the wrong message
- Nobody ever has the final number until everyone shows up (or doesn't)
What I'm building instead
ImIn replaces the thread with a link.
The organizer creates an event in about a minute — sport, place, time, how many spots. They share one link. Everyone who opens it sees the same thing: who's in, who's out, and how many spots are left. You tap once to confirm. Done.
No thread to scroll. No mental math. The count is just there, live, for everyone.
That's the whole pitch. It's deliberately small. The mistake most people make building this kind of thing is adding chat, payments, profiles, rankings, a feed — and shipping nothing. I'm doing the opposite: the smallest thing that kills the WhatsApp thread, then iterating from real use. I will add chat eventually, but not for RSVPs — that stays separate and clear. Chat will be for coordination once the event is confirmed.
Why I'm writing this down
I'm building ImIn solo, alongside a full-time job, in the open. I'd rather document the real version — the dead ends, the scope cuts, the "why did I waste a weekend on that" moments — than publish a polished story after the fact.
If you organize anything with a recurring group of people and a WhatsApp thread that makes you sigh, this series is for you. Next time I'll get into the first real scope decision I had to make: whether confirmations need accounts at all. (Spoiler: making people sign up to say "yes, I'm coming to soccer" is how you kill an app before it starts.)
More soon.