Why We Built TeamOutings (Our Origin Story)

In the summer of 2023, I was running a 28-person startup. We were growing fast, hiring well, and losing people we didn't want to lose. The exit interviews all said the same thing in different words: "I liked the work but never felt connected to the team."

That stung because we were trying. We had monthly team dinners, quarterly outings, and a budget for it all. The problem wasn't willingness. It was execution.

The spreadsheet that broke us

Our office manager, Jess, was the unofficial event planner. She kept a Google Sheet with everyone's dietary restrictions, a separate sheet for RSVP tracking, a thread in Slack for suggestions, and a personal note on her phone with restaurant contacts.

Every month, the same cycle repeated. Jess would pick a restaurant, post in Slack asking who's coming, spend three days chasing responses, call the restaurant to update the headcount twice, realize she forgot to check dietary needs, send another Slack message, get three responses out of 28, and eventually just book based on her best guess.

She spent about six hours per event on logistics. For a monthly dinner. And despite all that effort, attendance hovered around 55%. Not because people didn't want to come, but because the information was scattered and the reminders were inconsistent.

One Tuesday afternoon, Jess walked into my office and said, "I love planning these events. I hate everything about coordinating them." That sentence is basically our company mission statement now.

The first version was embarrassing

I built the first prototype over a weekend in August 2023. And I use "built" loosely. It was a Next.js app with a form that collected RSVPs and dietary info, stored everything in a database, and sent email reminders. That's it.

No photo sharing. No analytics. No integrations. No design to speak of. The color scheme was default Tailwind blue and the fonts were whatever the browser rendered.

But Jess used it for our September team dinner, and something clicked. She created the event in two minutes, sent the link in Slack, and had 22 responses within 24 hours. No chasing. No separate dietary survey. Her coordination time dropped from six hours to about 40 minutes. Attendance hit 82%.

She asked if other companies could use it. I said I didn't think it was ready. She said it didn't matter, because what she'd been using before (Slack plus Google Sheets plus prayers) was worse.

Finding the real problem

Over the next three months, I showed the prototype to office managers and HR people at other companies. Their reactions split into two camps.

Camp one said, "We already use Google Forms and Slack for this." When I asked them how it was working, they'd pause, then admit it was kind of a mess. But a mess they were used to.

Camp two said, "We stopped doing team events because coordinating them was too painful." These were the people who convinced me there was a real product here. They hadn't stopped caring about team culture. They'd stopped being able to manage the logistics around it.

The second camp was larger than I expected. At least a third of the people I talked to had either reduced their event frequency or stopped entirely because the coordination burden fell on one already-overwhelmed person.

We used to do monthly team dinners. Then our office manager quit and nobody picked up the planning. It's been eight months since our last one. I think about it all the time but don't know where to start.

What we learned from the first 50 customers

We launched a proper version in early 2024 and got our first 50 paying customers by April. Mostly small to mid-size companies between 15 and 150 employees. Here's what they taught us.

The RSVP flow is everything. If it's not dead simple, people won't respond. Our earliest version required an account signup before RSVPing. Response rates were mediocre. We removed the signup requirement and response rates jumped 20 points overnight. Every interaction between "I got a link" and "I responded" needs to be frictionless.

Dietary restrictions are a privacy issue most tools ignore. People don't want to broadcast their celiac disease or religious dietary practices to a Slack channel. They'll share it privately with a planner through a form. This insight shaped our entire approach to data collection.

Nobody wants another app in their stack. The moment we built Slack and Teams integrations, adoption accelerated. People RSVP where they already work. The tool needs to go to them, not the other way around.

Organizers care about follow-through, not features. They don't want a tool with 50 capabilities. They want a tool that makes sure the right people show up to the right place at the right time with the right food. That's it. Everything we've built serves that core loop.

The team today

We're a small team. And that's intentional. Every person here has either planned team events at a previous company or worked closely with someone who did. We're building for a problem we've personally experienced, which keeps us honest.

Our product decisions start with one question: "Would this have helped Jess?" If the answer is no, or if it's a marginal nice-to-have, we don't build it. There are plenty of project management tools and communication platforms in the world. We're not trying to be one of them. We're trying to be the thing that makes bringing your team together feel easy instead of exhausting.

Why this matters

I think about team events differently than I did in 2023. Back then, I saw them as a retention tool. A line item in the culture budget. Important but operational.

Now I see them as something more fundamental. The moments when a team sits around a table together, shares a meal, laughs at something stupid, and goes home feeling a little more connected, those moments compound. They make the hard days at work more bearable. They turn colleagues into friends. They're the difference between a job and a place you actually want to be.

Building a tool that makes those moments happen more often, more easily, for more teams? That's worth spending my career on.

If you're the person at your company who cares about team events but is drowning in logistics, we built this for you. And if you want to tell us what we're getting wrong, I read every piece of feedback personally. We're still building, and your experience shapes what we build next.