96. PlanSnap

Founder: Louise Doherty
Founded: March 2016 (launched April 2018)
Website: plansnap.com

We’ve all experienced the frustration of getting friends together.

There’s always the one friend who can never make the date, the friend who’s always late, the friend who wants to opt for a different venue or location, and the absent friend who never responds.

In fact, research shows that it takes nine apps, 22 app switches, 77 swipes, 13 minutes on the phone and 10 texts to agree on a plan on average.

Louise Doherty – the organised one in her friendship group who’s always suggesting plans – knew this frustration all too well.

After attempting to organise a 20-person camping weekend and subsequently “drowning in notifications”, Doherty decided that there had to be a better way to get friends together and, in 2016, made the leap to quit her job and start PlanSnap.

A social planning app which uses cutting edge machine learning, PlanSnap helps you quickly get your friends together – even if they don’t have the app (they get a text to a web view).

The app allows you to start your plan from the who, what, where and when stages. It then uses machine learning to help you confirm your plan by making smart suggestions; Doherty asserts that nothing else on the market can do this.

Having developed the concept while part of the esteemed Techstars accelerator in NYC – where Doherty was the only female founder on the course – PlanSnap has caught the attention of industry players and consumers.

AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer, has invested in the business, Time Out magazine has come on board as partner, and the crowd has pumped over £380,000 in the business via Crowdcube.

With its official launch only last month (the app launched in beta in November 2017), Doherty tells us that her biggest challenge has been “staying focused”: “this is especially hard in the social planning space where there’s scope for so much innovation and so much of a market opportunity!”

Despite this, the entrepreneur has a dedicated strategy for the company: “My goal is for PlanSnap to become the global go-to way to make any plan on any platform.”