Luodi Wang, 18, Building a Tech Startup Turning Student Nonprofits into Virtual Immersive Communities
Luodi Wang is an 18-year-old college freshman and serial entrepreneur, currently building Loop ( looptz.com ), a SaaS turning nonprofits into online communities. Upon discovering the finance world through investing his pocket money in stocks, he found a love for building startups and incorporating technology into everyday lives.
Starting at a young age, he was deeply fascinated with computers and tech creating 5 different games by 13. He voraciously consumed coding languages, algorithms, and work with machine learning apps like PyTorch by himself- but he then showed me, saying, “You know, without the Discord coding communities with people from all backgrounds, some [people] new like me, asking the experts learning all of this wouldn’t be possible. There are questions [that] just couldn’t be answered precisely- Discord helped me out, and I got the fastest responses from groups of people. That was life-changing [for me].”
Previous Startups
He’s previously built tech startups like Beamoos Hawaii focused on training algorithms to deliver daily news in bullet points on stacked cards eliminating bias in reporting, and Outwith Dusk, a C2C AR/VR startup developing videos and podcast clips for an immersive user experience.
Building and Founding Loop
Luodi and his other three co-founders, Aaryan, Anushk, and Tapas have heavily invested in building software especially virtual communities, and were searching for ways to combine the process of students finding a nonprofit or startup to join, idea creations, and organizing an organization’s public events.
After a week, they finalized the idea and spent 2 months building the software, testing it, and releasing the beta version to the public of 1,500 waitlisted users. In September, it was released to the wider public.
On why now Luodi said, “I’ve never had more certitude to bring the process to students around the world because you can scale your organization, the interest meetings, public events- and what you stand for to an infinite number of people. It’s limitless. And that’s impossible with separated social mediums since Instagram and Slack are too large for scaling student organizations.”
Continuing on, “I mean, it just saves so much time for the students wanting to join an organization and for the organization’s time spent on marketing. It’s reducing chance by randomness and the space between the students and organization,” he says.
This software is trained to be bespoke for each individual user through the wide range of organization offerings and new events added onto the site each day. The biggest challenge for them was building the technology and understanding that SaaS is really using tech to scale their solution to inefficiencies of the student nonprofit world.
“I think the tech itself is equally important to spread the world. You’ve got to prioritize simplifying and developing key features then roll it out to the right targeted audiences. Startups are challenging but it’s one of the greatest learnings in life. I just love the journey,” he says.
Future of Loop
About the future, Luodi hopes there’ll be many more thousands of users reaching 100k a month. For funding, Loop is currently in talks with a VC firm with $2 Billion dollars plus of transactions to raise six figures for his company. As for adding employees, he believes in keeping it to the 4 co-founders adding more interns for the future, “I think everyone deserves an opportunity to work or intern, and we want to democratize these experiences and give equal chances,” he says.
Follow @luodiwg on Twitter for tips on the startup journey and being productive as
a student & entrepreneur.
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