Joshua Gilmer

Luau is an AI platform for busy parents that runs your social life—catching relationship drift, orchestrating plans, and automatically turning limited free time into meaningful real-world connection.

Luau: Get Together, Grow Together

This week I was able to get our iOS app approved by Apple. I'm publishing a fast followup with some bug fixes, but it is mostly ready for users. I booked a few meetings, including a Chi Omega Chapter Secretary who is interested in using Luau for all Chapter events. I designed a t-shirt for college ambassadors. We have officially signed an ambassador for the fall semester at Stanford.

Luau: Get together. Grow together.

I had a ton of bugs to sift through with the new iOS app release. I had to cancel 3 back to back app submissions because I found a new bug and needed to fix it rather than wait. The biggest help was getting users to use the product in front of me and/or start sending screenshots in. I had a user who revealed a bug where he couldn't edit events on the day of in the iOS app. Then his guests couldn't rsvp. Another user couldn't get Google Calendar to sync. Rather than get discouraged by the mounting issues, I took it as affirmation (at least people are trying it). I eventually got to calm waters. Although they were the calm before another storm. The learnings become less and less free the longer you go, so cherish the time where all a mistake cost you was onboarding a few new users. The progress of building honestly isn't the problem. It's getting new users, specifically event hosts, that is the biggest hurdle. Early interviews confirmed that I am solving a real problem. But, so does dieting and exercise. People say losing weight is a priority, but their actions sometimes prove otherwise. I have a feeling that improving your social life is like that. Like eating right and staying physically active, maintain healthy relationships is directly linked with longevity. The trouble is we've been replacing them with other things for the last three decades. We want strong relationships but we don't know where to start. I'm exploring the idea of piggybacking off of free community events to get more exposure to users. Finding free events around people, but instead of packaging that service around advertising revenue from local businesses, I'd maintain it as a free service and let people RSVP on Luau for event reminders and to see who else is coming from your social circles. This is helpful since we'll need this data down the road anyways. AI could help aggregate. It's next week's experiment.

Luau: Get-togethers handled

I built new City Guides, where instead of waiting for a user to have the need to host an event, we get new guests for local events that are already happening. My goal is to convert the hosts to self-manage their own Luau account as they start to see RSVPs coming in for their upcoming events. This required a lot of progress: 1) Building an event ingestion engine to find local events 2) Building City Guide Pages 3) Create accompanying social accounts 4) Making a social planner tool for posting events, and create branded content 5) A city guide CMS that is easy to manage, and that converts free events into Luau events.