The Idea: It's 2015. Neil Tanna has just moved to London after university and every weekend the same painful cycle repeats: 47 messages in the group chat, three different restaurant suggestions, someone ghosts, and everyone ends up at the same pub anyway. At university, plans happened naturally - everyone lived close by and was generally free. Post-graduation, organising anything became a logistical nightmare. Neil had an idea for an app that could fix it, but he was training as a corporate lawyer and shelved it. Then in 2018, his mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The conversations over the next 10 months changed his mindset entirely. He promised her he'd stop letting fear hold him back. By August 2019, Neil went full-time on the idea, alongside university friends Jake Jenner (an investment banker) and Duncan Cowan (a software engineer). This was the beginning of Howbout.
The Execution:
The lesson? Neil sat on his idea for four years. It took a deeply personal promise to finally start. The three founders launched into a pandemic, got their investment pulled, and fought through the narrative of being first-time founders. But they kept building for the specific, painful moment between "we should hang out" and actually hanging out. That narrow focus, built for a generation that lives in group chats, turned a university side project into one of the fastest-growing social apps in the world.