Craig Pollard

Craig's twelve years at Apple shaped a single conviction that runs through everything he builds: technology should get out of the way so people can focus on what actually matters. As a team lead, he learned that the hardest part of great software isn't adding features — it's removing friction until the product simply works on the first try.

He founded Who's In after watching organisers everywhere drown in what he calls "admin debt" — manually tracking RSVPs in group chats, chasing payments one message at a time, and juggling messy waitlists in spreadsheets. Whether it was a local yoga class, a weekend hike, or a professional workshop, the same pattern repeated: the tools meant to help were quietly making the work harder.

What he's built with Who's In

Who's In started as a "one-link" RSVP tool and grew into a progressive-complexity platform with four distinct products. Events handles free and paid RSVPs with one-tap WhatsApp sharing, automatic waitlists, and QR check-in. Studio gives yoga, pilates, and fitness businesses class scheduling, memberships, and a branded booking page. Clubs runs membership communities with paid and free tiers. Conference covers multi-track agendas, speakers, sponsors, and badge printing. The shared idea across all four is the same one Craig carried out of Apple: give organisers their time back.

Under his direction, Who's In has leaned hard into three things organisers can rely on: secure, instant payments through a deep Stripe integration; automated WhatsApp and email reminders so no one has to chase a guest again; and smart waitlist management that handles overflow automatically. The platform now helps organisers in cities from London to Dubai to Bali move off spreadsheets and group chats and back to the events they care about.

AI-discovery and agent readiness

Craig has pushed Who's In to be discoverable not just by people but by AI assistants and agents. The platform exposes native WebMCP tools and a public REST API so assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can search events, check availability, and surface accurate, structured answers. It's a bet that the next wave of event discovery happens through agents as much as through search — and that being machine-readable and honest about your capabilities is its own form of trust.

Beyond Who's In

When he isn't building Who's In, Craig serves as a board advisor and non-executive director for companies across technology and sports, and invests in early-stage teams in the same space. Seeing how even well-resourced organisations struggle with simple coordination convinced him that the "organiser's headache" isn't only a community problem — it's a professional one, felt everywhere from a global startup hosting a retreat in Bali to a large firm in London coordinating an offsite.

His standard, applied to every feature, is borrowed straight from Apple: "Does this make the product feel more like it just works?" If a feature adds complexity without clear value, it doesn't ship. That discipline — simplicity first, respect for organisers, and meeting communities on the tools they already use — is what he wants Who's In to be known for.