The third starting point on Noovo is When. You have a free week. A stretch of days that just opened up. You don't yet know where you'd go or who'd come. I built Noovo's Start with When for exactly that condition. (For the other two starting points, see Start with Who and Start with Where. For the full overview, see How Noovo works.)
A free week is the most under-leveraged asset most adults have. You earn it, you protect it, and then more often than not you watch it disappear into errands and noncommittal "we should do something" texts. Start with When is the structural fix for that.
What happens when you mark a week free
On Noovo, you select a week and mark it as open. Two things happen:
- The map filters. Scrub the timeline to that week. The map shows which friends are already planning to be where, that week. If two of them are in Lisbon, you see it.
- The overlap detection runs. Friends who also have that week marked free get surfaced. Not as a feed item. As a quiet match: you and Sam are both free that week.
From there, the trip can form in either direction. You can join a friend who's already going somewhere. Or you can start a new trip and pull in the friends whose dates match.
Why the week is the right anchor
Time off is the constraint that holds. You either have a week available or you don't. Destinations are negotiable. People are negotiable. Dates are rigid.
Most planning tools invert this. They start with destination ("I want to go to Paris") and then ask you to negotiate dates against your work calendar. By the time the dates work, the destination has shifted. Start with When skips the loop. Lock the rigid part. Let the soft parts adapt around it.
The "what if I don't know what I want to do yet" answer
Most people don't mark a week as free because they haven't decided what to do with it yet. They wait to plan something before signalling availability. This is backward, and it's why most free weeks disappear.
The right move is to mark the week free first, then let the trip form around it. On Noovo, this carries no commitment. A free-time window isn't a promise. It's a signal. If nothing forms, the window passes and nothing happens. If something forms, you accept or decline.
Lower the cost of saying yes. More trips happen.
From a free week to a trip, end to end
- Mark the week free. Pick the dates. Choose who can see them.
- Scrub to that week. Look at the map. See which friends are already going where.
- Tap an overlap. Join a friend's trip, or start your own with the matching friends pre-tagged.
- Send the invite. The friends get the question framed directly: are you in?
- Lock the trip. Date confirmed. Destination chosen. The week is no longer disappearing.
That's the full Start with When loop. Five steps. None of them require a group chat.
The hidden value of marking a week early
The friends who go on the most trips aren't the ones with the most disposable income or the most flexible schedules. They're the ones who signal availability earliest. They claim the week on the calendar before anyone else has decided what to do with it, and then the trip forms around them.
Noovo just makes that signalling visible to the people who'd actually want to know.