The agency that lives in client WhatsApp groups

The shape of the problem

Every client has a WhatsApp group. That’s not a policy anyone chose — it’s just where clients actually message, and the path of least resistance for everyone involved. A client asks for a revised logo pass, or wants the Diwali campaign moved up a week, or approves a draft with a thumbs-up emoji at 11pm. It happens in the group, in the middle of five other threads, and it gets agreed there too.

The trouble is that agreeing to something in chat and tracking it are two different acts, and only the first one is happening. Nobody stops mid-conversation to switch apps and open a project tool. So the work exists as a scroll-up in someone’s phone, not as a task with an owner and a due date. A few days later, someone in the group — often the client — asks “where is the Diwali campaign?”, and the honest answer is that whoever remembers the thread best gives whatever answer they remember. That’s not a process. It’s institutional memory running on individual phones.

A day in the life

The morning starts with a digest: each person on the team gets a message listing what’s due from them today, pulled straight from the boards, no login required to see it.

Through the day, work keeps getting agreed the way it always has — in the client’s WhatsApp group. The difference is that a task gets created by messaging Kaarya in plain language, right when the ask lands, instead of after someone remembers to write it down later. If the client group needs to know where something stands, a task can be shared into that same chat with its status and due date attached, so the answer isn’t “let me check” — it’s already sitting in the thread.

When work is done, it’s closed from the same chat it was created in: reply DONE to the task message and it’s marked complete, no separate app to open. If a client comes back with a note on that specific piece of work, replying to the task’s message leaves it as a comment on the task itself, attached to the right piece of work rather than buried in general chat. Approvals that need a client’s yes or no go out with one-tap Approve/Reject buttons, so the client’s decision is captured as a decision, not inferred from a thumbs-up.

And when the status question does come up — “where is the Diwali campaign?” — it gets answered by looking at the board instead of by memory. Every task carries a per-task activity trail, so who changed what, and when, is visible without asking around.

What you set up on day one

Getting a small agency running doesn’t take an onboarding project. Link the WhatsApp number the team already uses — once, at setup — and lay out the client work as boards, one per client or per campaign, however the agency already thinks about its work. From there, pick whichever view fits how a given piece of work is best seen: a list for a straightforward client, a kanban board for something with clear stages, a calendar for deadline-heavy weeks, or a timeline for a campaign with milestones running through it. Milestones mark the moments — a launch date, a client sign-off — that the rest of the board is working toward.

That’s the whole setup. There’s no migration to run and no historical data to import; the team starts creating tasks from chat on day one and the board fills in from there.

What it does not do

Kaarya is in public testing right now, and it’s worth being plain about the edges of that.

It doesn’t read a WhatsApp conversation on its own and decide what should become a task — someone still has to message Kaarya to create one, or reply to turn a note into a comment. It won’t restructure a messy client thread into a clean project plan for you; it gives you the pieces (tasks, boards, views, milestones, an activity trail) and the team still does the organizing. And because it’s in public testing, treat it as a tool you’re trying alongside whatever you use today, not a system you’re betting a client deadline on just yet.