Founders
Relay was born from a simple question: why isn't social media more honest? Scott and Rex have been close friends since high school. When Scott brought the idea to Rex, they shaped it into a vision together - a social platform with honesty at its center, where your relationships are visible and real, not algorithmically obscured.
Scott designs. Rex builds. But the product and the vision are created together, debated, refined, and molded through a partnership built on years of trust. Underneath it all is a shared belief: their generation needs to do better at staying connected in the real world.
Our Vision
Mission Statement
Relay exists to strengthen real-world relationships through thoughtful technology.
In an era where social media often replaces genuine connection with endless scrolling and superficial engagement, Relay takes a fundamentally different approach. We believe technology should be a bridge to meaningful in-person interactions, not a substitute for them.
The Opportunity Ahead
Technology has long promised to free human time. Washing machines, email, smartphones - each was supposed to give us back hours. Instead, new demands expanded to fill the space. People today feel busier than ever.
But something is shifting. A new wave of technology - autonomous vehicles, AI assistants, automated systems - has the potential to reclaim time at a scale previous generations never experienced. Whether that potential is realised depends on what we build and why.
Relay is built on a bet: that this time can be different, and that the difference will come from intention. We're not waiting for free time to appear. We're building technology that actively protects time for what matters most - the people in your life.
The Problem
Social media trained a generation to treat their lives as a personal brand. Every photo is curated. Every post is calculated for how it will be perceived - not just by strangers, but by close friends. The result is a strange performance anxiety that infects even our most intimate relationships. You don't share the moment; you second-guess it.
This isn't a failure of willpower. It's a failure of design. Platforms built around broadcasting to audiences, where reach and likes are the measures of success, will always push users toward performance. Even among friends, you're performing.
Relay starts from a different premise: social technology should serve relationships, not reach. The atomic unit isn't the post - it's the connection between two people. Features like bilateral consent (where shared posts require mutual agreement) exist because posting should be something you do with someone, not at them.
Every action on Relay has a purpose: to make a friendship stronger, to bring people together, to turn "we should hang out" into an actual event. Not to build an audience. Not to optimise a personal brand. Just to be closer to the people who matter.
Core Belief
Human connection is the foundation of wellbeing. The most fulfilling relationships are built through shared experiences, face-to-face conversations, and genuine presence. Technology should amplify these connections, not compete with them.
Our Purpose
To create technology that:
- Facilitates real-world gatherings and interactions
- Strengthens existing relationships rather than fragmenting attention
- Respects users' time, attention, and mental health
- Encourages depth over breadth in social connections
What We Stand Against
- Addiction-driven engagement metrics
- Advertising that commodifies attention
- Algorithmic feeds designed to maximise screen time
- Social comparison and vanity metrics
- The replacement of in-person connection with digital substitutes
What We Stand For
- Intentional, meaningful technology use
- Genuine relationship maintenance
- Mental health and digital wellbeing
- Privacy and user respect
- Quality of connection over quantity of content
Why Now
Social media has completed a quiet transformation. It no longer needs your friends.
Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, X - these platforms work perfectly well if you follow no one you know. The algorithm feeds you strangers. Your friends appear only as decoration: a "liked by" label designed to make endless content feel personal, borrowing the credibility of your relationships to keep you scrolling.
This is the logical endpoint of engagement-driven design. Friends are inefficient. They don't post enough. Their content isn't optimized. So the platforms learned to route around them, while still extracting value from the social graph you brought with you.
The result is a new kind of loneliness: you're surrounded by content but starved of connection. The people in your life become background noise to an infinite feed of strangers.
Relay exists because this trajectory is not inevitable. A different design is possible - one where friends aren't decorative, but essential. Where the product is useless without the people you care about. Where your attention is returned to the relationships that actually matter.
Social media stopped needing your friends. Relay is built around them.
What Makes Relay Defensible
The tools people actually need to maintain friendships - group chats, event planning, shared calendars - have been neglected by social platforms. Not because they're hard to build, but because they're bad for engagement. Coordinating a meetup means leaving the app. That's a cost no ad-driven platform wants to pay.
Relay is built around these features - not despite their effect on screen time, but because of it. Event planning isn't buried in a menu. Group chats aren't an afterthought. They're core to the product because they're core to the mission: getting people together in the real world.
But utility alone isn't enough. Relay also builds a picture of who you are - not as a brand, but as a person. Your friend networks. How you respond to the daily poll. Your interests. Your personality profile. None of this is designed to help you perform for an audience. It's designed to help you and your friends understand each other better, find common ground, and create reasons to meet.
Over time, Relay becomes the place where your friendships live - not as a feed of content, but as a record of shared experiences, ongoing conversations, and plans made real. That's not engagement. That's value.
Business Model Philosophy
Relay will never show ads. Your attention belongs to you and the people you care about - not to the highest bidder.
This means we need a different model. Our approach gives users a choice:
- Free with data collection: Access premium features, and we use anonymized data to sustain the platform
- Free without data collection: A more limited experience, but your data stays entirely yours
- Paid premium: Full features, no data collection, direct support for what we're building
No option includes advertising. No option includes algorithmic feeds that prioritize anything other than what your friends have posted. The feed is theirs. The choice is yours.
Users are not the product. They're the point.
Metrics That Matter
If we reject engagement metrics, what do we measure instead?
Events created. This is the clearest signal that Relay is doing its job. An event means someone is trying to bring people together in the real world. More events means more meetups. That's the point.
Posts made. Not as a vanity number, but as a sign that users are sharing moments with friends - together, with mutual consent. A post on Relay represents a shared experience, not a personal broadcast.
RSVPs and attendance. It's not enough to create events. We want to know: did people show up? Did the plan become real?
The north star is simple: did Relay help someone see their friends in person? Everything else is noise.
The Goal
Relay aims to be used by over 1 billion people.
Not for engagement metrics or advertising revenue, but because we believe this approach to social technology can meaningfully improve how humanity connects. When a billion people use technology that strengthens rather than substitutes for real relationships, the positive impact on global mental health and social cohesion could be transformative.
Principles for Development
As Relay evolves, every feature must be evaluated against our core mission:
- Does this encourage in-person interaction?
- Does this respect the user's time and attention?
- Does this strengthen existing relationships?
- Does this support mental wellbeing?
- Is this genuinely useful?
If a feature doesn't serve these principles, it doesn't belong in Relay.
Usefulness Above All
Relay must be genuinely useful. Every interaction should provide clear value - helping users organise their social lives, stay connected with the people they care about, and spend less time in the app while getting more out of it.
We do not optimise for time spent. We optimise for value delivered. The best version of Relay is one users open with purpose, accomplish what they need, and close satisfied. Features should solve real problems, not create artificial engagement.
If a user could achieve the same outcome faster or more easily, we have failed. Relay should be the most efficient tool for maintaining and deepening real-world relationships.
Relay: Technology that brings people together.