Relay Roadmap
Phase 1 - Alpha MVP
May-July 2026
Free features
Goal: make the current product usable, prove the matching wedge, and strengthen the people/relationship foundation.
Fix Existing Alpha Build
Clear the current Todoist bug list.
Establish a stable baseline of working features.
Keep the current composable bento/grid feed visible enough to evaluate, even if it is not the final long-term UI model.
Relay Matching
Primary wedge: make Relay Matching specifically useful for IFI-style ministry and international student support.
Build student-first matching flows that feel friendly, low-friction, and worth trying on any campus.
Let students post requests, needs, and questions.
Let volunteers, staff, mentors, teams, and organizations publish what they can offer.
Help staff and volunteers discover relevant student needs and respond appropriately.
Student needs to support:
Cross-cultural awareness and adjustment.
First-time setup needs such as bank accounts, transportation, housing, school logistics, and local systems.
Cultural coaching, social tips, job hunting, and practical life guidance.
Returning-home support, including connection to churches, ministries, pastors, or trusted people in the student's home country.
Volunteer and mentor needs to support:
Build a volunteer portal.
Suggest ways volunteers can help.
Let volunteers set availability and service preferences.
Show potential matches.
Support solo mentors, teams, and organization-managed volunteer pools.
Add organization dashboards for managing volunteers and matching activity.
Relational intelligence goals:
Build trust between people, teams, and organizations.
Grow the relational graph.
Unlock latent relational capital.
Develop peer-to-peer and friend-of-friend matching.
Use graph-based trust signals to suggest people who may have the skills, services, availability, or relationships needed.
Relay People / CRM
Reinforce the original Relay value prop: helping people remember, understand, and care for their relationships.
Make the people CRM excellent before expanding too far into productivity.
Treat people, entities, relationship context, and relational memory as core primitives.
Improve contact enrichment and relationship intelligence.
Investigate Dex compatibility.
Revisit Happenstance integration and whether to use more API functionality or improve LinkedIn-style enrichment.
Begin foundation work for native macOS/iOS support where needed, especially Apple Contacts integration.
Business card and public profile features belong here:
Add public profile / digital business card functionality.
Support QR-code sharing.
Consider NFC or mobile-native sharing later.
Make it easy for students, staff, and volunteers to meet and connect.
Use this as the foundation for later forms, events, invitations, attendance, and relationship capture.
Atlas / Knowledge Foundation
Fold some early Atlas improvements into Phase 1 where they directly support matching.
Improve Atlas enough to support high-quality matching.
Let questions and answers emerge naturally from student needs.
Explore lightweight Q&A around student support, but avoid overcommitting to full forums too early.
Support publishing useful team knowledge into Atlas when it strengthens matching or onboarding.
Mbench / Full Jacket Placement
Do not make Mbench or Full Jacket a major Phase 1 deliverable.
Phase 1 should only include Atlas improvements that directly support matching.
Mbench / Full Jacket should be planned after the matching and Atlas foundation is stronger.
Phase 2 - Beta
August-September 2026
Around $5/mo features
Goal: build the personal/team productivity layer on top of Relay People.
Notes & Tasks
Build the Relay productivity suite around notes, tasks, and people.
Create a simple, elegant notes and tasks experience.
Use Relay People as the context layer behind notes, tasks, meetings, and assignments.
Aim for the simplicity and polish of Superlist, Bear, and Things.
Avoid getting pulled too early into full Notion, Linear, Obsidian, or Capacities complexity.
Support teams, but keep the primary experience approachable for non-technical users.
Task model:
Support simple assignment.
Consider optional "engineering mode" for richer task metadata such as creator, owner, reviewer, assignee, and agent.
Preserve future compatibility with Linear-like workflows without forcing technical complexity on normal users.
Allow agents to be assigned to tasks.
Allow a human owner/reviewer to supervise agent work.
Integrations:
Todoist API.
Things API.
Trello API.
Later: Linear, Shortcut, and other project tools.
Relay should not require users to abandon existing tools; data should flow in and out where useful.
AI note-taking opportunity:
Compete with Granola-style meeting notes, but broaden beyond meetings into general spoken notes.
Let users walk and talk, record thoughts, summarize them, and produce useful notes and tasks.
Differentiate by using Relay's people/team context to automatically assign follow-up tasks.
Meeting outcome should be: everyone has notes, everyone knows their responsibilities, and agents can begin working where appropriate.
Support ministry use cases like spoken prayer requests, shared Bible study notes, and summarized group updates.
UX direction:
"Magical piece of paper" feeling.
Simple like Granola or Bear.
Powerful enough to grow toward Craft or Notion, without inheriting their complexity.
Native Mac app likely becomes important here.
Native iOS may also matter, but web/server remains the main focus unless the native layer is necessary for the experience.
AI infrastructure assumptions:
Re-evaluate local model needs later.
Assume Apple Foundation Models may become good enough for many native personal-intelligence features.
Do not overbuild Ollama/Gemma-style infrastructure unless Apple's models prove insufficient.
Manuscript Placement
Manuscript should begin after the core notes/tasks foundation exists.
Phase 2 is the right time to start integrating Manuscript concepts into Relay notes.
Manuscripts can become a specialized document/note type.
Support Bible study notes, highlighting, shared study documents, and printable manuscripts.
Let Bible study groups collaborate on notes using the same underlying Relay notes system.
Do not build the full house-church/live-production feature set yet.
Events
Build calendar and scheduling features as an extension of the productivity suite.
Add calendars, scheduling, and events.
Integrate with Google Calendar.
Explore virtual/grouped calendars such as work, personal, ministry, or shared group calendars.
Clarify the boundaries between tasks, events, habits, workflows, and focus time.
Do not overbuild if Google Calendar integration is sufficient at first.
Use events as a foundation for later invitations, attendance, forms, student gatherings, and ministry workflows.
Weekly Bulletins
This likely starts in Phase 2 as a notes/tasks/publishing workflow.
Support team notes and shared context that can feed a weekly bulletin.
Let teams collect announcements, prayer requests, events, photos, and updates.
Use agents to help summarize and draft recurring bulletins.
Publishing can initially integrate with an external platform such as Ghost rather than requiring Relay to become a full CMS immediately.
Phase 3 - 1.0
October-December 2026
Around $20/mo features
Goal: refine the core platform into a polished paid product with meeting notes, forms, events, and stronger matching.
Meeting Notes
Refine Relay's notes into a serious Granola competitor.
Add high-quality transcription.
Add translation, especially for cross-cultural ministry and international student contexts.
Support real-time meeting notes.
Automatically summarize meetings.
Automatically extract and assign tasks.
Use team/person context to know who should own what.
Support agent-assigned tasks with human owners or reviewers.
Position Relay as the meeting notes app that also knows the people, relationships, and work.
Forms
Build high-quality social forms that connect back into Relay's people/entity system.
Replace basic Google Forms-style workflows.
Compete with Typeform / VideoAsk quality where appropriate.
Use forms to collect people, needs, events, RSVPs, applications, feedback, prayer requests, and ministry data.
Connect form submissions directly to people, entities, tasks, notes, and matching workflows.
Enable better event registration and invitation workflows.
Lay groundwork for future education use cases such as exams, tests, and teacher/student workflows.
Matching Refinement
Revisit matching after the CRM, notes, tasks, events, and forms foundations are stronger.
Improve matching quality.
Add better trust and graph signals.
Improve request/offer matching.
Refine organization dashboards.
Strengthen Atlas-backed knowledge and Q&A around matching.
Improve feedback loops from staff, volunteers, students, and matched outcomes.
Atlas, Mbench, and Full Jacket
This is the better phase to make Mbench / Full Jacket a serious project again.
After Atlas has improved through matching work, rebuild or integrate Mbench / Full Jacket more intentionally.
Connect Relay, Atlas, and Mbench around durable public knowledge.
Focus on useful, stable knowledge pages for entities, products, people, places, ministries, and fast-changing-but-stable-after-release information.
Explore Atlas as a better knowledge creation and truth-maintenance layer, not just search.
Treat this as adjacent to Relay's core, not as the main product wedge.
Manuscript Expansion
Continue Manuscript after the notes system is solid.
Deepen Bible study document support.
Let verses, people, places, themes, and biblical entities connect to Atlas.
Allow tapping a verse or entity in Manuscript to open the same structured knowledge in Relay/Atlas.
Build toward Bible dictionary / Bible Wikipedia functionality.
Consider read-along, group study, and house-church features later.
Defer video chat or Zoom-like functionality unless there is a clear reason to compete directly.
Future Phases - 2027+
Education / Teachers
Build on forms, events, documents, and people.
Teacher workflows.
Quizzes and tests.
Auto-graded assignments.
Student/teacher relationship management.
Paperless document scanning and organization.
Classroom or group workflows.
Native apps may matter, but many of these features can start web-first.
Relay Study / Cards / SRS
Likely after Manuscript and the productivity suite.
Flashcards.
Memorization.
Spaced repetition.
Bible memory.
Study workflows.
Consider connecting the existing Relay Cards project to the Relay backend.
Fork or modernize the existing project when priorities allow.
Relay Photos / Files
Later extension of the social productivity platform.
Shared photos for churches, teams, house churches, families, and friend groups.
Shared files and documents.
Possible Google Drive-style direction.
Could reuse some Swift camera code, but Relay should probably focus on casual snapshots and shared memory, not becoming a full camera app.
House Church Suite
Possible later vertical built on notes, events, forms, Manuscript, and media.
Shared Bible study.
Group notes.
Prayer requests.
Weekly bulletins.
Music/slides/live production.
Lightweight community publishing.
Possibly video hosting much later, but Zoom is good enough for now.
Finance
Much later.
Do not prioritize until the people, matching, productivity, forms, events, and knowledge layers are working.
Key Placement Decisions
Mbench / Full Jacket: after Atlas and matching are stronger; probably Phase 3, not Phase 1 or early Phase 2.
Manuscript: after the notes/tasks foundation; start in Phase 2, expand in Phase 3.
Relay Cards / Study / SRS: after productivity and Manuscript; likely 2027+ unless there is an easy backend connection pass.
Weekly bulletins: start as a Phase 2 notes/tasks/publishing automation, then strengthen with events/forms/media later.
Atlas Q&A / public knowledge: begin lightly in Phase 1 if it supports matching; deepen in Phase 3 with Mbench / Full Jacket.
Forms: Phase 3, because they become much more powerful once people, events, notes, and tasks already exist.
Teacher/education suite: 2027+, built on forms, events, documents, and people.