Relay’s Purpose
The mission of Relay is to cultivate shepherding that scales, but why?
TLDR
- Mission: Cultivate more Shepherding in the world and prevent burnout, aka shepherding that scales
- Problem: Shepherds, (ministers & teachers) often face burnout and quit, potential shepherds (church goers & students) never try
- Solution: Social productivity software that handles organization, discovery, and facilitation to unlock latent relational capital so humans can focus on communication and counseling without the overwhelm and ambiguity that leads to burnout.
Why does this matter?
Shepherding, which as I am using the term includes discipling, mentoring, coaching, teaching, advising and even parenting, is a universal human virtue and a core Christian value, as well as a command from Jesus. Relay exists to cultivate more Shepherding in the world, aka Shepherding that scales and does not dwindle or cause burnout, across multiple domains, not only Christian disciplemaking.
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations” - Matthew 28:19
I believe for software to truly be Christian (that is, Christ like) it must benefit not only believers but also unbelievers. This is to partner with Christ in bringing heaven to earth and the restoration of all things.
“may your kingdom come,
may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” - Matthew 6:10
“In the same way, let your light shine before people, so that they can see your good deeds and give honor to your Father in heaven.” - Matthew 5:16
This then, fulfills the command to evangelize as well, in a way that is celebrating the glory of Christ and the goodness of God, not trying to sell Jesus like a multi-level marketing scheme.
“In other words, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting people’s trespasses against them, and he has given us the message of reconciliation. Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making his plea through us.” - 2 Corinthians 5:19-20
Which also, incidentally, fulfills the original mandate for humanity in Genesis, to be God’s image bearer, to be light of the earth, to be an ambassador for God’s Kingdom, to make disciples of Jesus, these are all extensions of the same thing.
“God created humankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them,
male and female he created them.” - Genesis 1:27
So what’s the problem?
Shepherding doesn’t scale; in fact it typically causes burnout. There are few leaders, and many followers, but this is not God’s intent. The great commission is not “go be discipled” it’s to go and disciple others. This is how you are the light of the earth, by how you disciple others, not how much bible knowlege you’ve consumed.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest.” - Luke 10:2
Non-christian shepherds also have many of the same problems, thats why its admirable. Teachers, coaches, managers, advisors, and parents all face many of the same problems pastors do. Shepherding is hard, and people will notice if you make the effort, thats why disciple-makers, or shepherds, are called the light of the earth.
So what is the common problem all of these shepherds face? What are the leading cause of burnout in these spaces? My research over the past few years highlights the following:
- Task overload (admin & context switching especially)
- People overload (excessive demands, complaints, conflicts)
- Isolation and lack of support or appreciation
- Role ambiguity
Who has these problems?
- Pastors, missionaries, church staff, student ministers
- Advisors, coaches, managers, angel investors
- Teachers
- Parents
- Students (mentoring other students, navigating adulthood, or seeking to become a mentor / shepherd)
How do we solve these?
Software is better at solving some things than others, and Relay must also choose which audiences to focus on their unique shepherding problems.
-
Software is good at solving organization, discovery and facilitation problems, but not communication and counseling problems.
- It’s essential Relay cultivates humans doing the shepherding, not trying to do the shepherding itself.
- So we are focused on solving task overload and people overload so that human teammates can help clarify roles and provide support
- Therefore we want software that creates relational intelligence, (relational data & systems of action), to enhance people’s natural emotional intelligence, (emotional awareness, empathy & social interaction).
- Relay is uniquely focused on student ministry, thanks to its partnership with IFI and Frontier Commons, and so is focused on helping ministers (church, para church, & missional staff), teachers (high school & university), and the students (senior high & university) themsevles.
So what are we building?
Relay defines a new category: social productivity (as opposed to social media) by combining people, notes and tasks together as well as a robust discovery and matching system for potential resources and mentors. So not only does it provide the tools for individuals to work, it provides the network for teams & mentors to meet and journey together.
Relay then visualizes and organizes your knowledge network, essentially unlocking and empowering the relational capital you already have but may be unaware of. AI agents can be connected and integrated with both the productivity tools as well as the network layer. All together this creates relational data & systems of action which form relational intelligence.
To achieve this, Relay has 3 main surfaces, all integrated with agentic AI.
Atlas Network: search engine, matching, and publishing public content; so personal knowledge can be easily shared and relational capital of individuals and orgs properly utilized
Productivity: People, Notes, Tasks, and Events together. So the power of a personal CRM like Dex with the productivity features of Superlist, Granola, Capacities or Obsidian with the elegance of Bear and Things.
Platform: strong primitives to build your own tools, why recreate data, storage, real time sync, offline sync, again and again with vibe coded react apps, built on a solid foundation and iterate on business logic. Its building widgets in the Relay ecosystem and its new TUI/GUI hybrid or building full custom apps with Relay data and auth infra to enrich your apps (like Manuscript Bible app connected to notes from Relay). You can also deploy your own relay server so then it could run even separate from our main cloud, but I don’t really want people creating competing clouds. There’s just one public Relay cloud network, or your own self hosted operation for your personal or team needs.
How does it feel?
Like a magic piece of paper or canvas, ideally.
Ruthlessly simple using extensive and AI empowered progressive disclosure. Simple UI that expands upon detecting user intent. Not just predict what they type, what they want to do and therefore what we show them.
User friendly TUI: a new kind of GUI, not quite terminal, not typical GUI, a more user friendly terminal with widgets. I’m still trying to figure this out though. This is kinda crucial because it is the UI which the Agent orchestration works and the foundation for making the Roblox style platform much more efficient, no need to describe the UI if the all the lego block widgets are in place.
- I’m not sure the approach, should it be search first or chat first like google / openwebUI with suggestion cards? Is OpenAI style chat already this new UI paradigm? is this a done thing, everything in a chat stream?
- should it be browse or suggestion first like youtube / instagram / tiktok? show the user what they need / want in that moment and browse for more matches? should that be scoped to today? this week? or not time bound at all? what about for discovering content on Atlas?
- productivity first like Things? like simple sheet of tasks to do today?
Agent Workspace: Works with any local or cloud model, intertwined in the UX to be agentic first. Idea being Relay is a better workspace than the dijointed tools slack, linear, gmail, etc. built for agents from the ground up. Also help orchestrate agents like Composer or something. Also plays nice with other apps or tools, so if you prefer to use Gmail or Obsidian or something similar to look at your markdown notes, fine, but then those notes as still in Relay can reference other Relay entities such as people or tasks or things. Can also sync with Todoist or Things tasks. The AI agent then can see everything from one point, one cli command instead of several