Relay Roadmap

D
Douglas

Published April 30, 2026

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.