Recess: Keep Friends Close

Recess helps you keep up with the people you actually care about. Save little moments through the week, catch up every Friday, and turn “we should hang out” into “who’s in tonight?”

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Inspiration

As a founder and world traveler, I meet a lot of people: other founders, people at parties or bars, people I clicked with at a conference and swore I'd see again. I wanted to keep up with all of them; however, as a surprising introvert, the problem is that I'm a horrible texter and get overwhelmed with traditional social media. Catching up with people I genuinely loved hanging out with started to feel like a chore, one overdue reply at a time. Somewhere along the way I'd also drifted from my college friends since I moved and travel so much, and I wanted a low-stakes way to find out if we still had things in common.

The tools we have currently don't fix this. Group chats get noisy, and today's social feeds are built for everyone except the people you actually care about.

What Recess does

You might not need new friends. You might just need an easier way to see the ones you already have. Recess helps you keep up with the people you actually care about. Save little moments through the week, catch up every Friday, and turn "we should hang out" into an actual plan by sending a broadcast hangout invite to your contact groups.

Life Updates: share once on Friday, not twenty times throughout the week During the week you add photos, videos and random thoughts to your Life Update. You don't have to reply to anyone or post on a schedule. You share your week once, and it reaches everyone who should see it.

12:30am Friday, in each person's own time zone, everyone's Life Updates arrives at once. You catch up with all your people in one sitting, and then the feed ends: "You're all caught up. See you next Friday." Between Fridays there's nothing to check if you don't want to and nothing to fall behind on.

Recesses: turn "soon" into a plan A Recess is a spontaneous plan: getting coffee, going on a walk, game night, sitting on someone's couch. Choose a time (or create a time poll with Recess+), invite all of your contacts or everyone in a specific contact group (family, the homies, work friends) at once, and see who's in.

Contact groups: one app for every circle Private contact groups all you to decide who your Life Updates and Recess invites go to quickly. It also act as a tag to help you remember where you met someone. Only you can see your groups, so nobody knows which list they're on.

Your Year: proof you actually did stuff Your profile looks back on a year of Fridays and the Recesses that came out of them. The stats reward real life, not screen time. "Caught up" is measured over your last four Fridays and "Hours with friends" only counts Recesses you actually showed up to.

Business model

Recess is free, with two revenue streams:

  • Recess+ subscription (monthly or annual): your full archive (free keeps the last 3 months), time polling for plans, unlimited contact groups, a custom @username, "journal mode", post-level contact group selection for Life Updates (instead of Update-level), and postcard styles or your own photo behind your week. Recess+ is ad-free.
  • One native ad for free users, placed where discovering something local is actually useful.

How we built it

  • Expo SDK 57 + React Native with Expo Router: one TypeScript codebase for iOS and Android
  • Supabase for auth (Sign in with Apple and Google), Postgres, storage and edge functions. Privacy is enforced in the database with row-level security, and a scheduled job releases each Life Update at Friday 12:30am in the viewer's time zone.
  • RevenueCat for Recess+ (duh) and ad tracking
  • Google AdMob for the single native ad
  • Expo push notifications for invites, RSVP reminders and Friday

Challenges I ran into

  • Friday starts at a different time for everyone: "Release on Friday" sounds simple until your friends are in Lisbon, Chicago and Melbourne. Updates wait for each viewer's Friday, so everyone gets the same ritual on their own morning.
  • The empty-app problem: A social app does nothing until your friends are on it. I didn't want to upload anyone's address book, because that shares data from people who never signed up. Instead, invite links and an on-device contact picker let you bring people in one at a time, and nothing leaves your phone.
  • Keeping media costs sane: Photos and videos are the heart of a Life Update, and also the biggest cost. Images are resized at upload and videos are capped at 15 seconds, so storage stays predictable as the app grows.
  • Shipping two platforms at once: Launching on iOS and Android together meant getting sign-in, purchases, ads and push notifications working on both, and through both stores' reviews.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have agreements with 8 cafes in 2 different cities to host promotional events as we work towards getting our first thousands of users. We chose cafes for a reason, and it's because a third place is somewhere people go specifically to be around other people, and a cafe regular is exactly who we built Recess for, someone who actually makes plans and shows up to them. I wanted to make sure that our first users are planners and people who go to things, because those are the people who are going to keep using the app, and if we recruited from somewhere random we'd get a lot of downloads from people who never open it again.

What I learned

My last company, a social platform, grew to over 600,000 active users in less than a year. It taught me how to grow an app. Recess taught me how to make one that feels good to use.

Restraint is a design skill. The feed that ends, the quiet days between Fridays and the single ad slot all come from choosing what not to build. I also learned that a business model is a design decision. Recess makes money from subscriptions and one well-placed ad, not from your attention, so it can afford to let you log off.

What's next for Recess: Keep Friends Close

  • Local organizers can already post events on Recess. Next is bringing more of them onto "Happening near you," so every Friday catch-up has a plan waiting at the end of it.
  • Recess spreads through invite links, not ads or contact uploads. The next milestone is making it effortless to bring your whole group in after your first Friday.
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