Relay
Local perks membership for your neighborhood, $9/mo
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Relay - Local perks membership for your neighborhood, $9/mo

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Relay is a $9/month membership for one neighborhood at a time, starting with Clarendon in Arlington, VA. Members get recurring perks — a free coffee, a class, a discount — from independent businesses within walking distance. Pre-launch: I’m signing local merchants now and collecting a waitlist. Would love feedback on whether the merchant side of this can work.

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Hey PH 👋 I’m building Relay because I kept thinking the local-perks thing has always been solved backwards — Groupon burned merchants, punch cards don’t scale, and apps like this usually die because the businesses stop caring. So the honest state: the landing page is live, zero merchants signed, zero members. I’m in Clarendon this week asking coffee shops what they’d actually give a member for free every month. That’s the real test. The question I’d love help with: has anyone here made the supply side of a two-sided local network work? What made merchants stay in?

The single-neighborhood focus is smart, makes it feel curated rather than sprawling, and the walking distance angle gives the whole thing a real sense of place.

Love the hyper-local focus, picking one neighborhood feels way more intentional than the usual citywide membership apps. Curious to see if the $9 price point actually moves the needle for both sides once merchants start seeing repeat traffic.

Have you thought about adding a merchant dashboard so shop owners can see which perks drive the most redemptions and which members keep coming back? It would make the value of joining really obvious during sales conversations and give busy owners something concrete to brag about with neighboring shops.

Suggestion: when signing a merchant, ask if they'd be willing to offer one perk on a slow day or off-peak hour specifically, so members get a real reason to visit outside the rush. That could help small businesses without cutting into their prime-time revenue, and it makes the membership feel useful every week.

The idea of tying a membership to actual walking distance is honestly kind of brilliant — it forces the perks to feel like real neighborhood stuff instead of generic coupons. Excited to see how the merchant pitch lands once you've got a few signed on.