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.

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.