From Vision to Impact: RYLA’s 2024 Year in Review
RYLA’s journey in 2024 began in April with a clear mission: to solve a challenge we all experience but rarely have a great solution for—how to build meaningful, intentional connections in a world overwhelmed by noise and busyness.
Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook Groups, and Instagram no longer deliver the experience we need to foster professional networks and thriving communities. The current digital social infrastructure is fragmented, outdated, and dominated by content designed to capture attention rather than nurture relationships. The goal for 2024 was to build a v1 product that provides the ability to create multiple profiles and to seamlessly connect with the people and communities that matter most to us.
What if we launched a platform where meaningful relationships could thrive within a more intimate, curated network? A place where anyone could effortlessly start a community—whether small or large—and bring people together around shared interests?
Today, social media profiles, email threads, and event invitations live on separate platforms, creating unnecessary friction when managing our relationships and social activities. RYLA aims to eliminate that friction by reimagining how we connect, share, and grow together.
KEY ACHIEVEMENTS IN 2024
We’ve had several key announcements in the second half of 2024. In case you missed it, this is how far we’ve come:
Public Beta Launch and Early Users
May: Business incorporation.
June: Announced the public beta to early adopters, introducing Profile Cards to create custom networks around first- and second-degree connections.
July: Rolled out the Notes feature, allowing users to add private context to their connections, and the Origin feature, which captures when and where connections were made.
August–September: Incorporated user feedback and tuning the user experience before the v1 release.
October–December During the final stretch of the year, we shared insights from our journey building RYLA, attended events aligned with our mission, and engaged with college students to gather valuable feedback. We demonstrated how to set up Profile and Community Cards, announced the Events feature, and celebrated major milestones. This included expanding our team and introducing our first set of communities within the Philadelphia startup ecosystem.
Now Available in RYLA
Multiple Profile Cards + Add Unlimited Connections
Multiple Community Cards + Add up to 1,000 Members
Unique QR Code Per Card
Add Unlimited URL Events to Your Profile & Community Cards
Chat in All Community Cards
Add Private Notes to Each Connection
Connection Origin with Geo-Location
Private Mode for Profile & Community Cards
View Your Shared Connections for All Events
Discover New Events & Communities
LOOKING AHEAD TO 2025
RYLA aims to build a digital connective layer to mimic how humans naturally connect, providing a better way to manage personal relationships for the gig worker, the side hustler working a 9-5, the local chamber of commerce, the small business community, the artist, and the busy parent.
Now with the completion of the v1 product, we will start actively testing and scaling in the New Year 🎉
Join Our Journey to 10,000 Users: One of our first goals for 2025 is to welcome 10,000 users to the platform, building niche social networks for professionals, organizers, and social groups. RYLA is the social infrastructure where networks grow organically, connections evolve into relationships, and people come together around a shared purpose.
Become a Partner: From collaborating with local organizations to partnering with businesses and sports leagues, we are having exciting conversations with potential early partners. Partnerships play a vital role for scaling RYLA’s impact. If you’re curious about RYLA and want to chat, please reach out!
THE RYLA PRODUCT PROMISE
It's all about creating stronger communities and providing the digital social infrastructure that maps to how humans naturally connect. RYLA is designed to empower individuals and communities to connect, collaborate, and impact the world around them. Whether you’re looking to organize events, strengthen your local network, or manage connections across different roles, RYLA offers the tools to make it happen.
Removing Noise: There's a lot of content on social media that drowns out the posts from our closer connections. RYLA keeps interactions focused and relevant by eliminating a news feed filled with posts from connections many times removed. This creates a space for genuine conversations and action.
Relationship Building: Sometimes we meet someone and lose track of a promising connection. RYLA is an ecosystem building platform that reinforces ongoing relationship building, facilitating opportunities to organically bridge the gap between meeting someone and building a lasting relationship.
Event Coordination: It's common today to text or email to coordinate with separate individuals and groups of people about which events we're attending and when to meet. Whether professional meetups or social events, RYLA reduces the time and effort needed to organize gatherings.
Community Building: Typically, building a community requires managing a number of separate platforms. Anyone can set up a community space in RYLA in just a few minutes and leverage organic community discovery built into RYLA. A member list, community chat, and event schedule make it simple to build and engage any size group from 3 to 10,000.
Priced to Scale: RYLA is built to make it easy and affordable for anyone to create a community space. All accounts come with one free profile card and one free community card.
WHAT'S YOUR RYLA STORY?
One of the most exciting things for me is speaking with people and witnessing their enthusiasm when they tell me how RYLA solves a real problem for them. From startups to professional organizations to nonprofits and social groups, there's a recurring theme: the tools they've relied on often fall short, and RYLA bridges that gap. I'll share some of these case studies when they go live in the new year, but here are a few ideas I've come across.
For Musicians: Using RYLA’s community spaces, musicians can effortlessly organize events, share updates, and connect directly with fans and supporters. Social media is great for reaching a broad audience, but some times it makes sense to create a space for engagement with a smaller group.
For Small Businesses: RYLA offers a way to create dedicated local networks, build strong relationships with customers, and foster collaboration with other businesses. By using RYLA’s community cards, businesses can share events, promotions, or create a conversation with their audience—without the clutter and competition for attention endemic to traditional social networking platforms.
For Professionals with Multiple Roles: Professionals juggling multiple careers or roles can use RYLA’s profile cards to keep their networks organized and separate. Whether managing a full-time job, a side hustle, or multiple career tracks, RYLA provides the flexibility to keep connections and context separate.
BEYOND CONNECTIONS, BUILDING ECOSYSTEMS
Beyond connections and communities, it's about ecosystems. People have become so busy, transient, and highly digital. It's less common to know your neighbors or have common spaces where we run into the same people consistently, organically building relationships over time. RYLA aims to restore these touch points across the digital and physical worlds we live in today.
How will you use RYLA? We’re excited to learn from your experiences and feedback as we continue to grow and evolve.
I'm really looking forward to 2025! If you want to join the RYLA community on RYLA to share ideas and feedback, find us here: ryla.me/c/ryla
