We built Social Relay because we were sick of doing the same job four times. Here is the honest version of how it started.
This one is not a sales pitch. It is just what happened.
We run a design and web business. For years, part of that meant looking after social media for clients — cafes, tradespeople, agents, a few shops. And every single week, the same ridiculous ritual.
Write the post. Paste it into Facebook. Change it slightly for Instagram, because Instagram wants it shorter and needs the photo cropped differently. Rewrite it more formally for LinkedIn. Then log into WordPress and write it properly as an article, because the website deserves the full version.
One idea. Four completely separate jobs. About twenty minutes if nothing goes wrong, and something always goes wrong.
The thing that actually annoyed us
It was not the twenty minutes.
It was watching good businesses stop. They would start with real enthusiasm, post for a month, and then life got busy — as it does — and the whole thing quietly died. Then six months later somebody would look them up and find a page that had not moved since March.
These were not lazy people. They were flat out doing actual work. The posting was simply the first thing to fall off the list, because it was the most tedious thing on it.
So the problem was never that small businesses do not care about being seen. It is that the way you are expected to do it is stupid, repetitive work, and repetitive work always loses to real work.
What we built
One box. You write the post once and add a photo.
Social Relay shapes it for each place it is going — the full article with its headings and links on your website, the short plain version on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn — shows you exactly how each one will read, and sends them all at the same time.
It runs in a browser, so it works on the phone in your pocket as well as the computer in the office. Most posts take about a minute.
What we deliberately did not build
We did not build a marketing dashboard. There are no engagement scores, no content calendars, no strategy modules, no AI telling you the best time to post on a Tuesday.
Because none of that is your problem. Your problem is that doing it at all takes too long, so it does not get done. Fix that and everything else takes care of itself.
We use it ourselves, every week, for this blog and our own channels. This post went out through it.
Rick H Founder, Social Relay
