The case for remembering
You can hold 150 people in your head. Your phone holds five thousand — and forgets every one of them the moment you scroll past.
Orbit remembers for you. Whose birthday is Thursday, what you promised on Sunday, who you haven’t spoken to since spring — all of it already in your messages, none of it anywhere you can reach.
Dunbar’s number is the ceiling on how many people you can hold in mind at once. Comparing brain size across primates, anthropologist Robin Dunbar put the human figure near 150 — and found they nest in circles: roughly 5 you’re closest to, then 15, then 50, and 150 at the outer edge of everyone you genuinely know.
That ceiling isn’t really about how much you care — it’s about upkeep: remembering who’s owed a reply, whose birthday’s near, who you haven’t talked to in too long. Orbit carries the upkeep for you — so how many people you keep close stops being capped by what you can hold in your head.
This is the actual app, running.
The real interface — two panes on desktop, one on mobile. Switch screens, open a conversation, resize your window to watch it adapt exactly like the app does.
The real app, reproduced — two-pane on desktop, resize to watch it adapt. Everyone here is invented; the app reads your own messages and never sends them anywhere.
Start with why. Your people are not your network — they are the reason for it.
Every venture you’ll ever build, every door that opens, every hard week you get through — it runs on people who show up for you. And nobody shows up for a name in a contacts list. They show up for the person who showed up first: who made the intro, who didn’t miss the birthday, whose “how did it go?” landed the day after, not the month after.
I didn’t build Orbit to help anyone message faster. Faster was never the problem. I built it because the tools meant to keep us close quietly became the reason we drift — and the people who matter deserve better than to be forgotten by an algorithm optimizing for someone else.
A tool should serve the person using it before it serves anything else. Orbit keeps your relationships; it never trades them.— The one rule everything here is built on
The mind holds 150. The phone holds thousands. Nobody tells you which is which.
Robin Dunbar found the brain can carry roughly 150 stable relationships — five you’d grieve, fifteen you’d call in a crisis, fifty good, a hundred and fifty known. That’s the carrying capacity. Your contacts app doesn’t respect it. So the people who matter compete for attention with the ones who never will, and the signal drowns.
For a mind that runs on out of sight, out of mind — the ADHD mind especially — this is brutal. It isn’t that you stopped caring. It’s that the thread scrolled off screen and took the whole relationship’s object permanence with it. The promise (“I’ll connect you next week”) evaporates the instant it leaves the display. Multiply that across a founder’s sprawling, ever-growing network and you get a slow, invisible erosion of exactly the ties your life and companies are built on.
Willpower is not the fix. You do not rise to the level of your good intentions — you fall to the level of your systems. And you don’t have one.
Externalize the remembering. Keep the caring for yourself.
Orbit reads your real conversations — privately, on your own machine — and does the executive-function work your brain shouldn’t have to hold. It remembers what you promised and flags it before it goes stale. It surfaces who you owe a message. It tells you where a relationship actually stands, and who’s been carrying it. Then it hands you the one small thing to say next.
Your mind was made for having ideas and holding people, not for being the filing cabinet of paperwork about them. Move the paperwork out. What’s left is presence — and a system engineered so the right action is the easy one.
Pulse surfaces the person, not a red badge
A birthday within reach, a friendship past its rhythm — brought to you, calmly, before it becomes a regret.
Follow-through, down to two taps
Every promise either of you made, pulled from the actual message, with the receipt attached. Done, or dismiss.
Layers & Rhythm
Which layer someone belongs in, and the hours they’re actually awake to hear from you.
A kept word, logged
Each follow-through is a small deposit you can feel. Reaching out stops being a chore and starts feeling good.
Every promise, kept in view — with the receipt attached.
Orbit reads your conversations and pulls out what either of you committed to — the intro you offered, the doc you said you’d send — each with the exact words behind it, and a flag when it’s slipping past due. Nothing important gets lost just because it scrolled off screen.
Introduce Maya to the design lead at Foundry
“I'll connect you with Sofia next week — she's exactly who you need.”
Send Dev the hiring scorecard template
“let me dig that up — it saved us months last time”
Theo is sending the contractor referral
“I'll text you his number tomorrow, he's great.”
Your people, sorted into the circles you can actually keep up with.
Orbit ranks everyone by how much you really talk — recent contact counting for more than old — and slots them into Dunbar’s 5 · 15 · 50 · 150. When someone starts slipping out of a layer they belong in, you catch it early enough to do something about it.
A two-line brief every morning, sent to you like a text.
Opt in and Orbit sends you a short morning message — the birthdays coming up, the promises you owe, the friend to reach out to. No dashboard to remember to open; it comes to you, and it’s never longer than it needs to be.
Good morning. Three things before your coffee’s cold.
Priya’s birthday is Thursday. You still owe Maya the Foundry intro — 11 days now. And Mom and Dad’s anniversary is this week.
Four commitments most messaging tools can’t make.
Not an inbox — a relationship instrument
Inboxes measure unread counts. Orbit measures how long it’s been with the people you love, and points you back before too much time passes.
Every insight is grounded in a real message
If it can’t point to the words you actually sent, it doesn’t show it. No invented commitments, no AI fiction about your life.
Your conversations never leave your machine
Local-first by design. A private tool that eats last — it serves you, not an ad market wearing your friendships as inventory.
Feel-good, not guilt-driven
The most consistent people aren’t the busiest — they’re the ones who feel good doing it. No shame spiral. Just the next kind thing, made light.
Built for the person with a hundred open loops and a heart that means every one of them.
You’re wired to start things and meet people — a superpower right up until the follow-through, where a fast, generous, easily-distracted mind leaks its best intentions. Orbit isn’t here to make you someone else. It’s the external scaffolding that lets the person you already are actually land.
Without a system
- The intro you promised at dinner, gone by the parking lot.
- A friend you love, unread for five months and climbing toward six.
- 200 contacts that feel like a wall of guilt every time you open your phone.
- “I’m so bad at staying in touch” — said so often it became an identity.
With Orbit
- The intro resurfaces the next morning, one tap from sent.
- The quiet friend is flagged at month five — before it’s a regret.
- The network becomes a source of energy, not a source of dread.
- You become, quietly and by evidence, the person who follows through.
That last line is the whole game. Habits aren’t about outcomes, they’re about identity — and every kept word is a vote for a new one. Not “productive.” The person people can count on.
One Orbit for your whole life — everywhere the people are.
WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Slack — one place
An open bridge behind the app, so every relationship lives under one roof instead of scattered across seven silos.
Three people, three reasons, thirty seconds
A single daily nudge — who’s up, who’s owed, who to reach out to — delivered to you, not a dashboard you must remember to visit.
Walk in already knowing what they care about
Conversation-worthy signal on the people you’re about to see — so you show up present, not scrambling.
On your phone, over your own private network
The second brain, always with you — the data still living on the one machine you control.
Do you need this?
$100 once, for life — if a hundred of us want it.
I built Orbit for myself and it already works. Building it for other people is a different job, so here’s a deal that cuts both ways: put $100 down for lifetime access. If a hundred people do it by December 31st, I build it — no subscription, no tiers, no upsell, ever. If a hundred people don’t, every deposit comes back in full and I go back to using it alone.
No card, no charge today — this holds your spot and your price. I only collect the $100 if the hundredth person shows up, and only then do I start building. Your email is stored for that one message and nothing else, ever.
The heart of it
150 isn’t a rule — it’s a starting point. A way to notice who’s close, who you owe a message, and who you’d never want to lose.
Maybe your number is forty. Maybe it’s three hundred. It was never about the count — it’s about catching the people you love before they drift out of reach, and keeping the ones you want in your orbit.