Lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Mortality comparison by risk factor
Friendshifthelps you act on the care you feel,even when overextended.
1 / 5
Do you wish you were closer with your friends?
40% of us feel we're not as close to our friends as we'd like.
2 / 5
Do you often think of someone you care about and haven't spoken to in a while without messaging them?
Less than 28% of people who want to reconnect do so, even when they expect their friend would appreciate hearing from them, have their contact information and time to act.
3 / 5
Does it feel like you spend less time with friends than you used to?
Over two decades, time with friends dropped 57%, equivalent to 17 fewer hours together each month.
4 / 5
Have you noticed distance grow between you and someone you once cared deeply about?
Most friendships don’t end in conflict, they fade when proximity and interactions disappear.
Who is Dropped and Why? Methodological and Substantive Accounts for Network Loss 2015-18
5 / 5
Would you maintain more relationships if staying in touch felt easier?
93% of people want to keep-in-touch with more people if it were easier. 54% report fatigue or mental overwhelm is the primary barrier to staying in touch.
2025 Friendshift Product-Market Fit Survey (n=79)
Problem
In our hyperstimulating world, attention is fragmented. The American Time Use Survey shows adults now spend less than 30 minutes a day with friends, down more than 50% in two decades. Meanwhile, adults spend 40% of waking life online. Less than one-fifth of the average person's feed comes from people they know, meaning most of us spend much more time online with strangers, bots, and professional content producers than with friends.
Staying in touch with friends requires willpower, memory, and context switching. A contact list stores names. A calendar reserves time. A social feed hijacks attention. None addresses the cognitive and emotional burden in a way that truly helps overextended adults maintain friendships.
Problem
Technology
Solution
Solution
We apply executive function support principles to relationship maintenance. Friendshift uses physical cues in your everyday environment and cognitive offloading to reduce the intention-action gap, compressing the 12-step decision chain behind each call — who to call, when, and what to talk about — into just 2 taps.
Calls complement, rather than replace, time together. People we surveyed were five times more likely to say calls led to more in-person time than less.
Technology
Hardware: Near-field communication friendship tiles placed around your home, office, and vehicle serve as physical reminders to call someone while you're going about your daily life.
Software: The app maps how each relationship fits, feels, and functions, then prioritizes outreach to help you sustain healthful check-in cadences before drift occurs.
Behavior Ritual: Tap your phone against a tile and Friendshift suggests just one person to call, with pre-call conversation prompts. One tap confirms the call; shake to reroll. Post-call contextual check-ins help you reflect on the relationship.
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” Essays: First Series (1841)
Faust founded Friendshift
When four of his favorite people married without inviting him to their weddings, Faust reckoned with how much he valued those relationships and how little he acted on that care. As a neurodivergent, multidisciplinary creative who often felt like an outsider, Faust began studying social dynamics as a teenager; in college, he began developing question sets for deeper dialogues, and as an adult he's been experimenting with an outreach system for distributing attention across a broader relationship network. Friendshift turns years of iterations on a private social prosthetic into a scalable consumer product.
Faust’s nonlinear path makes him unusually well suited to build it. He studied Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford and later worked as an intrapreneur on the Rapid Evaluation research and development team at X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly Google [x]). His earlier work spans assistive technology and consumer products: at eight, he invented PaceMate to make remote pacemaker and defibrillator battery checks easier; at fifteen, he licensed his second invention, Needle Beetle, through By Kids for Kids to Mattel, which sold it nationwide. Needle Beetle and Friendshift pair hardware with simple behavioral rituals to make difficult things easier: venipunctures in one case, staying in touch beyond what memory and willpower can support in the other.
Faust has never been more motivated by a mission than Friendshift's. Faust is all in on building it into a venture-scale company where social impact and commercial success reinforce each other. Friendshift brings together the work he is best at with a widespread problem he has spent years trying to solve in his own life: helping you close the intention-action gap and be the friend you want to be to the people you care about.
Time-respecting technology
We measure success by real-world outcomes, not screentime. No feed to check, no streak to protect, missing a day is not a failure. There is no gamification of any kind.
Human-to-human
Our system won’t send messages as you, we only want to support your capacity to better reach the social wellness goals you set for yourself.
Invest in existing bonds
Deepen and repair connections with the people you already care about instead of chasing new ones.
Private by default
Your profile, usage, and data is private. We won’t sell you out to advertisers or betray your trust in any way.
Promote cognitive ease, reduce decision friction
Every major design choice removes a decision or step between you and reaching someone who matters.
Let’s stay in touch!
Join early access and help shape an easier way to stay close. No spam; we won’t sell your data or use it for advertising.