A small team,
in Hamilton.
DailyMoment was founded in April 2026. We’re twenty-two people, working out of a former textile mill in Hamilton, Ontario. We make one social network. We don’t plan to make others.
How we got here.
Maya and Diego had been friends since university. Both had built things at larger companies — Maya in product, Diego in infrastructure — and both had reached the same conclusion at the same time, more or less by accident, in the spring of 2025.
The conclusion was: every social platform either becomes an attention casino or dies trying. There’s no third door from the inside. You have to start over.
They quit on the same Friday in late November. They spent the winter writing prototypes and arguing about defaults — should you see follower counts, should likes be public, should there be a daily cap. They picked one consistent answer: do less, more carefully.
In April 2026 we incorporated as DailyMoment Inc. and moved into a corner of a textile mill in Hamilton with peeling paint and good light. By May, Nina and Jordan had joined, with a dozen more lined up to start. We’ve spent the spring finalising what we want to ship and running a small internal alpha — about three hundred people, mostly friends-of-friends, testing the build and breaking it in useful ways.
Private beta opens in June 2026. Waitlist members come in first. Public launch follows once we’re confident in the platform at scale.
Who works on this.
A short, honest list. The full team page is internal — we don’t list everyone publicly for safety reasons, but here’s the leadership and a sense of scale.
A few principles.
Subtraction is design
Most of the work was deciding what not to include. We removed infinite scroll, public like counts, follower numbers, third-party trackers, and ads. The list of what’s in is shorter than the list of what’s out.
The defaults matter most
Anyone can argue settings into a kinder place; few do. We obsess over what happens before anyone touches anything. Quiet hours, private posting, location off — all on by default.
Small is the goal
We don’t want a billion users. We want a few million people who use the app once a day and feel better for it. Different KPI, different decisions.
Slow is durable
Slow growth is more defensible than fast growth. Slow conversations beat fast ones. The app should reward patience because the world doesn’t.
How we’re funded.
We’ve raised one round so far — $6 million in seed funding in February 2026, led by Slow Capital with participation from a small group of operators, founders, and a handful of writers we admire. We chose investors who understand that the goal is not a billion users.
The cap table is intentionally simple. Founders hold a majority. We’ve structured the company so that selling to a larger platform is genuinely difficult — not impossible, but requires a high bar of agreement among the founders and the original investors. If we’re ever in a position to consider it, we’ll write about why, publicly, before any decision is made.
We do not take growth-stage venture capital. We expect to be profitable on subscriptions by mid-2027.
In Hamilton, mostly.
Read the manifesto.
It’s the longer version of all of this, and it’s the more honest one.
Read it →