Built by a person, not a company.
A note from Trey Trusko on why Rewind exists, how it got built, and who it's for.
Most of my friends graduated and scattered. We started doing weekly photo dumps in our group chat because nobody posts to stories for each other anymore — we all post for everyone. The dumps became the one moment of the week we really saw each other.
At first it was just a dumb Sunday ritual — twelve people sending forty photos each, a reverse inbox zero. But it was also the only time my feed felt like my people again. No algorithm. No strangers. No strangers performing for strangers. Just Marcus's hike, Jess's birthday, Sarah's tacos.
The mechanic.
I kept thinking about the problem with the group-chat version: there's no anticipation. Somebody posts their photos Thursday, somebody else remembers on Sunday, the moment is scattered across four days. You're not really opening anything together.
So Rewind has one rule: you queue your week privately, and at a time the group sets — Sunday 4pm for us — every queue unlocks at the same second. You're not checking in. You're opening a present, together, at the same minute, with the people who would be in the room if you still lived in the same city.
The process.
Five months in a notebook. Three abandoned Saturdays for every shipped one. I built it at Skysong Innovations at ASU while finishing my senior year. Shipped February 2026. No investors, no co-founder, no plan for world domination. Just a tool for the fifteen people in my group chat.
Then other people started using it. Families. College groups. A marathon training crew called Marathoners. A group called Real Housewives of Tempe. I didn't expect that. I'm still a little nervous about it, honestly.
Who it's for.
Rewind is for groups of 4–10 people who already love each other. That's the only audience I care about. If you want a broadcast app, there are dozens of those. If you want to keep a small room with the same ten people every week, this is the only one I know how to make.
Try it with your closest friends. Not your network. Not your extended circle. The four or eight or ten people you'd call first if something great or terrible happened on a Tuesday. That's the group.