Write For Friends, Not For the Internet

Jarric, Chris, Kyle, Derek, and Kyla

May 2026 · 2 min read

We built a writing app but not for “writers.”

We're not writers in the have a blog, grow an audience, make money from our writing sense. We're just friends who want to be creative and get a few laughs out of each other. We had this crazy idea, what if the five of us wrote something and just shared them with each other? Two weeks later, we shared five personal essays all at the same time: a baseball love letter, a children's book on a family heritage, a political rabbit hole, a letter to self, and a hilarious parody on bedroom analytics.

We were instantly hooked, and not just on the writing. It was the conversations sparked by it, the stories and perspectives that never came up in the routine of our relationships, the deeper discovery of people we thought we already knew so well. None of that happens when you're writing for strangers. But it happens when you're writing for people who already know you.

“Welcome to Write Club,” we said when other friends wanted to join in. A write club — like a book club, but for writing. The writing is just the reason to gather, and a way to riff with friends. Eight of us do it now, sharing something roughly every month, going on two years and over 100,000 words shared. We started in Google Docs and email threads. Eventually we built ourselves something better, a space where reveals happen all at once, commenting feels like our group chat, a home for everything we've written so far.

Riff is not for writers, it's for friends. If this sounds cool, sign up, poke around, then hit up a friend and say Let's riff!