After graduating from Ohio State University in 2021, Kai McKinney gave himself a "startup gap year" to try building a company. The bet on himself paid off.
Relay, the product development agency McKinney co-founded 13 months ago – his third startup – is on its way to about $3 million in annualized revenue and helping other startups launch.
Relay Product Collective LLC bills itself as a "zero to one" design, strategy and software development firm, working with startup founders and, more recently, middle-market companies in non-tech industries.
"It's more than just building; a lot of it is thinking through what to build," McKinney said. "It's really expensive to build the wrong thing."
At least seven happy clients and investment groups have offered to buy the business. For now the "scrappy and practical" team is focused on growing, McKinney said.
An industrial designer, McKinney worked in corporate innovation for companies including J.M. Smucker Co. and Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. while attending OSU. With a group of fellow students, he co-founded Wonderwerk Creative, a digital media agency, and Helm, which makes software for employee onboarding.
Early in the coronavirus pandemic, the Helm team also created Can't Stop Columbus, an online platform to coordinate volunteer hackathons for social good, which Smart Columbus operates. Last year's projects included a student voter registration and turnout initiative, charity shoe and clothing drive, and a network of entrepreneurial support organizations.
In early 2022 McKinney and engineer Brad Browning split from Helm to repeat the product-building they did there for various types of products, and helping founders "build with discipline" instead of trying to boil the ocean.
"A lot of Helm was really trial and error," McKinney said. "What we ended up creating was a really great product."
Other co-founders are Will Turon, formerly an engineer at Circulo Health Inc. (where Browning had an internship), and designer Richard Giang, who had been at a health IT company. Turon graduated Ohio State in 2020, Browning and Giang in 2022.
The group recently added Brandon Tolle, formerly an engineering manager at Root Inc., as a partner. Relay has six full-time employees and about 10 part-time contractors.
Relay works with clients to figure out the market and goals they want to reach, and explore the assumptions behind that, before deciding what to build.
"People come to us and say, 'I want to build all of this,' and we're like, 'Why?'" McKinney said. "The first time we work with someone, it's actually to downscope.
"We take a very sparring partner type of approach," he said. "Let's trust each other and figure this out together."
One of the first clients was Uleet Inc., a Columbus startup that was pivoting from health insurance to an online wellness marketplace. Relay's research included attending hot yoga classes to understand the target consumer.
Referrals brought clients from legacy industries seeking to incorporate technology, such as trucking logistics and Medicare enrollment. For a large roofer, it developed a supply inventory tracker to prevent downtime from running out of materials like nails on a job site.
"We're getting exposed to a lot of really interesting problems," he said.
In the process, the team teaches clients the "product mindset," so they can keep building on their own – a handoff, hence the name Relay.
That mindset means to build the right thing for the right person, always keeping the end goal in mind. For example, instead of adopting AI because it's cool, incorporating AI if it would solve the problem at hand.
"The job of product is to be ruthlessly aligned to the outcome," McKinney said. "Is this actually creating value?"
Relay charges professional services fees and in some cases takes some revenue sharing. Eventually, the business could commercialize what it builds as standalone software, in partnership with the client.
Two co-founders stayed with Helm, and it's gaining market traction, he said.
Since November, McKinney also is an executive-in-residence at OSU's Fisher College of Business, helping student-entrepreneurs.
"It's really cool to be in Columbus to do this," McKinney said. "Our team has this startup background. We're just a bunch of nerds."
