The internet gave us the ability to reach almost anyone, yet somehow made it easier to lose touch with the people we actually care about.

We watched good people share thoughtful work and slowly stop because it felt like nobody was listening. At the same time, the answer to getting noticed became increasingly artificial: engagement pods, automated likes, AI-generated comments and enormous groups of strangers trading reactions in the hope of pleasing an algorithm.

The original behaviour wasn't the problem. People have always supported people they know. Colleagues recommend each other's work. Friends turn up to launches. Founders introduce other founders. Creators share ideas with peers, and professional circles have always helped their members become more visible.

What changed was the infrastructure around it.

Support became a transaction. Group chats became noisy. Links disappeared underneath hundreds of messages. Pods grew until members barely knew each other, and tools emerged to automate the very human behaviour that made these groups useful in the first place. Somewhere between genuine support and manufactured engagement, we lost the people.

So we built Coterie around a different idea.

Small circles of people with a reason to care about each other. A regular time to show up. A little accountability to keep creating and supporting the people around you. No bots pretending to be you, no automated comments and no need to hand over your social accounts.

Coterie doesn't replace LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube or anywhere else you create. It brings your people back to them. Members share what they've been working on, visit the original content and respond as themselves.

Because we don't think people supporting each other is the problem. We think what it became is.

Coterie is our attempt to bring it back to something simpler: people knowing who their people are, making time for them and continuing to show up.