This essay was first published on the Zyaku blog.
I keep coming back to one picture.
A phone on a kitchen table, screen on, one bar of signal that keeps disappearing. Water is already in the street. Someone is trying to tell their mother they're fine. The message sits there with a little clock icon next to it, and nobody knows if it went.
Most of the internet was never built for that moment. It was built for good Wi-Fi, a charged battery and a calm afternoon. When the network goes, apps don't slow down gracefully. They just stop. The phone still works. Your words are still there. But the software decides that without a connection, nothing you do counts.
That idea bothered me enough that I started building something about it. It's called Zyaku.
I didn't come from software
I spent most of my working life in finance: investment, wealth management, and eventually my own firm. I wasn't an engineer. I taught myself to build because the thing I wanted didn't exist, and waiting for someone else to make it felt worse than learning.
I'm telling you this because it explains the way Zyaku is built. In finance you learn one rule early: a transaction either happened or it didn't. "Probably sent" is not a state. So when I started on the offline side of Zyaku, that was the first rule I wrote down. Nothing gets called sent until it has actually arrived.
Write now, publish when the world lets you
The first thing Zyaku had to do was simple to say and hard to get right. You can write while you're offline, whether it's a post, a story or a news report. Zyaku keeps it safely on your device. When the connection comes back, it goes out once. Not zero times, not twice.
That "once" took more work than anything else. Phones lose signal halfway through a send. People tap the button again. Apps get killed in the background. Every one of those moments is a chance for a post to vanish or show up twice. A few weeks ago I posted a demo of this on X, phone in airplane mode, and engineers I'd never met started asking hard questions. How long do you keep the keys that stop duplicates? What happens if I force-close the app? Does a post keep the time it was written? Those questions were a gift. Building in public meant a stranger could look at my work and push it further, and that's exactly what happened.
Then the floods
Zyaku's Disaster Alert came out of the floods in Nepal. Networks failed exactly when people most needed to reach each other. Watching that from the outside, I realised that a platform which works offline for creators can also work offline for families.
So the safety side of Zyaku grew from there. Today it has:
Official warnings, turned into Crisis alerts. Zyaku draws on official warning services around the world, including in India, Japan, Nepal, Europe, Canada and Brazil. When one of them issues a serious warning for an earthquake, flood, cyclone, wildfire or severe weather, Zyaku sends it first to people in that area, in its own Crisis feed so it doesn't get lost between memes.
An Offline Emergency Assistant. Step-by-step guidance for earthquakes, floods, fire, first aid and CPR, with no internet at all. It speaks English, Hindi and Hinglish, because in a crisis people should get help in the language they think in.
A Medical ID with a QR code. You add your blood group, allergies, medicines and emergency contacts. Zyaku turns the details you choose into a QR code that a rescuer can read with any phone camera. No app, no internet. It stays encrypted on your own phone, and we keep no copy.
I'm Safe. One tap tells the people you trust most that you're okay. Nobody can add you to a circle without your say, and your location is shared only when you choose, every time.
An offline map of hospitals and shelters. Save your area while you're online. Later, with no connection, your phone's GPS shows the nearest hospitals, clinics, shelters, police and fire stations, with distance and direction. The place data comes from OpenStreetMap, built by volunteers, which feels right.
I want to be careful here, because safety is the one area where overpromising is unforgivable. Zyaku is not an emergency service. If you're in danger, call your local emergency number first. What we can do is make sure that when the network is gone, the little things that help are still on your phone.
Creators shouldn't need a big audience to get paid
Safety is the part of Zyaku that gets attention, but the everyday part matters just as much.
Zyaku is a home for creators and independent journalists. Comics, motion comics made in our AI Studio, short video, podcasts, long reporting. There's no follower minimum to start earning. Readers pay for the chapter they unlock, not for how famous you are. And creators get paid wherever they live, including in countries where the usual payment rails don't reach.
Creators can also make Offline Packs: bundles of comic chapters or videos that a reader downloads once on Wi-Fi and enjoys anywhere, on a train, on a flight, in a village with one weak tower.
For journalists, one line matters more than any feature list: journalists can publish anonymously. Their identity is stored encrypted and is never shown to readers.
And every moderation decision on Zyaku goes on a public ledger, with a real window to appeal. If we take something down, you can see that we did, and you can argue with us.
Where I'm being honest about what isn't done
There's a part of Zyaku I care about a lot that isn't live yet. We're working on a mesh, where phones talk to each other directly when there's no network at all. It's in testing. I'm not going to call it finished until it works in the field, at real distances, with real people. If you've read startup announcements before, you know how rare that sentence is. I'd rather be slow and right.
Why the core is going open source
This is the part I'm most excited to write about.
The engine that lets you compose offline and publish safely during an outage shouldn't belong only to Zyaku. Newsrooms need it. Aid groups need it. Small apps in places with bad connectivity need it. Every team that builds this alone makes the same mistakes I made, losing posts, duplicating posts, and lying to users with a "sent" that wasn't true.
So we're going to open-source it. The idea is simple: a piece of software that holds your work safely while you're offline, sends it exactly once when the connection returns, and never pretends something arrived when it didn't. Anyone should be able to use it, inspect it and improve it. When it's public, I'll write about it here first.
I've also started a second company, TAMVEL, around the same belief applied to money: financial apps shouldn't stop working the moment the network does. Different problem, same stubborn idea.
What I believe
I don't think the next internet will be defined by who has the biggest model or the most users. I think it will be defined by what still works on the worst day.
A journalist in a shutdown who can still file. A creator in a small town who gets paid. A family that knows everyone is safe before the towers come back.
That's what I'm building. It's not finished, and I'm doing a lot of it in public, mistakes included. If you build software, report the news, make things, or just live somewhere the signal drops, I'd really like to hear what you'd want from it.
You can see everything that has shipped at zyaku.com, and every update goes on our public changelog.
Rohit Kashyap
Founder & CEO, Zyaku · Founder, TAMVEL
Safety features · About the founder
Update: the open-source part is now public as HoldSend, an early open-source outbox for apps that must never lose or double-post what people write. It is not production-ready yet.
Top comments (2)
"Probably sent is not a state" applies way beyond messaging. Most teams run customer follow-ups on exactly that logic. Someone says they replied, nobody checks whether anything actually landed, and the record lives in one person's outbox. Your once, not zero, not twice rule is the same discipline, just applied to words instead of transactions. The kitchen table picture carries the essay too. Software that only works on a calm afternoon is not really working.
Thanks for this. You're right, it's the same problem. "I replied" and "they got it" aren't the same thing, but most tools only keep track of the first one.
That was honestly the part that took us longest. Not the sending, the showing. So now a post shows if it actually reached Zyaku, and an emergency message shows if it's sent, waiting for signal, or still trying.
How do you deal with it on your side? Do you track sent and delivered separately?