Designing the perfect crutch was an early business idea by former Upton resident Alex Jayyosi. Although majoring in biochemistry at Northeastern, he always had an entrepreneurial attitude. As a member of his school’s Entrepreneur Club, this mindset blossomed.

During several competitions at the time, Jayyosi, one of the cofounders of a new social media application called Reach, would pitch his different business ideas and pit them against other student-created company designs. He explored many ventures, but his idea to develop a redesigned auxiliary crutch was one idea he recalled fondly.

“I was working with some engineers to try to redesign basic auxiliary crutches which are the stock ones you get if you break your leg,” he said. “But I found those to be extremely uncomfortable. I thought we could probably create a design that is probably more comfortable.” Jayyosi entered his redesigned crutch in the Husky StartUp Challenge, a competition run by Northeastern. His crutch idea performed well and placed high as a finalist in the competition.

He has since tabled the crutch idea, in favor of improving communal engagement through a new social media app called Reach. “I haven’t abandoned the redesign crutch completely,” he said. “I’m just focusing more on Reach right now.”

Reach has recently become one of twelve StartUp Worcester cohort members. The goal of StartUp Worcester is to provide cohort members entrepreneur mentorship and access to much needed facilities and resources.

“When we applied, I didn’t really expect anything out of it,” Jayyosi said. “I applied because I had just heard about it through word of mouth. We were just like, ‘well, this seems extremely interesting and it might give us more resources.’ It was obvious, I just graduated college and I don’t really have much experience in the business world and perhaps they could propel us forward.”

From the moment Reach joined StartUp Worcester, Jayyosi and the development of Reach rapidly increased. “Building this company has increased exponentially because of the number of resources available to us,” he said. 

David Sullivan, the Economic Development & Business Recruitment Associate at Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Marc Printz, the community manager of WorcLab (formerly Worcester CleanTech Incubator), have been the biggest help to the development of Reach. “We talk to David and Marc all the time,” said Jayyosi. “And their advice, especially Marc, has been really helpful in connecting us to different groups and giving us the resources that we need to develop out.” 

Alex Jayyosi, co-founder of Reach, a new social media app, has enjoyed his new business venture with the help of StartUp Worcester. Submitted photo

The mission of Reach is social engagement. Founded by Jayyosi and his two Northeastern University friends, Stav Rones and Nigel Hunt, Reach is a social media application aimed at getting its users to engage with their environment. The goal is to utilize a location-based interactive map that directs users towards fun activities and to meet people.

“Reach is the best way to set up spontaneous and planned events, instantly find fun things to do and make lasting memories,” said Jayyosi, a former student of Nipmuc Regional High School and the Mass Academy of Math and Science in Worcester.

Jayyosi said the Reach app combines “all the best things” from existing platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. For instance, Reach borrows aspects of the Snapchat map feature. “The Snap Map is really more saying where your friends are and our map will be more of what your friends are doing or what are people doing in general,” he said. Essentially, Reach encourages its users to be more proactive with the kind of posts they are making. “Let’s say I want to go play a pickup basketball game at the park, but I have no one to go with me,” he said. “What I would do is hop on Reach and say I’m playing pickup basketball at ‘X’ location and anyone else who’s on the platform can go to the map and see that someone is playing pickup basketball and then just join from there. You can go out and meet new people or meet people with similar interests and find things that interest you.” 

The origin for Reach began at the same place of the redesigned crutch, the Northeastern Entrepreneurs Club. Jayyosi said the student-led organization enabled him as an aspiring entrepreneur to pursue his business passions even though he was not a business major. Reach proved to be something he wanted in his life.

“I think Reach is the one that really snagged me and I just have been running with that since halfway through my college career,” he said. “I’ve been working on it ever since.”

The idea for Reach came one day, while Jayyosi lived in Boston during his college years. “I wanted to go out,” he said. “But I didn’t really know what to do and I didn’t really want to text every single person in my contact list. I wished there was an app that could just show me things to do in my city. In order to figure those things out, I have to go online and I found that Google maps was not really helping me discover events and things that were going on.” He eventually discovered a lot going on, especially on the weekends, like farmers markets, people gathering in the park, spontaneous concerts, etc. “But how do you hear about these things?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s only word of mouth. There’s no central location where you can just go and discover all these things … So, Reach came about as something that I wanted to exist.”

Further, Jayyosi had an ulterior motive for Reach. He wanted to make a social media app that extended its usefulness beyond mindless entertainment. “Reach is a tool,” he said. “You know I always just found that social media, right now, just doesn’t really serve a purpose other than for entertainment. I always felt I wanted social media to be a tool that allows me to engage with something or someone. I wanted people to think social media could be something that could help enhance life instead of just wasting hours scrolling down and clicking on Tik Tok videos and Instagram posts.”

Reach also uses the best qualities of Instagram, which is mainly a photo sharing platform. Jayyosi said every event planned on the Reach app has the ability to create a shared photo album. Anyone who joined the event can upload their photos to the Reach thumbnail. “So, when you go back and look into an event, you can see everybody who was there and all their photos and pictures,” he said.

Reach is currently in what Jayyosi called the “beta-stage” of development. Essentially, the Reach app is still in development and is projected to be available for general use by the public in about six months. The beta-stage works as a kind of focus group for the developers to work out and bugs in the app. “You want to get as much constructive feedback as possible and you want to be able to update and change things extremely quickly,” he said. There are about 100 current Reach app users from the Assumption University and Northeastern campuses that act as a focus group for the product.

Jayyosi said the StartUp Worcester experience has been an enjoyable one. “It’s really changed my outlook on the world. I always thought there were set paths before you and you only had to pick one, but I learned when you build a company you’re just constantly evolving and learning new things. The learning experience has been the biggest thing I’ve enjoyed, plus the collaboration with friends.”

The top two things Jayyosi has learned through his startup experience are patience and perseverance. 

“When you have a new idea and you’re excited about it, you just want it to exist as fast as possible,” he said. “You have to understand that developing something of this magnitude, things aren’t going to happen with the snap of your fingers. Through patience and perseverance, your mindset will change as well as the product you’re trying to develop. You will have to be malleable enough to adapt to those changes.

“Different challenges come up along the way, challenges you could never have anticipated,” he said. “And you just mop up and learn how to deal with them and you’re better prepared for the next time. Patience and perseverance: yeah, those are the top two things I’ve learned.”