Become the best version of yourself

and

Strengthen your closest relationships

Become the best version of yourself

and

Strengthen your closest relationships

What you can do with Riza:

Love Well

Celebrate the strengths of the people closest to you. Understand your family and good friends better. Practice the skills that make your relationships healthier.

We all want to be loved – and to love! Whether loving comes easily or not, use Riza as a tool to help you increase love – in you and in your family, friends, mentors, coaches and other close relationships. Riza is a fun and intuitive way to pay attention to, communicate with, and celebrate the people you care about most.

Use Riza to learn more about your loved ones’ sparks and struggles, to care about and contribute to their whole lives. Assess your relationships and adjust your actions. Cultivate skills and practices that make your relationships healthier. Build trust in an environment of mutual respect. Love is willing and working for another’s best and Riza is here to help you put that into action.

Keep Track

Remember the big moments and the small, important details of your family’s life. Organize and find what you need, fast: data, dates, people, and so much more. Pay attention to your life as a whole.

Riza is intuitive, accessible and above all, useful. So many apps have hidden motives to use your data for their own extractive purposes. At Riza, your content is yours. Everything by default is personal and private. All of your content is shareable. And you get to choose who you share it with, and when.

Riza is practical. And we also love it when our members use Riza to take the long-view of life. Make your life story come alive. Take a step back and consider who you are as a person, and the people and the places that contribute to that person. Discover the patterns, the meaning, and the purpose of your unique life, in an environment of mutual accountability and support. All so you can act with integrity and intention.

Live with Intention

Create goals that reflect the person you want to become. Track your progress and get the kind of support that helps you most. Visualize your successes and struggles as you seek your best version of you.

The courage to be the person we know we can be – every one of us wants that. Riza is designed to help you identify your deepest values and connect your daily actions to reflect those. Track your progress, visual your successes and failures, change course, figure out what works for you. But don’t do that alone. Riza believes that the people who can best help us stay true to our best selves are sometimes the people close to us – our family, our friends and mentors. Riza helps you get and give the kind of support that works for you. Social science shows that a strength-based approach is more effective and we’re all about that, to help you build a realistic, hopeful future. We’ll give you the tools to take action – so you can stay true to the life you intend to live and the person you want to become.

Grow Together

Act as the experts of your own lives. Share your resources to make life better for each other. Make changes that build everyone’s self-efficacy and strengths.

As human beings, all of us need two things. One: We each need to be the agent of our own unique story, to be recognized apart from others. And two: we need to be a part of, to be connected to and in communion with others. These two needs are interdependent, in healthy tension and dynamic relationship with each other. Riza cares about both of these. We want people to discover their potential, to live authentic and good lives, to do the sometimes-easy, sometimes-very-hard work of self-assessment and awareness. We also want to help people find joy in what most agree is the most important measure of a well-lived life: making one’s closest relationships healthy and happy. Riza is a set of tools designed to help you grow both as an individual and as a person in relationship. We challenge you to use Riza tools to become your best self and to strengthen your closest relationships. Assess and improve. Fix what isn’t working. Practice courage and connection. In an environment of mutual support, Riza invites you to grow, together.

Learn more.

Consider joining the beta team. We’ll contact you when we launch!

We will only use your email to send you Riza updates. We promise not to share or sell your contact information.

What our first Riza members are saying

Riza is a tool that has become essential to my growth. I most often use Riza like a journal where I am able to reflect, organize photographs, tag locations & people, and save information. It is a way to record moments in my life that I find significant, allowing me to reflect privately or share with others my experiences. Riza nudges me to complete the intentions I’ve set for myself, helps me track my progress and lets me share and receive support from my family and friends. Riza helps me be better AND feel better! — Hannah King-Guffey, OG Riza member and best flower arranger in NYC
As most social media continues to become a more short form, dissociative and disconnected space for many users, Riza exists as an important antidote - at once a platform for personal reflection and journaling, a safe space for both young people and adults to celebrate one another and connect with their communities, and a vehicle to connect people to resources and undiscovered passions.
Because the world of social media has consistently felt isolating for me, both when I was a young person and now as an adult, I’m happy there’s an intentional platform that centers community, celebrating one another, and connecting with intention. Most of all, I’m glad the youth I serve have a platform where they can feel reliably connected and celebrated, a dedicated place to fill their cups. — Rivu Dasgupta, Friends of the Children mentor and dedicated dachshund-dad
I use Riza in a number of ways. Its value to me is both emotional and relational. I use it as a tool to help log and process big changes in my life. I’m currently using it to track my pregnancy and to measure my experience in therapy. I can use Riza as a private space for me to add photos and journal about feelings, fears and joy. Or I can choose to share things with family and friends on a platform that genuinely feels like it fosters growth and support but doesn't feel performative or curated. Relationally, I look forward to using Riza to rebuild, reinforce and reframe family dynamics. Riza is completely unique in the way you share content and interact with it. I really look forward to when my in-laws can use this app because I think our whole family system could benefit from the culture that is created on Riza: one that is respectful, thoughtful and exists solely to help foster connection. Something we could all use more of! — Gabby Raglione, Riza bestie, nurse-in training, chef extraordinaire, and soon-to-be new mom
I’ve been part of the Riza journey for several years now so I’ve watched the vision come to life. I think it’s pretty special as a dedicated safe haven for personal growth and a powerhouse for collaboration and community. One thing that I’ve continually advocated for in Riza is the intentions feature. In my former role with Positive Coaching Alliance and as a coach, I am always looking for positive ways to help athletes reach their goals. We need encouragement along with accountability and this app provides a safe place for this to happen. It is empowering because it allows me to track my journey and allows others to follow and support my progress. I don’t think we are meant to live life on our own and Riza is a modern way to stay connected, stay focused and stay encouraged. I would recommend this for any team. I’m also excited for the new version to launch because I plan to use it to facilitate a more mindful connection with God through communal reflection and the built-in accountability tools that nurture personal and spiritual growth. — Ben Dudley, Free Guitars 4 Kids Executive Director; song-writer; coach of the St. Rose Hawks 6th grade basketball team
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Why Riza?

I love Riza for so many reasons, but I especially love using it to help me love my kids. For that alone, I’m so grateful that Riza exists.

Hi, I’m Cynthia!

Cynthia King-Guffey, CEO and Founder of Riza

I originally made Riza to help me love my family – with more intentionality, more effectively, and just, more.

I’ve heard it said that being a mom is like having your heart walking around outside your body and I think that’s true. Like a lot of families, my family has experienced a lot together. We’ve had – and we’ve been – a ton of fun. And we’ve struggled both with the usual family stuff and with more intense, really hard things — addiction, trauma, and other hardships – that have stressed and strengthened each of us in our own way. When I started out as a marriage and family therapist, I was sure that I and all my book-learned theories were right. But real-life parenting, marriage, and my witness of others on their journeys have made me humbler. I know what it is like to be at the mercy of therapists that see my family through a deficit lens, of systems of help that are disconnected and depleting. I’ve experienced the despair of wanting more than anything to unlock the secret of how to love members of my family well but not being able to find the key. I’ve also experienced the grace of the helpers in this world who get it, and care, who are curious, and kind.

When Riza was still a dream, my wise friend and colleague Trina said to me, “Cynthia, create that thing that you want more than anything to use with your own family. If you do that, other people will want to use it too.” Trina was right to light that path for me, and that’s the path I’ve taken. I made Riza so that I could love my family more — more intentionally, more effectively and, just more. Riza is what I want to use with the people I care about the most.

Hi, I’m Cynthia!

Cynthia King-Guffey, CEO and Founder of Riza

I originally made Riza to help me love my family – with more intentionality, more effectively, and just, more.

I can also say that Riza is much better because of the people we’ve listened to – especially the mentors, the youth, the families, the friends who have generously shared their vulnerabilities, experiences and needs around their closest relationships.

Riza is a product of those experiences and voices. A life-long obsession with the concept of love—theoretically, theologically, and social-scientifically—has been transformed into a passion to make tools that are intuitive to people as they seek to love well. Riza is fiercely strength-based because we know that that approach is more effective. Riza is at its heart curious—a constant learning environment—because none of us has everything figured out, but we need all the hard-earned wisdom we can get from each other. We welcome shared solutions and we believe, for example, that the mentors at Friends of the Children have as much to contribute to Riza as the good PhD researchers who inform what we do every step of the way. Riza is a mashup of best practice, social science, technology and art. We see ourselves as artists, because love thrives in a creative environment. We created an app that people could actually use, a set of tools that make people better versions of themselves, and stronger, together.

Like becoming a mom, making Riza has been one of the coolest, hardest, most joyful journeys of my life. The folks who’ve made Riza what it is today have given their hearts and minds to making it extraordinary. Individually and collectively we have failed forward again and again in our relentless pursuit to create tools that matter to people. Riza really is different. Riza is an app, yes, a set of tools, yes, but also an invitation to make your own growth and your closest people’s wellbeing a higher priority in your life.

Even during our development stage there have been times I’ve used Riza where – in little or big ways – it has led me to love my children more effectively and more. I love Riza for so many reasons, but for that reason alone, I’m so glad that Riza exists.

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