Dayo: Get paid to log off with Corey Scholibo

What if your phone paid you to put it down? That's the premise behind Dayo, the Portland-based app that rewards users with real purchasing power for spending 30 minutes or less on social media each day. Corey Scholibo, Dayo's co-founder and CEO, joins the show to unpack how behavioral economics, fintech, and a deep frustration with attention-harvesting platforms converged into a product that hit #6 on Product Hunt at launch and amassed several thousand active users in its first weeks - all organically.

This episode is a masterclass in founder conviction: how to spot a genuinely underserved problem, build around existing platform primitives (Apple's ScreenTime API), and construct a business model that aligns incentives for users, brands, and the company simultaneously. If you're building anything at the intersection of consumer behavior, wellness, or commerce, Corey's story is required listening.

The Problem: 30 Minutes Is the Cliff

Corey's obsession didn't start with an app idea - it started with a book. After reading Johann Hari's Stolen Focus and watching the 2024 election cycle amplify misinformation at scale, he became fixated on one specific data point from the American Psychological Association: social media use under 30 minutes per day is net neutral to net positive for mental health. After 30 minutes, outcomes flip sharply negative - particularly for young women, where the suicidality data is stark enough that the U.S. Surgeon General has called for warning labels on social platforms.

The insight isn't "social media is bad." It's that 30 minutes is the line - and almost nobody stays under it. Dayo isn't about abstinence or demonization. It's about finding the practical, reasonable intervention that meets people where they are and makes the behavior change actually worth doing.

How Dayo Works

The mechanics are elegant in their simplicity. Users download Dayo, select which social apps they want to track, and set their 30-minute daily limit. Apple's ScreenTime API handles the monitoring. Once the threshold is hit, a shield screen activates and the tracked apps gray out. Hit your goal for the day? You earn $5 in Dayo credits.

Those credits are redeemable in Dayo's curated marketplace - an intentionally small, values-aligned collection of direct-to-consumer brands: Rumpl, JBL, La Creuset, Patagonia, Yeti, Powell's Books, Bar West. The discount you receive at checkout is the reward. Dayo earns an affiliate fee on every transaction. The business model only works if users actually change their behavior - which means the company's financial incentives are structurally aligned with user wellbeing.

Corey draws a direct parallel to Sweatcoin, which built a billion-dollar business on the same mechanic applied to steps. Dayo is betting the same psychology works for screen time - and early signals suggest it does.

Behavioral Economics as the Moat

The science behind Dayo's approach is more rigorous than it might appear. Corey cites an NIH study showing that $30 in exchange for clean urine was twice as effective as therapy alone in helping meth addicts achieve sobriety. Contingency management - rewarding desired behavior with tangible incentives - is one of the most evidence-backed behavior change mechanisms in clinical research.

His personal anecdote makes it memorable: his mom paid him $20 to stop sucking his thumb as a kid. It worked. The principle scales. What Dayo is doing isn't a gimmick; it's applying well-understood behavioral science to one of the most widespread and underdressed public health challenges of our era.

The Marketplace as Moat

The brand curation in Dayo's marketplace is deliberate on two dimensions. First, quality: these are aspirational, premium brands that users actually want to buy from. Second, values: the roster intentionally includes LGBTQ-owned, women-owned, and Black-owned businesses - reflecting Corey's belief that social media, for all its harms, has genuinely served as a normalizing force for marginalized communities. Dayo doesn't want to destroy that utility; it wants to redirect it toward a healthier relationship.

Advisor Aviv, who comes from Goodie and Showfields, brings direct-to-consumer expertise to the brand partnership strategy. The goal is a marketplace that feels like a reward in itself - not a discount bin.

Early Traction and the Path to Seed

Three weeks post-launch at time of recording: 3,000 downloads in the first week, a #6 ranking on Product Hunt launch day, the #1 FinTech App of the Week designation, and roughly 500 new users per day - all organic, no paid acquisition. Dayo has been bootstrapped with support from the Oregon Entrepreneur Network's Tech Award ($110K convertible note) and a City of Beaverton grant/note ($25K).

Corey is actively raising a seed round of $500K–$800K, targeting investors who understand consumer behavior, fintech, and mission-driven business models. The team is approximately 10 people: two co-founders (Corey and Patrick), a creative director in LA, a tech team split between India and LA, and advisor Aviv handling brand partnerships.

The Bigger Vision: Capitalism for Good

Corey is explicit about his philosophical framework: the current social media economy treats users as the product, not the consumer. Advertisers pay platforms for access to your attention. Dayo flips that dynamic - users earn value directly by choosing how they spend their attention. He points to Blue Sky's open-source algorithm as a better model for platform accountability and cites Mark Cosco's concept of "The Great Ignore" as the cultural moment Dayo is riding.

The long-term product roadmap includes a credit card product, peer-to-peer reward sharing, and potential fintech and crypto integrations - all orbiting the core thesis that your attention has real economic value and you should be the primary beneficiary of it.

Android support is in development. iOS is live now at dayo.co.

Tools & Resources

• Dayo App - iOS app available now; tracks social media use via Apple ScreenTime API and rewards users for staying under 30 min/day (dayo.co)
• Apple ScreenTime API - Platform primitive Dayo is built on; enables app-level usage tracking without requiring device management profiles
• Sweatcoin - Cited as the direct behavioral analogue: converts steps into marketplace credits; reached ~$1B valuation on the same mechanic
• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari - The book that catalyzed Corey's obsession with attention economics and screen time reform
• Oregon Entrepreneur Network Tech Award - $110K convertible note; early non-dilutive capital that got Dayo to launch
• City of Beaverton Innovation Grant - $25K note; local economic development support for Portland-area startups
• Blue Sky - Open-source algorithmic social platform cited as a more accountable alternative to closed-feed incumbents

Key Frameworks from This Episode

The 30-Minute Threshold

APA research establishes ≤30 min/day social media as net neutral to positive for mental health; harm accelerates sharply after that line. Designing around this specific threshold rather than total abstinence makes Dayo's ask practical and evidence-backed.

Contingency Management

Clinical behavior change methodology: reward desired behavior with tangible incentives. NIH data shows it outperforms therapy alone in addiction contexts. Dayo applies this at consumer scale - $5/day in credits for hitting your screen time goal.

Aligned Incentive Architecture

Dayo's business model only generates revenue (affiliate fees) when users successfully change behavior. This structurally aligns company economics with user wellbeing - the opposite of the attention economy's fundamental misalignment.

The Attention Asset Flip

Social media treats users as inventory sold to advertisers. Dayo treats user attention as an asset owned by the user, with the platform earning only a facilitation fee. Corey frames this as 'capitalism for good' - market mechanics in service of public health.

Build on Platform Primitives

Rather than building screen-time monitoring from scratch, Dayo leverages Apple's ScreenTime API - a trusted, privacy-compliant system primitive. This reduced technical risk, accelerated time to market, and sidesteps user skepticism about third-party monitoring.

Values-Curated Commerce

The Dayo marketplace isn't just a discount channel - it's a brand statement. Including LGBTQ-, women-, and Black-owned businesses alongside premium consumer brands (Patagonia, Yeti, La Creuset) signals who the product is for and what it stands for, attracting users who share those values.

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