‘Interview everyone’: Meet Lifey, a social media app created by BYU grad and his son
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- Nephi, left, and Alex Balinski pose for a photo Thursday, May 29, 2025, in Provo.
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- Nephi Balinski is seen working on building the Lifey website.
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- The Lifey.org home page is shown.
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- A glimpse of a college interview by topic on Lifey.org is shown.
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- The Lifey.org dating topic home page is shown.
It is a project Alex Balinski has felt inspired to work on since he was a student at Brigham Young University — a family-friendly platform where you can watch short advice videos from experts on a myriad of different subjects.
Balinski has pursued his vision to a certain extent by posting thousands of interview videos on YouTube. But with the help of his 12-year-old son, Nephi, the project is just beginning.
The father-son duo from rural Missouri are co-creators of Lifey, a social media app and website they describe as a mixture between YouTube Shorts and Reddit.
The idea is anyone can make a video — a counselor can answer general questions about mental health, or a student can give studying tips — and upload it onto the platform for advice-seekers to find.
The app’s motto? “Interview everyone.”
“The platform’s all about people helping people by sharing their life experience,” Alex Balinski said in an in-person interview with the Daily Herald in Provo. “Doing kind a life selfie, where they just record their life history, and we index it in a way so everyone can learn from everybody else.”
While Alex is the idea man behind the project, Nephi makes it run.
He has a “special gift” for programming, Alex said, and is a self-taught coder who redid the entire mobile app last year and built a Lifey website last month.
So far, Lifey has 28,000 videos uploaded, and the Balinskis are looking for more.
“We definitely want to make it big,” Alex said. “We have thought about turning it into a nonprofit. Our values are very nonprofit, mission oriented and we don’t care about making money. Our desire is to help millions of people in a meaningful, impactful way.”
How it started
Over the past decade, Alex Balinski built a YouTube following by posting video interviews of people discussing their travel experiences or Latter-day Saint missions, among other things. The YouTube channel, now called Lifey, has 14,000 videos and nearly a quarter-of-a-million followers.
The first Lifey video was published in 2018 using what Alex called a “rudimentary mobile app.” But the new app, built by Nephi last year using React Native, and the website have given the platform a reboot.
Nephi started coding when he was seven or eight using a coding tool called scratch, and he has expanded his skills thanks to his ability to focus on a project for hours at a time, teaching himself through videos and picking up new things, Alex said.
“I’ve never met anyone who just gets programming so well,” he said. “He can pick up something (so easily). He did not know anything about databases, and then a week later, he started watching tutorials about databases. Next thing I know, he redid our entire database of our app and made it 10 times better and more efficient.”
The Lifey app and website are simple and easy to navigate. On the web, you first arrive at an explore page, where separate boxes display topics to click on to learn more about.
The most popular topic is colleges. Click on it, and names of different universities appear, most prominently BYU, with over a thousand uploaded videos. Click on the BYU tab, and inside are videos of advice from current or former BYU students, discussing a wide panel of topics from freshman advice, to how to save money and even date ideas.
“I feel very accomplished that I created this app,” Nephi said. “It’s been a really, really fun process creating it and we’ve had a lot of advice from our interns and other people as far as the app and the website goes for features and stuff, and I like programming.”
The vision
The large number of BYU content is no coincidence. The Balinskis have student interns at the university who crowdsource to get people to take videos.
Lifey has several posts from other students at schools like BYU-Hawaii, BYU-Idaho and Utah State. There are also thousands of videos giving advice on specific missions — insight on the culture, foods and what to bring.
But the vision is bigger than the Beehive State or the Latter-day Saint community. The Balinskis want to make it a helpful tool for everyone.
“I see it as a platform that people can go to to help explore various careers, colleges, different life topics,” Nephi said. “If you’re wanting to decide what careers to choose, you could go on the app and watch a bunch of videos with a bunch of real actors sharing their advice on getting started or tips for success.”
Alex laid out a scenario of a person considering becoming a neurosurgeon. The best thing they could do, he said, is shadow a neurosurgeon or take one to lunch and pick their brain. An alternative solution, though, that would require less gumption and have more mass appeal, would be for Lifey to interview 10 neurosurgeons from around the country and post the videos.
“It’s not unreasonable to think that we can get 10 or 20 neurosurgeons across the country to take 20-30 minutes and do a rapid fire video interview about their career,” Alex said. “And then that becomes, generally, freely accessible to all people who want to access it.”
Currently, the most time-consuming part of the app is editing and approving videos. Alex feels strongly about keeping the social media platform clean — no hate speech, pornography or profanity — and the best way to ensure that is to have control of every video that gets uploaded.
The Balinskis watch and edit every video that is submitted but know that may not be sustainable.
“We recognize that, eventually, we’re going to need to have at least a few employees or people to help us,” Alex said.
The platform will become as big as people are willing to make it.
“In order to make this project successful, we have to get tens of thousands of people to contribute,” Alex said. “It’s like Wikipedia, we need everyone and their dog to go on the app and share whatever they’re willing to.”
