The App That Shuts Off the Moment You Look Away

Chris Fresle was watching John Oliver when he saw the segment that changed his direction. A university lecturer — senior, respected, by all accounts nowhere near a punchline — had broken up with a partner who then sent her intimate photos to her own students, her colleagues, her principal. She was fired. She was ostracised out of her career and her community for something that had been done to her, not by her. She attempted suicide.

Fresle was twenty, coming out of a rough run of his own — a year nine dropout who'd spent his teenage years getting into trouble — and going through a depression he recognised in what he'd just watched. "I looked at that and it really resonated with me," he says. "If I can fix this, or at least prevent it in some way, this will be my thing."

A phone that knows when you've looked away

The product he eventually built, Just Us, works on a principle that sounds almost too simple: the receiving screen only stays on while it can see the receiver's own face looking at it, using continuous front-camera facial recognition. Look away, and it shuts off. Another face enters frame — someone looking over a shoulder — and it shuts off. Point a second phone at the screen to photograph it, and object recognition catches that too and kills the display before the photo can be taken. The team is now building a digital privacy layer to block even an off-angle shot the front camera can't see.

Fresle had no coding background to build any of it himself. A development studio in Vietnam, CMC, found him rather than the other way around — he'd all but given up getting a serious response after hearing "this is impossible" from everyone else he approached. CMC had done confidential development work for companies at the scale of Apple and Samsung; when he explained the concept, something clicked. "They're like, oh, this is gonna work," he says. That trust mattered because he had nothing else to offer as reassurance — no technical credibility of his own, just conviction and, repeatedly, not enough money. "Sometimes we would run out of funding, so I would have to stop for months," he says, "until I had to go around asking whoever I could to give me a bit more money to keep it going. This is before Claude and all those types of things — we didn't have any help."

Friends, family, and one very persistent Chris

The investor who kept the project alive found Fresle through his own social circle — the uncle of a friend, who put in far more than a typical friends-and-family cheque. "If it wasn't for the other Chris, we would be screwed," Fresle says. "I have no idea where I'd be." The condition wasn't a blank cheque: an early angel asked him to prove two specific pieces of functionality before committing further, rather than fund the whole vision on faith. Fresle credits Australian investors generally with more scepticism than their American counterparts — a instinct he understands, but one that's made fundraising for something people initially assume is technically impossible harder at home than it might be overseas.

Free for the people who need it most

Just Us doesn't charge for privacy. The core protection — the facial recognition, the screenshot and photograph blocking — is free indefinitely, on principle. "We'll never charge for the privacy," Fresle says. "The most vulnerable, the ones that can't afford premiums — that stuff will always be free." The business model instead charges $5 a month for convenience: sending the same protected message to more than two people at once, or larger group chats. Free-tier users see either untargeted ads or can opt into a short preference survey instead of handing over behavioural data — a choice Fresle built in deliberately for users who, given it's a private messaging app, understandably don't want to be tracked at all.

Letting survivors write the pitch

Roughly six weeks after launch, with around 500 to 600 users, Fresle is keeping growth deliberately small — he calls it keeping the blast radius contained while the product is still rough — in favour of listening hard to early feedback. For marketing, he's partnered with a US agency whose talent has worked with creators in the tens of millions of followers, but the campaign he's proudest of is smaller and more specific: survivors of image-based abuse, speaking to their own audiences, in their own words. "They're like, we want to tell them that we're deleting every other messaging app. We don't feel safe on any other app. Just Us is the only thing we're going to use," he says. "That's coming from the survivors, the victims of this, and from their recommendation. They're the people I'll always listen to."

The company has held a method patent — covering the concept itself, not a specific line of code — since 2022, now pending across Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK and the EU. Fresle's own stated goal is bigger than the product: to change what "private messaging" means by default. "When you say the words private messaging, you're not going to think of WhatsApp or Signal," he says. "We've got encryption. Encryption's great. But they don't have what we have. And that's real privacy."