How the Marco Polo app is redefining modern friendship

Shannon Milliman’s grandfather was in his 80s when she felt like their relationship developed new depth. Caring for his wife suffering from dementia, he often felt isolated and overwhelmed. So every day, he started pouring out the ups and downs of his daily life to Milliman, his oldest granddaughter — the heartbreak of his wife forgetting the house they shared for 40 years, the joy of her recalling a detail from their childhood.

This granddaughter-grandfather bond deepened over Marco Polo, a video messaging app that allows users to leave video messages for individuals or a small group and to respond and listen to them asynchronously — whenever is convenient for the participants. By exchanging these daily video messages, Milliman, who was then living in Portland, Oregon, was able to get a multidimensional and emotionally rich portrait of her grandparents’ life in Burley, Idaho. “It was this intergenerational dialogue that we could take on our own terms — different from a conversation with small talk,” Milliman told me. “It cut through some of that in a surprising way.”

While the Marco Polo app has been around since 2014, its use soared during the pandemic, with people flocking to the app for human connection and a glimpse of their loved ones. In April of 2020, in one 24-hour period, 20 million video messages were shared in the app, according to TechCrunch .

Heather Olson Beal called her Marco Polo group with other women “a pandemic version of meeting up for lunch with friends on a workday or grabbing a drink after work” in an essay published in the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative. During school lockdowns, a preschool teacher sent bedtime stories to the kids in her class via the app. I, too, discovered Marco Polo during the pandemic, forming a video thread with two friends who moved away. We talked about everything, venting to each other about work, exploring cooking choices and sharing exercise routines, touch points that provided a sense of relief and friendship at a fragmented time.

But even as life returned to normal, many people have stuck with Marco Polo, and the app remains a powerful way to maintain connection. Milliman, a mother of five who works full time and has a business on the side, reconnected with her college roommates and her cousins, sparking a new family history initiative. Support communities have emerged around struggles like postpartum depression, and eating and alcohol disorders, and some people use the app to check in on fellow members of communities of faith.

Over three years, my own thread has became a chronicle of lives, marriages and experiences of our children. While initially — and even now — the app catered to busy moms, more men have begun to use it, too, Vlada Bortnik, Marco Polo’s co-founder, told me. The number of users are in the millions and the new users are joining daily, according to the app’s spokesperson, although the company declined to provide specific numbers.

At a time when our communication is often truncated to texts and emails, and loneliness has risen to a public health crisis, Marco Polo offers an antithesis to the doom-scrolling and unsatisfying dopamine drip of social media.

An unusual founding story

In 2014, Bortnik and her husband, Michal, relied on Skype to stay in touch with their families scattered around the world. Bortnik, who is originally from Ukraine, had family in the Midwest and on the East Coast, while her husband’s family lived in Poland. But with a packed schedule of staggered Skype calls with different family members, family calls began feeling like a chore. “We just felt like there had to be a better way for people to really feel like they’re part of your life, as opposed to just an effort to stay in touch,” Bortnik told me in a recent Zoom call. Also, after working at an advertising startup, Bortnik and her husband wanted to model to their two children the value of work that does good in the world.

The initial versions of Marco Polo focused on exchanging videos as memories; later, the goal shifted to enabling effortless conversations (hence the name Marco Polo, which is meant to evoke the back-and-forth of the swimming-pool game). There were nine different iterations of the app as it evolved, Bortnik said. “I do think this is a pretty unusual founding story,” said Bortnik, who also has background in engineering. “Because usually people have an idea and then it’s going to generate some kind of financial success and then go after it, but for us, it really started with the purpose.”

The app doesn’t use algorithms that keep people in the app for longer than they need to. There are no ads, and the company doesn’t sell users’ data. You can “like” a video, but the app doesn’t count the reactions. “I think in part, because we know how to make money through advertising is why we don’t want to make money through advertising,” Bortnik said.

All of these features are designed to maximize closeness and authenticity with no distractions. “In this race for efficiency, we’ve lost the quality of conversation,” Bortnik told me. She is not against maximizing profit, but “we can’t do it at the expense of our wellbeing,” said Bortnik, who is an avid advocate for the surgeon general’s initiative to include warning labels on social media.

The basic level of Marco Polo is free, but with a $60 annual membership, you can upgrade for features that include enhanced speed, and the ability to take notes and post photos and prerecorded videos. As of this month, along with each message, the app offers a transcript and AI summaries with the paid version.

The app especially resonates with family-oriented communities, Bortnik told me. In Utah, for example, she said that 1 in 5 people use Marco Polo, which is the highest number of users in all of the United States. “The family vibe is very strong there,” she said. The app also is a bit like a “gated community” where kids aren’t exposed to the barrage of pop-up ads and the risk of strangers contacting them, she added.

“It’s not for your thousands of friends, your followers — it’s for the 5, 10, 15 people you really want to talk to — if they came to visit you — you would actually go see them,” Bortnik said. What Marco Polo aims to be, she said, is not just a tool for staying in touch, but “for being in life with each other.”

Swapping texts for ‘polos’

The initiated know exactly what it means to be “in life with each other” on Marco Polo. The app blends into the busy and chaotic lives, often revealing the unflattering things we try to hide on social media: a child interrupting a message with a request for a snack, a snippet of a tense exchange with a spouse, a message recorded while doing dishes or putting on make-up.

One of my friends leaves panting messages while she’s exercising. My sister-in-law has recorded messages from her bathroom. There are “dark” polos and “post-shower” polos, and the ever-popular “driving polo.” As Heather Beal wrote in her essay: “The polos are recorded at our desks or whatever we are using at home for a desk, such as outside in a carport, sometimes while driving, and, not infrequently, while hiding out in a bathroom or closet — trying, desperately, to just have a few tiny uninterrupted moments,” she wrote.

When I posted on social media that I was looking for stories about Marco Polo, Heather Sundahl, a therapist in Orem, Utah, responded, calling herself a “Marco Polo junkie.” Marco Polo has infused her friendships with new intimacy — including a friend who lives in Saudi Arabia. “There is a difference between knowing people and knowing the daily things of their lives,” she said. “That’s where friendship gets really close, when you know the names of people your friends work with and what they have for lunch.”

Some view Marco Polo as free therapy. The mere act of talking, uninterrupted and knowing that people are listening, allows Sundahl to process her thoughts (some have described the app as the “friends podcast” or “friend therapy”). “On the days that I do polo on the way home, by the time I get home, I’m just in a little bit better headspace because I have worked through some things,” Sundahl said.

There’s research that backs up these positive impacts. Researchers at Brigham Young University in partnership with Joya Communications, which has developed Marco Polo, looked at the use of various social media tools, including Snapchat and Instagram, and found that Marco Polo users reported “positive health-related outcomes” as opposed to those who used social media. A 2023 survey conducted by Marco Polo itself (the company does one every year) reported that 9 in 10 users felt closer to their conversation partners after swapping texts for “polos.”

Managing and maintaining any relationship is a time commitment, and Marco Polo relationships are no exception. Beal’s group exchanged 50-75 messages a day during the pandemic, a number that rose to 200 on weekends. One person’s “polo” can sometimes run up to 15 minutes. Some have devised ground rules to help manage these new vibrant communities.

Wes Piatt, a CrossFit gym owner in California, started a Marco Polo support group for dads, called WeBus, which now has about 80 members. “We had a hundred videos on there a day and nobody was watching them. We had to come up with a system,” Piatt said. So they broke down the 80-person group into smaller groups of 10-12. Only listening and affirmation are allowed. “We created one rule in the group — you’re not allowed to give advice,” Piatt said.

On my Marco Polo with two girlfriends, we have one rule: We’re not allowed to delete our messages, even if we later regret oversharing.

Although the app has been more popular with women from the beginning, men, too, seek connection and open, honest dialogue, Piatt told me. “I think we have more of a society problem than we have a problem that men aren’t willing to share their vulnerabilities,” Piatt said. “We’re trying to create a space where being a man is being vulnerable and being honest about your emotions.”

Michael Sacasas, an expert on technology and culture and author of “ The Convivial Society ,” a Substack about technology and society, wonders what’s being displaced in our use of communication tools, including Zoom and Marco Polo.

Younger generations, in particular, are developing a tendency to shy away from phone calls and even face-to-face gatherings. The video dialogue offers a “fuller rendering of a human,” he told me, and the asynchronous format allows for a more thoughtful and deliberate response. But these advantages come at the expense of the spontaneity of human interactions, fostering a “controlled” and “safe” environment, he said, a kind of managed cocoon for a relationship to unfold.

“You can manage the relationship without risking the kind of messiness of the face-to-face or synchronous encounter,” he said.

A record of family history

As Milliman grew closer to her grandfather through their Marco Polo conversations, she decided to start using their video exchanges for capturing her grandfather’s life story. She asked her grandfather about being on a basketball team and how his relationship with his wife began. Over several years, she has compiled thousands of pages of transcribed “polos” that she’s using to write a book about her grandfather’s life. Eventually her cousins got involved in these video interviews and began filling in the gaps in the family history. “It sparked this vehicle for my whole family to participate in telling the story of my grandparents,” Milliman said.

A friend shared that she was able to retrieve her late husband’s Marco Polo messages with their children. “I cherish those back and forth videos of him and the kids,” she wrote to me.

In the middle of the pandemic, Milliman’s grandfather’s health started declining rapidly. From his hospital room, where no one was allowed in, he talked to his family through Marco Polo messages. She recalled getting hardly decipherable, broken video recordings from him as he grew weaker by the day. “He reached out to us, and it was so pure and beautiful that he had enough confidence that we would listen and we would care,” she said. “He felt seen and heard and we were able to give him words of encouragement to fortify him.”

One of the last things he told Milliman on Marco Polo before he died was how glad he was to have shared his story.