For many of us, Facebook functions as a billboard for all the wonderful things in our lives—the pregnancies, marriage proposals, vacations, babies and shameless work brags.
But what about the thoughts that we're too afraid or embarrassed or ashamed or nervous to share? Wouldn’t it be great if there were an anonymous social network where we could say whatever we wanted, without the fear of tarnishing our image?
Well, there is. It’s called Whisper, and the site and its accompanying app are insanely popular. How popular? According to the company, the site attracts more than 6 billion page views per month. Just create a user name (not your real name), and you can post anything you’re thinking about; the app will furnish a related illustration or photo to be featured as the backdrop to your words. Just like Facebook, users can also interact with each other by replying to posts.
So what exactly are people posting on Whisper? Here are a few examples:
“I didn’t get dressed until 3pm today … I’m okay with that.”
“Orange is the New Black has made me question my sexuality.”
“I work in a pet shop and secretly let all the hamsters free.”
“Whenever I’m on a train, I like to look out the window and cry a little so I can fee like I’m in a Lifetime movie.”
Whisper is the brainchild of Michael Heyward, a 20-something techie who was tired of the lack of authenticity on Facebook and saw a gap in the market. (The app is similar to the now-defunct PostSecret.) “Facebook is very much ego-based content; it’s all about ‘Look at me! Let me show you how great my life is!’” Heyward says. “Whisper was designed to give people a place to share things that they normally wouldn’t have an outlet for.”
Heyward and his co-founder, longtime colleague and friend Brad Brooks, launched the app in 2012. Since then, the partners have attracted a reported $60 million in funding. The company, which has more than 40 employees, is based near the boardwalk in Venice, California.
OPEN Forum recently spoke with Heyward to hear about the early days of Whisper, how the company competes for tech talent and how the app is saving lives.
Let's start at the beginning. How did you get Whisper off the ground?
When Brad and I were working for my dad [well-known cartoonist Andy Heyward, the creator of Inspector Gadget] at his company, DIC Entertainment, we started becoming frustrated with the lack of authenticity on Facebook, so we tinkered around with the idea of Whisper. Brad and I incubated it inside my dad’s company until May 2012, when we spun it out on our own. We had a little bit of funding at launch, mostly from angel investors.
Six billion page views per month is really impressive. How long did it take to see that kind of traction?
It took a while. On our first day, I think 20 people installed the app—18 of which were people my mom knew (laughs). It was challenging at first because I'd been working on this night and day, and there's that thought that if I’ve been thinking about it so much, everyone else must be, too. But, of course, that's not how life works.
We slowly attracted users, and as we did, we saw very heavy engagement. From the beginning, people were using Whisper seven to 10 times per day. I thought that if we could scale that up, it would be a huge opportunity. We went to college campuses, and that's when our numbers really grew. It took off pretty quickly by word of mouth from there.
Were there any big glitches early on?
There were technical challenges—our service would go down [because] we had too many users and not enough hardware. That was a pretty high-class problem to have, though. It kept me up at night, but once our user base started to grow, we became really dedicated to staffing up, which helped immensely.
More than 70 percent of your users are women. Why do you think that is? Are they the only ones with things to get off their chests?
Ha, no, that isn’t it. I think women tend to be more extroverted. They're more likely to tell other people about new products. Pinterest and Snapchat see similar stats. I just think women tend to be early adopters.
How do you make money?
We don’t. We’ve experimented with a lot of things, from advertising to user-generated payments, but right now, we don’t have any experiments going. We're a free service—not sure when that will change.
Some people say Facebook is fading. Do you agree? Are you trying to replace Facebook with an anonymous social network?
I don’t think Facebook is fading; I’m very bullish on Facebook. I think Facebook has become your driver’s license on the Internet.
Whisper won't take over Facebook. Anonymity isn't a fad, just like identity isn't a fad. I just think people are going to want different things for different reasons—like Instagram for photos and Whisper to share things they don’t want to say publicly but still need an outlet for.
Today’s startup market can be tough for founders looking for top talent. How does Whisper compete?
We have ping-pong, and we have free lunch and dinner and unlimited vacation time, but I don’t classify those as things we use for recruiting.
I really think it all comes down to our product. I don’t think there's any gimmick or hack that can outweigh the chance to work on an amazing product. This is a place where, every single day, young people post “I wish I was straight because my parents would love me” or “I’m 24 and a virgin.” Whisper is making people feel less alone in the world.
But what is your reaction to those people, like Michael Arrington at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference, who say your app can be used for unethical purposes like bullying?
Safety has been our number-one priority since day one. We’ve built a layer of technology that serves as a real-time screener for content coming into the app—every piece of content goes through a technical scrub. It's looked at in real time. We have 130 full-time human moderators that also review content. If a post is talking about a real person or being defamatory with explicit imagery, we'll take it off the site.
What if someone posts something defamatory or worrisome about themselves?
We do have people post about threatening to put their own lives at risk. We want to make sure that that person is responded to immediately, so we put a watermark on top of their Whisper post that says they've been heard. Also on the watermark is a hotline number to a place to get help. We also link them to Your Voice, a nonprofit we founded that helps raise awareness of mental health issues.
Wow, that is powerful. Do you ever hear back from those people?
Every day. Multiple times per day—sometimes even 10 times a day—we get messages from people saying that our intervention helped save their life. Sometimes people are having a really bad day and they don’t want to talk to a friend, professor or family member about it. So they go on Whisper. It's like talking with a stranger on a train, except this stranger can help them.
What has running this company taught you so far?
It's taught me that most people are really good by nature. If you give people a place where they can come out of the catacombs of their own minds and make themselves really vulnerable, other people will accept them as they are. There's nothing more exciting than being part of something like that.
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