As Secret and Whisper blow up, KC’s Gossup has its anonymous answer

Privacy is more or less a bygone era, which may explain the influx of apps, tools and outlets entering the market to satiate the need for people to distance themselves from any form of identity. Turns out we may not always want to be associated with our immaculately manicured Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. While several…

Privacy is more or less a bygone era, which may explain the influx of apps, tools and outlets entering the market to satiate the need for people to distance themselves from any form of identity.

Turns out we may not always want to be associated with our immaculately manicured Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

While several apps have made it to the national discussion—Secret and Whisper, most notably—a Kansas City startup thinks it has a better answer for confessions, secrets and inappropriate jokes.

Secret has become the talk of Silicon Valley for the rumors being spread, with a different twist of knowing whether a user is a friend or a friend of a friend. It leads to a lot of guessing. Whisper has taken off with the younger crowd for its text paired with images and only the ability to respond to people through messages—still anonymous. It’s being compared to the popular website PostSecret.

Gossup, which recently went through BetaBlox, allows anonymous users to share anything with the world, but with the focus heavily on location. Users can see posts from those posting nearby and can follow specific places, towns and cities for now.

Co-founder Kevin Bradford told Silicon Prairie News it’s just the start. They also want users to be able to follow along with events as well, and are targeting college towns and campuses in the coming months to create more close-knit communities of sharing.

Just about anything can be shared on Gossup. Case in point, Bradford said he saw a user admit that his girlfriend is pregnant with someone else’s baby.

He wants people to use it however they need to, but says the essence of it is that “you can post whatever stupid shit is in your brain.”

With a basis around geography, unlike Secret and Whisper, the conversation turns more toward what’s happening around you, and so the team hopes, about places and news that affects the user.

Which is why colleges are the natural fit. The team has established presences in KC and Lawrence—home to the University of Kansas—but has begun targeting Facebook and Twitter ads at specific demographics in Des Moines, Omaha, St. Louis, Austin, Denver and Minneapolis.

Anyone anywhere can use the app and see the feed of what’s coming through, but the true value, according to Gossup, is the ability to follow your neighborhoods and places. That requires the team manually inputting each location, keeping a close eye on where downloads pop up from. 

Sometimes that leads to intriguing results. Bradford said a cluster of friends in Amsterdam picked it up and helped it spread there. So they added their locations, and also learned a lot from them. They were engaging with the app in different ways then Americans. They were using its “sway” feature much differently—voting posts up and down to determine a user’s status and how visible their posts will be. He said they were much more likely to down-vote, which led Bradford to change the algorithm behind it.

“The community already has a sense of ‘This is what we want, this is what we don’t want,’” he said.

The sway is why he likes the anonymity so much. Celebrity or stature doesn’t influence what rises to the top. No one can see who you are in any way, even a username. It’s solely from the value of the posts.

“It requires no social equity,” he said. “It’s all in how good the content is.”

“Make us finish”

He’s plugging away on Gossup with co-founder Eric Miller, social media strategist at Barkley, as he runs his own app development company focused primarily on educational games for kids. He was with Fortune 100 conglomerate Honeywell in Kansas City for a number of years before making the jump out on his own.

He and Miller have tossed around ideas for years, and this was one that finally stuck. Instead of letting it stagnate, they decided to enter BetaBlox so that someone else could “make us finish what we started, give us accountability.”

They have more than 2,000 downloads so far, but as with any startup, Bradford said the biggest concern is gaining users. If they can, they have ideas for location-based advertising relating to the places users follow or a one-time fee.

The app is available on iOS and Android.

 

Credits: Screenshot from Gossup.co.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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