Turn off the lights.
Why rumr and why now?
We’ve grown up in a world where most things we do are public. Every tweet, every photo, every status update has our identity tied to it. There is no separation between our public and private lives. The lens of identity is always present, and sometimes, we just don’t want it to be.
The biggest issue with anonymity so far has been context. The general use of anonymity typically has been one-way to an audience that we have no connection with, other than we are both users of the service. This solution tends to not be a driver of real or meaningful emotions and typically turns into places to vent or share confessions. There is power in anonymity to solve real problems, however, the right tool never existed.
Today, we present rumr, a new way to anonymously message with people you know. This is the first app of its kind to do real-time anonymous messaging with your friends. This isn’t photo sharing, this isn’t disappearing messages, this is a new way to communicate with the people you care about.
rumr works on a sliding scale of anonymity. The more friends you add to a chat, the more anonymous it becomes. The level of anonymity is directly related to the number of people in a chat.
Much of the concern with anonymity is due to the malicious and negative behavior it seems to attract. Because many of the services have no boundaries, the malicious behavior is amplified. By introducing the constraint of keeping these chats between your friends, the environment becomes inherently safer.
My co-founders Andrew, Collin and myself have been thinking about rumr for well over a year. Before starting rumr, we worked together at textPlus where we spent a lot of time thinking about new and innovative ways to connect the world for fractions of a penny.
We knew there had to be a better way, but, what was always missing for us was a place to be yourself and to say things you couldn’t or weren’t comfortable saying anywhere else. We wanted to create a place that you could let your guard down. Where everything didn’t always need to be perfect.
Over the past year, we struggled with the idea of whether we should just launch and iterate, but we wanted to get this right. And today, we’re finally ready to share it with the world. We’ve taken anonymity and made it the new default. We encourage you to check it out and we can’t wait to hear what you think.
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