Scouting Ahead
45 days later
Today, Secret is 45 days old. In this short time, we’ve watched our community embrace and shape the tone of the product in inspiring, informative, heartfelt and creative ways. As the platform evolves, it becomes more clear that Secret truly shines in its ability to spark intriguing, meaningful and provocative conversations with unprecedented levels of authenticity.
Engagement. When we launched, we planned to spend the first 90 days learning, crafting and polishing the product before turning our attention to growth. We’re now halfway there and have found a direct correlation between the number of friends a user has and their engagement on Secret. Notably, 75% of people with more than 5 friends come back every day. Furthermore, 90% of users that engage in a conversation come back within the week, often several times per day. Data like this reaffirms our belief that there is opportunity to build a platform around rich and unexpected conversations.
Funding. Focusing on revenue so early on for a social network is detrimental to its natural evolution. When raising money, it’s critical to work with people you trust that will believe in you through the good times and the bad, which is more valuable than raising the most cash at the highest valuation. We’ve selected a diverse group of exceptional individuals that know this to be true, and will help steward Secret forward.
This week, we brought $8.6MM of new capital into the company from a mixture of venture capital firms and angels. We received support from Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian of Initialized Capital, MG Siegler of Google Ventures, Bing Gordon and Megan Quinn of KPCB, Chris Howard and Brad Silverberg of Fuel Capital, Vivi Nevo, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher of A-Grade Investments, David Sacks, Bill Lee, Pete Cashmore, Joe Montana, Rob Wiesenthal, Andrew Chen, and several other secret and amazing individuals, with co-founders David Byttow and Chrys Bader as sole members of the board.
Our vision is to create a world flowing with authenticity. Being more open with each other brings us closer together, builds understanding, and ultimately makes the world a better place. Our Series A funding enables us to curate a small, passionate team of artists and builders, listen closely to the community and continue to focus on the work in order to make it happen.
Want to build this with us? Say hello at work@secret.ly.
You should follow us on Twitter and download Secret for iPhone.
