A Trillion Reasons To Follow Our Journey
Five female makers set out to change the Internet — for good.
We’re five teenage women based in Los Angeles, CA, who hope to transform social networking. Easy enough, right? Sit back, relax, and cheer us on as we take Trill from dream to reality to awesome reality. But first, let’s recap how we got here…
Throughout all of our middle and high school lives, we have watched and participated in the millennial craze over social media. While social media can (and does) do some good, filters, catfishing, facetune, body shaming, and cyber bullying have turned existing online networks into public hubs for isolation and negativity. Probably everywhere, and especially in LA, it can feel like everyone around you is in competition to win the Most Curated Instagram award. It also didn’t help that we never knew which sites or corporations actually had access to all our ‘personal’ information.
We started out by forming a team to participate the in the Technovation Challenge. Seriously disillusioned with our own sense of “privacy” in our lives and on social media, and horrified but not very surprised at the harrowing statistics and research on gen z mental health, we knew that we somehow wanted to address those.
To see if there would be any interest in an app like that, or if we would be building it for nobody, we started out by asking the question “What would you tell the world if no one knew you were telling it?”. Using a Tumblr account and an anonymous google form, we quickly received the validation we’d hoped, and believed, we could get. We reached 10,000+ email signups in around 3 weeks, and began our beta in TestFlight.
For the last month, we have been adding more users to the beta, listening to feedback, and constantly updating the app. We may have built Trill, but our users are the driving force behind many of the most popular feature requests, such as private messages, integrated emergency resources, and trigger warnings on posts in the app.
The Trill Project is an anonymous social network that allows users to safely express themselves in a supportive environment, while building tight knit communities. Our users are confident in their security and benefit from hearing people around the globe share and relate to their honest thoughts. Due to its privacy, our app is perfect for anyone grappling with issues, thoughts, or ideas, they aren’t ready to publicly share, or are not supposed to be sharing.
As young women in STEM, we’ve found a great purpose in working together and creating something meaningful for our community. We want Trill to foster a sense of comfort, collaboration, and community for others, not just in Los Angeles but really around the globe.
The Trill Project is all about creating communities where we can focus on building each other up instead of tearing each other down. The resulting dialogue is authentic, powerful, and invites users to think, reflect, and elevate social media into something we’re really proud of.
