The story of the founder of the social network Secret for the exchange of gossip: is there life after the Secret

David Bytau, founder of Secret social network for sharing secrets, told the Secret Company publication about his life before the project, about working on Secret and how to turn defeat in his favor with the help of a special mantra.

"Megamind" brings the most interesting facts from its history .

Background of the project

Baitau, originally from Indiana, entered Purdue University, but did not finish: he collected things and went to California to work in a game company (he had been programming since he was ten). Got a job at Google, where for almost five years I was engaged in Google+ and Google Wave . In one of the interviews he said: while doing Secret, he looked at Google+ and did the opposite.
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After Google, he did not work for a long time in Square with Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter . Communication with Dorsey inspired Bytau, he decided to open his company, without having any idea what it would be.

Once he invited to the meeting of Chris Bader-Wechsler, a talented programmer, whom he himself hired at Google. They found a common interest - anonymous messages - and became partners by inventing the Whispr messenger to send anonymous messages to friends. The messages disappeared like the photos in Snapchat . The girl Baytau then was in Paris, and he gladly tested his idea - sent her anonymous letters with declarations of love. Baytau liked that the message in Whispr was always a pleasant surprise. The text is important, and it is not very important who wrote it. Partners showed service to investors, but could not interest them.

In November 2013, they strolled through South Park in San Francisco and came up with a new idea - to create a social network for secrets. If you connect users on a social graph with friends, they will read anonymous information about those who are interesting.

This time it was easy to convince investors. At the end of 2013, the company received $ 1.4 million, in particular, from Google Ventures, and in early 2014, the Secret application appeared in the App Store.

I woke up "famous"

May 23 last year, Baytau woke up at 3 am. The phone was broken by notifications - signals from a server that could not cope with the load from the influx of new users. “I saw that the traffic was coming from Russia, and at first I decided that hackers were attacking us,” recalls Baytau. He quickly realized that there were no signs of an attack, but in Secret there appeared many posts in Cyrillic.

Secret in Russia went the same way as in Silicon Valley. It began with gossip IT-market: caused a resonance reports about the delay in wages in Look At Media. In Russia, they shared insights, intimate secrets and wrote the most about politics. The country, about which Baytau did not know anything, became an important market for an anonymous application. Secret hired two Russian-speaking employees in San Francisco to translate posts, work with a monitoring team and raise a Russian-speaking community.

Beauty will save the world

When Baitau and Bader-Wexler launched the project, they clearly defined the mission of the new service: to make people more honest, closer to each other, to let them talk about what is scary and uncomfortable to talk about. “This ultimately makes the world a better place,” wrote Baitau 45 days after launch.

The founders were obsessed with beauty. Baytau expressed a romantic hypothesis - problems with cyberbulling (threats, curses, bullying) that killed several anonymous startups will not be in Secret, because beauty attracts beauty. “When you create products, you need pivot points that people will love, it creates positive emotions and affection,” he said.

Goldmine

In March 2014, the company attracted a new round - $ 8.6 million from venture capital funds, including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers (in Twitter, JD.com, Google and others), actor Ashton Kutcher and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanyan invested their own funds. Ohanyan believed that Secret would be able to compete with Facebook, which is losing a young audience. “People need to share frank thoughts, and they can do it only in Secret. Publications under the real name will ruin a career. "

It seemed to investors as if they had found a gold mine. “The need for self-expression lies in our desire not to be alone,” wrote Danny Reamer, who joined the company's board of directors from Index Ventures. - Secret - a new form of graffiti; a place where we can afford controversial discussions. ”

In June, the team announced Secret Dens - anonymous groups for the teams, they were used by employees of Google, Facebook and Twitter. It seemed that the triumph was close, but in fact the Secret had already fallen into the web of problems.

Bad experiment

The design of the application really appeals to many, but the psychological experiment by Baytau failed. Secret was filled with gossip and slander. Baitau received messages from anti-suicide organizations. The media wrote the news on the basis of secrets, it irritated the newsmakers. Increasingly, opinion leaders, a couple of months ago, supportive of a new service, began to blame Secret.

Debaters broke spears. Influential investor Mark Andriessen spread a long thread, where he wrote that Secret "was created to generate negative behavior, humiliate people, darken human souls." ValleyWag blog mischievously wrote that Andriessen was angry at Secret after the service refused his money.

“Building anonymous applications is very difficult,” explains the founder of the Memo service (an anonymous application for discussing work) Rayyan Jenssen. - People do not tell each other about them, so making them viral is hard. People do not build a reputation there, so there is no incentive to write quality content. ”

The founders of Secret realized the naivety of the idea “beautiful design will generate beautiful content.”

A year ago, the service was in the center of the scandal unleashed by the publication of PandoDaily. Sarah Jane Sachetti, PR-director of Secret (she used to work in Formspring) did not respond to the proposal of the head of the anti-suicide foundation to discuss the problem. After media attacks, she apologized and soon quit.

Competitor

Secret burned investments for moderators' salaries, 150 people in the Philippines and in Guatemala daily deleted millions of posts. In parallel, another problem appeared - Yik Yak .

The service arose in the wake of a new interest in anonymity and immediately became a serious competitor. If Secret's design was more like Instagram, Yik Yak showed a fast-paced message feed, like on Twitter. He instantly spread to schools and universities in America. In June 2014, Yik Yak raised $ 10 million, and in the fall - already $ 62 million with the leading fund Sequoia Capital (valuation of $ 350 million less than a year after launch).

Secret developed better outside the United States: in Russia, Mexico, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Indonesia — and precisely because of this, the American market was losing, users were leaving because of the influx of foreign-language perverts. The main competitor quickly learned the lesson: Yik Yak closed access to the application from developing countries - it’s impossible to download from Russia.

In emerging markets, Secret didn’t shoot either - the service had taken offensively one-night entertainment niche. He acted like a virus - spread very quickly and just went out. In Russia, on May 28, he was among the top five App Store apps in Russia, and on June 15, he disappeared from the rankings.

In Brazil, the service was quickly banned by the authorities - its appearance coincided with the presidential race, and thousands of paid trolls began posting compromising materials on Secret candidates. In August, a Brazilian court ordered Apple and Google to remove the application from stores and from phones of Brazilians who downloaded it. The penalty for each overdue day is $ 9,000. Then Apple first used the switch killer function - removing the application from the user's phone without his knowledge.

Sunset

Secret has been looking for its way for the past six months. In December, the company redesigned and became a copy of Yik Yak. It did not help, people began to leave even faster. “The product has lost some of its magic,” says Baytau. He also lost the second founder.

Chris Bader left the company in January, shortly after the launch of the new version. "It's time to let the team do what it wants, and I focus on what works best," he said. “He was just very tired, there was no other specific reason,” recalls Baytau. - I was surprised". The partner’s care has severely hampered the development of the project.

April 29, he published a post on Medium. "Sunset". The project has closed.

From the side it seems that the end was quick, but in fact painful. “For a long time it was only in my head, the staff knew nothing. When I said this to the team, it seems to me that everyone felt relieved, because the truth was very hard for us. "

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better »

"In the Valley, there is an unspoken rule - do not speak ill of the companies in which you worked and invested in," explained an IT entrepreneur living in San Francisco. Reputation here is very important. Redpoint Foundation wrote how inspired it was by participating in the round. Now the Secret logo is not in his portfolio, and the partner didn’t answer anything. Funds silently remove unsuccessful projects from the list.

Bytau's mourning Facebook cover has a black background, and he still doesn’t know what he will do next. The first month after the closure of Secret, he arranged the life of his team - sent people to Uber, Twitter and other companies. I am sure of one thing: no more social networks. “Social products are a battle for the attention of consumers. They are interesting only when they are used by many people, and it is very difficult to grow. Few can achieve the success of Facebook and Twitter. Only Snapchat could. We have gained popularity, but it is difficult to make the product sustainable. ”

In a year and a half, Secret received 15 million users and $ 35 million in investments. Baytau closed the project, let down investors and disappointed users - and now he thinks what to do next. "I made the most difficult decision in my life," said Baytau.

“These feil mean nothing. Picasso created paintings for seven years, and they were very bad. ” The words of the playwright Samuel Beckett “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better ”become the Silicon Valley mantra. That is why many entrepreneurs are happy to quickly fly out of the university and start a business. Startups are the same school, only steeper. American investors, competitors and employees do not curse the loser (at least publicly) - which means he can be proud to have lost.