A Social Network for Introverts, by Introverts

When you've designed an app to appeal to shy people, it only seems appropriate to skip the marketing.
That's why James Sun, the cofounder of Anomo, is keeping his app under the radar for now. At least as much as possible.
Anomo is an app that launched in February for iPhone and Android as a location-based dating app. But Sun recently found a whole new audience and pivoted the service into a social network for introverts, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. Unlike some of its competitors like Whisper, it's not fully anonymous, but shy users can mask themselves with avatars. Though its user base is still small — 40,000 downloads, 4,500 daily active users — it's growing by 500% each month.
Those are the kinds of figures even an introvert like Sun can crow about. It puts Anomo on the same playing field as Facebook: According to Sun, users open the app 18 times a day on average, as opposed to 14 times for Facebook. And nearly all of those users are from a demographic Mark Zuckerberg is eager to win back: teens.
The idea behind Anomo is simple enough. Select an avatar and tell the app your gender and age range (95% of daily active users are between 15 and 20). You can choose to verify your age via Facebook, which is handled on the back end; other users can't see your Facebook profile, but they do see your verification. About 65% of Anomo's users are already verified.
"The innovation here is not that you're anonymous," said Sun, below, who is known on the service as White Panda. "It's that you're wearing a mask."
Once suitably masked, you're placed into a mixed-gender group with four other users for a very casual ice breaker, a simple survey in which everyone's answers are revealed at the same time. Anomo takes note of your answers, and the next time you play, it tries to match you with users who answered in similar ways.
At first, Sun and his cofounder Ben Liu conceptualized Anomo as a dating app for the painfully shy, solving a problem they experienced growing up themselves. "We found it hard to meet new people because we're science-oriented kids," Sun said. "We came to the conclusion that we had social anxiety."
However, it turned out there was a need for more than just masked speed dating for the socially anxious. Anomo found a community fleeing Facebook and seeking somewhere to hang out. The startup tapped psychologists to analyze the 2 million questions from the ice breaker answered so far and found that roughly 85% of its users were introverted.