By James Sun, Amono founder and chairman
Elevator Pitch: Anomo is the first multi-identity social network (patent-pending) that ‘helps the world meet the people they need’ in an easy, safe, and authentic way, while giving the user 100 percent control of their privacy in every interaction.
Product Service/Description
Anomo’s core mission is to help the world meet the people they need. Humans are born into this world as social creatures, and our successes are highly dependent on the people we meet—from first grade friends to college mates to significant others to business partners. But the challenge is that we all inherently have some degree of social anxiety when meeting new people. Anomo solves this problem with a new ‘multi-identity’ social app that provides the easiest and safest way to chat and meet new people around you. It allows you to keep all your personal information confidential behind a multi-identity profile, and only reveal private information (pictures, job, name, etc.) to people with whom you have positive interactions.
Anomo is the newest mobile social discovery app, available both for the iPhone and Android, teaching people how to engage in rich, quality social interactions in an easy, safe, and real way. Users create an ‘anomo,’ similar to an avatar, that allows the utmost privacy while first meeting someone digitally. They are then matched with four other users of the opposite sex based on algorithms such as age, location, and similar experiences. A series of ‘ice breaker’ games allow users to determine their compatibility with four users at a time, as they simultaneously answer five questions per game. Each shake reveals another four matches, initiates another game.
As users chat and become more comfortable with their matches, they are allowed to reveal new qualities about themselves, such as an actual photo, name, profession, and more. Age, sex, and interests have all already been verified by Facebook if denoted by the letter ‘F’ next to their chosen username. Once the users have both decided to meet, the chat feature allows for their first encounter, bringing this quality social interaction from the digital sphere to real life. Built on genuine conversations, matches from Anomo have been shown to create lasting relationships, whether it be romantic, a friendship, or for business networking.
In addition, based on geo-locations, Anomo accounts for those otherwise missed opportunities for social interactions. Many have found that the first initial awkward encounters are replaced with valuable social conversations that overlook looks and status, and are rooted in a stronger foundation that is often lost in today’s culture.
Founders’ Story
Both of us co-founders are natural born introverts, but we learned the importance of being more extroverted in life. In high school, both of us were very math-oriented, but also enjoyed sports. We were a bit of an aberration, and it was hard to meet new friends that shared both interests. One of us went to Princeton University and the other went to University of Washington, and in college we both realized how difficult it was to meet friends, dates, and business networks. After college, we realized it’s even more difficult to meet new people—but we realized the importance of who you know. We wanted to solve this problem of making it easy and safe to meet new people based on real content and common interests instead of just a photo on a profile page. This is how Anomo began!
Market Opportunity
Our market opportunity is bigger than Facebook. Facebook does a great job of keeping you connected with your existing friends, but it’s a horrible platform to meet new people. The social graph of existing friends may be 500-to-1,000 friends, but the potential social graph of all the people in the world that can help you in life is at least ten-to-20 times that number. There are tens-of-millions of missed opportunities due to the inefficiencies of matching people up with coordinates of location, time, interest and intention. We believe this is a $500 billion opportunity to help the world meet the people they need.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNN1mSiDAcg&feature=player_embedded
Marketing/Promotion Strategy
We have already built our core group of base users. This is critical to any great social network. Our average daily active user opens up the app 18.3 times a day and we’ve really hit the teen market as our initial early adopters. After successfully meeting new friends, we will focus on giving incentives for our base users to spread the word virally.
How We Differentiate From the Competition
We have a new concept that is patent-pending called a ‘multi-identity social network.’ We give users multiple identities in the Anomo world that is an extension of their real identity. These masked-identities work on behalf of the real user and help meet new people without social consequences like Facebook. Only when they feel comfortable with another interaction with a user do they reveal parts of their real identity. There is no other service that makes it as easy, safe and authentic for meeting new people compared to Anomo.
Business Model
This is completely confidential at this time. We have created a new patent-pending model that allows large consumer brands to engage with specific users without using display ads.
Current Needs
-Kick-ass senior mobile architect who has experience on backend scaling and iPhone/Android client development.
-$500,000 from Angels who believe that there could be something even bigger than Facebook. $350,000 was already raised in the Seed round.
# # #
Website: www.anomo.com
Founders: James Sun, Ben Liu
Headquarters: Seattle
Investors: Orca Bay Capital, Lee Zehrer of Kiss.com, and Amit Mital of Microsoft
Year Founded: 2012
Twitter: @MeetAnomo
Facebook: facebook.com/pages/Anomo/159014757565146
CrunchBase: crunchbase.com/company/anomo
AngelList: angel.co/anomo
