Fourth-year College student Jack Crawford-Brown and College of William & Mary graduate JP Mohler launched a new app Wednesday at the University. The app, called Splash Anonymous, is a social media platform designed to foster greater community interaction and was loosely inspired by the app Yik Yak.
“For a couple years [we’ve] been trying to figure out a better way to allow people in tight knit communities to communicate with each other,” Crawford-Brown and Mohler said. “We saw how fast Yik Yak took advantage of that market, and visually, this is just as important”
Like Yik Yak, the app — which has already launched at William & Mary and Virginia Tech — synthesizes posts from the surrounding community into a single feed and can be accessed by anyone within a certain area. However, the Splash Anonymous feed includes photos and videos, an aspect Crawford-Brown and Mohler said helps make the app business friendly. Some community bars at William & Mary have posted pictures on the app advertising drink specials for college events.
The app is designed to fulfill a variety of community needs, in addition to allowing members to talk about an assortment of events and informal news. At the University, posts have ranged from pictures of bad parking jobs to videos celebrating the weekend.
Crawford-Brown and Mohler said all activity is filtered to ensure the feed remains an acceptable and fun space for expression.
“Our app is fully monitored,” Crawford-Brown and Mohler said. “A lot of [other] apps just have all this inappropriate content on there. I’m sure guys are attracted to it at first, but we really want the whole community…to see funny and relevant and cool stuff without [it] being a turnoff to [a] big portion of the community.”
The two said the app took about a month to develop, but they are continually updating the programming and adding new features to enhance the experience. Crawford-Brown and Mohler are currently promoting Splash Anonymous with the hope of attracting investors.
“Our hope is [that] it’ll blow up at U.Va. and that will allow us to get some recognition from investors to get money and do rapid expansion to other schools” they said.
Based on their communication with investors interested in early stage social media apps, Crawford-Brown and Mohler said they learned that a solid base of users at a couple of schools will generate interest from venture capitalist companies. As a result, the two founders said they are focusing first on growing their user base before seeking funding.
Since launching at the University this past week, the app has gained 637 users in the surrounding community. Splash Anonymous is available free of charge in the Apple App Store, and a version for Android is currently in the works.
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