Facebook acquires tbh, the two months old "to be honest" app which allows people to send each other positive feedback through anonymous, quiz-style polls.
Nikita Bier started tbh parent company Midnight Labs back in 2010. The app studio tried creating some products before eventually taking a small seed round in 2013 from investors, including Greylock via partner Josh Elman, Bee Partners and Indicator Ventures.
At the time, none of its products got traction they need, and Midnight Labs was running out of money.
With just a couple of months worth of cash left, the company decided to build something that anonymous apps lack: a social network where users can request candid feedback from their friends. This was when tbh was born.
"We shipped it to one school in Georgia. Forty percent of the school downloaded it the first day," said Bier.
Since then, the app that focuses on teenagers, went viral in the U.S., and topping app stores by surpassing millions of downloads and having 2.5 million daily active users. Its users have sent over 1 billion messages during its short time before being acquired.
Facebook paid "under $100 million" for the startup.
With the acquisition, tbh co-founders, Nikita Bier, Erik Hazzard, Kyle Zaragoza, and Nicolas Ducdodon, move to Facebook's headquarters, and continue working on the app with Facebook's resources.
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Tbh allows users to create surveys and send them anonymously to friends. In them, as the company notes on its website, users can post queries such as the classic teenager question "Who is most likely to be president?" Or "Best to bring to a party?”
Other quizzes and questions can be more creative and legit. Users can also create polls
The startup said that "we wanted to create a community that made us feel happier and more confident about ourselves."
While Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's mission was all about making the world more open and connected, it recently became about giving "people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."