“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
– Morpheus
Stats
Friday May, 29th 5pm – June 1, 11:59pm Stats
SMS Questions Received: 230
SMS Questions Sent: 262
Page Views: 4970
The quote from Morpheus above is what I posted in the slack group to the team answering question on Anonymously Ask A Black Person. We’re up to 10 Brilliant Black People from across the country. The team is 7 guys, and 3 women. We have developers/engineers, sales guy and a couple of growth hackers. Everyone does not live in the Bay or Silicon Valley either. The team is from Austin, Cleveland, and the Bay area.
Last Friday, I wrote the blog post “Anonymously Ask A Black Person via SMS (ABP) is Back Online” in which I listed our core values, features list and goals. I was at Google I/O and wasn’t expecting a big flood of text messages to come in. I pinged the team in slack and said we’re live!
After a few tweets, and a Facebook post the messages started to come in on late Friday such as:
“What’s the best Kool Aid flavor”
“Is Nikki Minaj’s butt real?”
“Do you like chicken and waffles”
Come, Saturday afternoon more text were coming and the team and I started talking about ways to improve tracking who replies back to what messages. We also started thinking about growth. Since I haven’t sent the site to hacker news, I thought why not. So I posted “Anonymously Ask A Black Person” to the Show Hacker News section and waited. I didn’t have to wait long as I immediately saw traffic increase and more traffic means more SMS. We started getting questions like
“I’m on a date with a black girl right now. What should we do?”
“Do you all really have bigger dicks than white people?”
“How do you feel about non-black people singing the n-word at concerts when its part of the song?”
“What’s the best thing to say to someone when they make a racist joke to show you’re not cool with it?”
Not making the same mistake I did with Product Hunt, I decided to answer some of the comments on the Hacker News thread. Some were curious to why I built it and others had real suggestions on how to make it better. Be sure to check out the thread.
Saturday’s Page views where 1,389 with 1,237 uniques. Not bad.
Sunday, I again woke up to an unusual high number of page views. It turns out someone had submitted the site to Reddit’s CoonTown. I have never been to that section on Reddit… you are warned it’s real over there.
Either way, more Hacker News comments and traffic from Reddit started to increase the number of SMS questions coming in and the team was ready. We stared receiving some real tough questions like;
“hey. 1. are you really black or this is some social justice movement/horrible prank 2. you ever think social issues (of race,gender,orientation) are just handled horribly in the US? like it has to become a big movement in the newspapers and tv with people debating and moralizing about shit, so that bigots can have something to talk about. its like blindingly fucking simple isn’t it? all people are the same. do you feel that way?
Hi, I’m a white woman and often the target of sexism in my career. If I bring this up, men shut me down and laugh it off, “that’s not sexist”. It’s very frustrating. I feel like if it was a racial issue and I accused someone of being racist, they would quickly back down, if only just for appearances. Do you think that’s the case?
How do you feel about non-black people singing the n-word at concerts when its part of the song?
What is the worst and best thing about black church?
Are black people racist towards white people?
How would you fix the problem of diversity in tech specifically black people?
What’s the best way that I, as a white person, can help people of color?
Then more of the not so serious question started to come in such as:
Curry or LeBron?
What was Jay-Z’s first album?
do black people really have the biggest weenies?
Is it just met but there’s seems to be a real interest in blacks having a bigger penis parts than whites.. I’m going to leave it right there… #thatisall
At the end of the day on Sunday, this message warmed my soul.
“I want to apologize on behalf of humanity if people have texted anything terrible. Happy Sunday!”
Sunday’s numbers were: 2,570 page views and 2,294 unique visits.
Yesterday I was heads down on few projects buta reporter reached out to us for a story on Anonymously Ask A Black Person. I asked the team who wanted to remain anonymous and who wanted to be public. We also talked about growth, features and getting more returning users. I just checked some of the questions from yesterday and most were serious. The stats from yesterday are 1001 page views and 858 unique visits.
We’re going to really think about new features, partnerships and growth over the next week and see how we’re doing on numbers to reach our 90 day goal of 10k messages sent and received.
As of today we’re really 3 days old with almost 5k page views and have replied over 250 SMS questions. We’re getting ready for press and growth plans and to some up one of the reasons why we’re doing this. I believe this Q&A below that happen via Anonymously Ask A Black Person sums it up!
Question: Why do black people on average have such low IQs compared to whites and asians?
Answer: Black people don’t have low IQs. We have the most underrated IQ 🙂
-your friendly neighborhood black person #aabp
You can view the first 3 days of questions below!
