Salsa

Hi Ryan, Thanks for having Salsa here! And great insight in this area. What you described -- "most of these tools are limited to larger companies ..." -- is a real problem. I try to solve this issue by making the community more open -- any user can post messages about any company, not limited to their own employers. Messages can be anything -- thoughts, public news, rumor, or insider gossips. The intention here is to encourage sharing while protecting privacy. Another interesting feature of Salsa is "Spice Up", which is an enhanced version of "vote up" with geographical information. Now the original poster can see where people in the world cheered for her, and how far the message spread to the world. Salsa also provides a tool for anonymous salary survey. Besides providing a reference to anybody who are curious about how much her skill set values, I also hope this can capture the huge pay gaps between genders and different geographic areas. Salsa is still in its early stage. After all, it's my side project from last two months and I'm the only developer/designer. I am really looking forward where the community takes Salsa to.

We've seen several variations of anonymous apps for coworkers and teams but I haven't seen any take off (correct me if I'm wrong). I just did a search for related products and previous hunts, Kangaroo and OffGarden, are no longer around. Of course that doesn't mean this can't work but I'm skeptical. Most of these tools are limited to larger companies that have enough people to make the responses truly anonymous and I believe those companies are harder to sell (if it's a top down strategy). Thoughts, @ychw?

@ychw, as someone who has tried other enterprise "yik yak" apps, I really like Salsa's approach of not making employees sign up with their work emails because that way the IT department can't track you down (which is what happened to me). My main critique here is if you have no way to authenticate where someone works, how can you guarantee that the comments are going to relevant to that company? Also, what made you decide to go with salsa for the name.