2 Women Create The Anonymous Facebook
I’m a mother of 4 from Wisconsin living in the Costa Rican jungle in a house on a hilltop overlooking the ocean. I've commented on FB about the monkeys in the trees, the toucans, and the sweet ocean breezes I feel while I lay on my hammock. My FB friends of course commented how jealous they were and how lucky I was to be living in paradise.
"Must be nice to have a perfect life".
Right……well, not exactly.
There were the things I never put on FB …… how I lost my job and my husband couldn't find one. We were living with hardly any money and food for months and no one there to help. One day I reached rock bottom and didn't feel like life would ever be good again.
I realized around that time that my life had two sides and I could only show one side on FB. Let's face it, no one wants to hear about someone's issues on the newsfeed, it's just not socially acceptable. It's like being in a room full of people chatting about the weather and someone starts talking about their messy divorce. It's just not done.
Where do you turn when you have no one to talk to about your problems?
Where can you vent about your bad day?
I realized I'm not the only one with difficulties in my life. Everyone has problems and lots of us don't want to dump on our friends. FB needs a place where anyone can talk about whatever they need to talk about.
Not just what we had for dinner… or the awesome party we went to last night.
Let's GET REAL

So I thought, I'm going to do something about this! I am going to make a website or place on FB where you can be yourself and vent about anything! Anonymously.

How does a woman with 2 toddlers living in the jungles of Costa Rica who doesn't know much about computers and has no money, do this?

Good Question. I believed it was a matter of: if it's supposed to happen it will and I'm going to do my best to see that it does.

I had finally found a job and was working at the time my idea came. A week later I told one of my co-workers, Nicki, who also lived in CR, that I wanted to make a website & something on FB. She told me she would help me with whatever she could.
So I told her the idea and immediately she understood exactly what I was talking about. You see Nicki had recently left her job in Costa Rica because her boss and talked rampantly about his sexual escapades and had hookers in the office all day. She started working for someone else who didn’t pay her last two paychecks. She definitely was in need of something amazing.

That's how Nicki and I started working together on GET REAL, What two business partners could be any different than Nicki and I? Me- quiet, calm, and conservative; Nicki- loud, energetic, and wild. But we work great together and balance each other out.

So here we were… two women with no money, not much computer knowledge, living in CR, going to make a website and something on FB?
We were a little intimidated to say the least…we both felt a little inadequate.
After all, we weren’t Harvard attending computer engineers like Mark Zuckerburg. Heck I hadn't finished college.
I do remember thinking how proud my mother was of our family. We have this huge family tree spanning back to John Cotton, my great, great, how many times I don't know, grandfather and his son-in-law Cotton Mather, who had helped found Harvard and Yale. I remember reading about how 35 of my ancestors had attended Harvard. My mother had once heard from someone how we could go to Harvard for free because of our family. I didn't know for sure if that was true but for some reason thinking about my family from all those years back gave me some inspiration.
So we had the drive…but we started researching and realized after our weeks of research we needed money to pay a developer to develop a website and FB application. And it wasn't going to be cheap. But where would the money come from? We were both pretty broke. Since the beginning things were going really fast with GET REAL, and then the money just showed up. The day after I told Nicki, "Well all we need now is an investor", Martin McCarthy came along. He loved the idea, and committed the money to develop the website, build the FB application, and pay attorney's fees.

GET REAL was a go!

We hired our developer and started working non-stop, while still working our jobs. Good thing hubby was a big help, taking care of two toddlers 8 hours a day. I told him I had the easier of the two jobs.

One thing we realized… that since the beginning things have gone so quickly and perfectly that we feel we are just along for a ride that someone else is taking us on.
Strange things have happened along the way, like, my computer was struck by lightning --- blue light came out of my hands and surrounded the computer. Killed my computer and I got a headache. Nicki’s hardrive crashed for apparently no reason… and she needed to replace it. No matter what wall we ran into we just kept going.

Right before the completion of GET REAL, Nicki sent me a story about a young man who had posted his suicide note on FB. He had suffered abuse as a child at the hands of a relative. He had carried this pain through life with him, and even had gone on to become a successful software engineer, only to shock his friends and family with his suicide. In his suicide letter that he posted on Facebook, he said he never had anyone he felt he could share his true thoughts with bc he could never do so without fear of judgment. He never got to talk to others that had gone through what he had. He said how he felt he couldn't tell anyone about how much he was suffering. But the truth is…there are tons of people going through what he went through. I thought about how many other people suffer like he did and hurt because they have no one to open up to. And I realized even more that is what GET REAL is for.

So now Nicki and I are putting GET REAL out to the world of Farmville, like buttons, and newsfeeds about what a friend had for dinner last night.

Am I the only one whose had difficult times in my life, had a bad day, gotten into a fight with a crazy family member, been depressed, lonely, bored?

I didn't think so.

So now GET REAL is finally finished and ready to be launched. Where can you go if you need to vent about that bad day you had, the fight you got into with that family member, the dark secret you can't tell anyone, or what you really think about...whatever. You can go to GET REAL on FB at: http://apps.facebook.com/getrealcommunity/ or www.mygetreal.com

From Angel Atencio and Nicki Foote, co-creators of GET REAL
Thanks Martin we couldn't have done it without you.
God, you made it happen.
Contact: angel@mygetreal.com