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Most “professional social networks” today are really just glorified spreadsheets with profile pics.

Sure, LinkedIn is great for job hunting, humblebrags, and checking if your ex is still unemployed. But try having a real conversation on there? Good luck. Everyone’s too busy polishing their personal brand to say anything remotely honest.

That’s exactly the problem Matt Sunbulli set out to solve when he launched Fishbowl in 2017 — an anonymous social app where professionals could actually talk like... real humans. No filters. No façades. Just unfiltered work talk, hot takes, and the occasional spicy thread about your boss.

Fast forward: Fishbowl grew to 1M+ users, got acquired by Recruit Holdings (the same folks behind Glassdoor and Indeed), and carved out a surprisingly sticky niche in the world of work chat.

Let’s unpack how Matt pulled it off — and what you can steal for your own product.

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Genesis

Matt has quite the experience in the social media world, especially on the B2B side.

His journey began with his first startup, Social Amp, which was among the pioneering third-party developers to join Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program. Social Amp provided Fortune 500 e-commerce brands with tools and APIs to make their websites more engaging and interactive for visitors.

This venture gave Matt a unique perspective on user behavior across various platforms, including LinkedIn. In 2012, Social Amp was acquired by Merkle Inc, a major player in the customer relationship management (CRM) industry at the time. Matt continued with Merkle for three years, focusing on building integrations and enhancing social features.

During this period, he observed some intriguing trends:

1. There was a gap in the professional social space. Unlike other social networks, LinkedIn lacked interactivity and had lowest volume of user-generated content.

2. Meanwhile, mobile apps were gaining popularity, enabling more real-time interactive experiences on social platforms.

Fishbowl’s Growth Playbook

1/ Demand Testing

The lack of interactivity he saw on professional social platforms and the mobile trend got Matt to think more about opportunities in the space.

The key hypothesis = you could build tight-knit communities around specific industries (consulting, private equity, etc.), and by making the product mobile-first, you might spark real conversations between professionals—not just profile stalking.

Like many scrappy founders, Matt kicked things off with a good old-fashioned demand test: email blasts and Facebook ads. The click-through rates were solid—a signal that people did want what he was building. The idea had legs.

2/ MVP

The initial product was an iOS app that allowed people from the same niche industry to interact with each other. It was like if LinkedIn and Reddit had a baby; people could see each other’s names & where they worked and interact with each other’s posts.

However, the team faced a major content liquidity when the product was launched. Without people creating content, it was hard to crack the initial chicken and egg problem for people to stick around.

To understand the root cause of the content liquidity problem, Matt and his team reached out to users.

They quickly discovered that folks were hesitant to share content and voice their thoughts because they were worried about their professional image.

People were treating it like another LinkedIn.

That key understanding of this nuanced psychology helped shape, arguably, one of the most important product decisions in Fishbowl’s history: making the platform semi-anonymous. 

However, unlike purely anonymous platforms where everyone could join, Fishbowl has a verified anonymous model. This unique model does not only encourage people to speak up more, but it also keeps people accountable because you have to prove that you are who you say you are during the signup process (e.g. consultant at McKinsey). 

This product change helped them crack the content liquidity issue.

3/ First 1000 customers

Before a consumer app finds product-market fit, the single most important goal is to build something that truly sticks with your earliest users—even if they come from a niche segment with a tiny TAM.

You need to deeply understand what drives them and make something they can’t stop using. Only then should you think about expanding.

For Fishbowl, that initial wedge was management consultants.

The hypothesis was that consultants are typically extroverted and always on the move—prime candidates for a social platform built around real-time discussion.

That turned out to be true, but not for the reason they expected.

It wasn’t extroversion that made consultants ideal early users. It was loneliness.

Consultants can be the loneliest people in the world due to the nature of the profession and constant traveling. Fishbowl became a space for them to vent, swap war stories, give advice, and feel a little less alone in the chaos of their careers.

4/ First 100K customers

Adjacent WOM

One of the key growth principles at Fishbowl is adjacent word-of-mouth. 

Virality doesn’t just have speed—it has direction. Think of it as velocity: how fast something spreads and where it spreads.

After watching usage patterns closely, the Fishbowl team noticed a consistent trend: the app spread fastest within individual companies and then jumped to adjacent industries. Management consulting and tax accounting, for example, had a lot of cross-pollination.

If a consultant at PwC’s New York office downloaded the app, chances were high that colleagues sitting a few desks away would hear about it next. Even teams like tax accounting—who shared office space and lunch tables—would get pulled in soon after.

The Magic 5%

One of Fishbowl’s most important viral insights was what they call the “magic 5%”: once 5% of a company is on the platform, word-of-mouth growth takes off like wildfire.

Getting to that 5% became an obsession. The team tested a range of tactics to hit that tipping point.

One successful approach was designing invite flows that leaned into social proof. Users would see an in-app popup showing how many of their coworkers were already on Fishbowl, along with a one-click button to invite more.

The subtle nudge: “You’re not the only one—this is already a thing.”

They also tried some other scrappy growth experiments. At one point, they sent interns to physically visit office buildings and pitch the app in person. It wasn’t scalable, but it helped them learn what resonated face-to-face.

Virality isn’t just about being shareable. It’s about understanding how networks behave—and doing whatever it takes to spark the first few flames.

5/ First 1M users

Today, word of mouth contributes to 50%+ of the new users they acquire. On the paid side, the team at Fishbowl has figured out an effective playbook around influencer marketing, sponsoring niche influencers on different social platforms.

For example, in the management consulting industry, many of the consultants follow different consulting meme accounts, such as Consulting Humor. Fishbowl frequently sponsors their Instagram stories which have proven to be a great acquisition channel.

In fact, this has worked so well that Fishbowl has started its own consulting meme page called Fishbowl Consultants.

5/ Fishbowl today

Today, almost 10 years after Fishbowl’s launch, there are now over 1 million active users and 10,000 communities.

Communities on Fishbowl represent a diverse group of professionals across industries having the sort of conversations you can’t have on other social networks. There are discussions like what a fair salary is for a specific role, what a company’s culture is actually like behind the branding, or how to adjust to a new job as a person of color. Users speak candidly, unmotivated by self-promotion, and without their professional brand impeding on what they say.

5 Lessons from Fishbowl’s Rise

1. Anonymity unlocks honesty: Semi-anonymous identities let users speak freely without turning the platform into chaos. The right constraints create trust.

2. Start with a narrow wedge: Fishbowl focused on consultants—not because they’re chatty, but because they’re lonely. Emotional insight > surface-level assumptions.

3. Virality has a tipping point: Once 5% of a company joined, growth accelerated. Find your product’s version of this and design to hit it fast.

4. Scrappy beats scalable (at first): Before paid growth, they sent interns into offices to pitch the app. Learn what works, then scale.

5. Go where your users already are: Fishbowl partnered with niche influencers and meme accounts in each profession. Distribution often hides in plain sight.

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See you next Tuesday,

Leo

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