Bike designer is the man behind fast-growing new social network Ello

There's a new kid on the block in social networking, Ello, and one of the founders has a hand in the bike industry.

Ello founder Paul Budnitz describes himself on his own website as a "designer, author, filmmaker, & serial entrepreneur". After working in film after graduating from art school in 1990, he founded designer toy company Kidrobot and in 2011 started Budnitz Bicycles.

Budnitz Bicycles makes clean, simple singlespeed and hub-geared town bikes and mountain bikes in steel and titanium. You can see the same simplicity that characterises Budnitz' bikes in Ello.

If you're used to Facebook, you'll find Ello's look very spare. This is a tool that was created for designers and artists to share images and ideas, so the site tries to get out of the way of the content.

Budnitz says that will always be the case. He says the site won't display ads or aggregate and sell users' data, an approach that's caused the site to be dubbed "the anti-Facebook".

And for many people fed up with Facebook for one reason or another, that's attractive. The opacity of Facebook's privacy and data policies, and the difficulty of controlling just who can see what on the site has made many people distrustful of the world's biggest social network. The last straw for some was Facebook's recent renewed determination that users go by their real names.

Ello has been claiming 31,000 sign-up requests each hour, so there are plenty of people out there who like the idea of a social network that doesn't care what you call yourself, won't bombard you with ads or track you all over the Internet.

Budnitz says the site will make money by charging to unlock premium features. So far it's not charging anyone for anything, which is a good job as the service is still pretty buggy.

Critics have claimed that the $435,000 in investment from venture capitalists FreshTracks of Vermont means Ello will end up breaching its founding principles and sell user data.

Budnitz told Business Insider: “If [FreshTracks] were the type of people who were doing that, it wouldn’t matter because the founders have such an overwhelming share of Ello.

“The venture capitalist can get upset, but it wouldn’t matter because they have no control. And Ello is so deeply based, we put a flag in the stand with a manifesto, I can’t imagine how that would change and people would stick around.”

Curious? Pop over to Ello.co. You'll find us — eventually — ello.co/roadcc.