Hey HN - Matt from FocusGroupIt here. Would love to hear feedback from the general HN community, and especially from Kevin Hale @ YC given his background in the survey software market at Wufoo and SurveyMonkey.
Yes. You can set any topic to "private," which prevents the participants from see what each other wrote for that topic. You can also set a group to be completely anonymous, which will assign a random username to each participant and no one (not even the moderator or observers) will be able to tell who the participants are.
I should add... Participants can also mark their individual replies as "private" if they aren't comfortable sharing something broadly with the focus group.
A direct link to sign up and participate in a demo focus group is here: https://focusgroupit.com/groups/cf966c0e