Nikita Bier: Why teens are the wedge for viral social apps

1. 0:00 – 6:08

   Nikita’s background

   1. NBNikita Bier0:00

      Honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:05

      (laughs) We're already, we're already getting into the hot takes. You launched TBH, it went viral, you end up selling it to Facebook. What was the insight that helped you come up with, "This is a big idea that we should try"?

   3. NBNikita Bier0:15

      I looked on the App Store, and the number one app in the United States was an app called Sarahah, but the entire app was in Arabic. Like, the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something-

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky0:27

      This is insane. I did not know this full story.

   5. NBNikita Bier0:29

      So we launched this app. It immediately took off. Servers started crashing. I looked at our numbers and I'm like, "We will be number one in the United States in, like, six days."

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky0:40

      A tip that you're sharing here is look for latent demand.

   7. NBNikita Bier0:43

      Where people are trying to obtain a particular value, and going through a very distortive process. If you can actually crystallize what their motivation is, you can have this kind of intense adoption.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky0:57

      I, I didn't know you were actually a product manager at Facebook.

   9. NBNikita Bier0:59

      The thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. We're mainly just writing, uh, documents and then kind of being the team secretary and running around getting approvals. But products live and die in the pixels. You should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. That's on you.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21

       At some point you started tweeting, like, "Hey, I'm working on a new app." Everyone was going nuts. I saw a stat that you made $11 million in sales, 10 million downloads.

   11. NBNikita Bier1:28

       The thing that is hard to really understand is it is absolute chaos to keep the thing online. I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. Our team was also relentless, though. They would come over to my house, 9:00 AM, stay until midnight, and just do that seven days a week.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:44

       Is there anything else that's just like, this is something that'll probably gonna help you with your app?

   13. NBNikita Bier1:48

       With certainty, if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral. Over the years of building all these apps, I've accrued all these growth hacks that still nobody knows about.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky2:00

       (instrumental music) Today, my guest is Nikita Bier. Nikita has built, launched, and helped get more apps to the top of the App Store than any human I've ever come across. He sold his first big hit, TBH, to Facebook for over $30 million. He sold his second big app, Gas, to Discord for many millions more. He did this all with a tiny team and very little funding. He's also helped dozens of founders and apps, and is an advisor or investor to companies like Flo, Citizen, BeReal, Locket, and Wealthsimple, and many more. Today, he spends his time advising companies on viral growth strategies, design feedback, structuring their product development process, and a lot more. What I love about Nikita is that he has very strong opinions about how to build successful products that are rooted in him actually doing the work over the past decade to see for himself what works and what doesn't. Nikita has been the single most requested guest on this podcast, and you'll soon see why. This episode is packed with tactics and stories and lessons that I am sure will leave you wanting more. If you wanna work with Nikita on your app, you can actually book his time at intro.co/nikitabier. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Nikita Bier. Nikita, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

   15. NBNikita Bier3:26

       Thanks for having me. I'm excited to, to dive in. I'm also, I feel, uh, honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky3:37

       (laughs) We're already, we're already getting into the hot takes. Uh, we're definitely gonna chat about... Oh wait, and you said not real. Okay. (laughs) I thought you were gonna say not, uh, not useful. Okay, this is good. Okay, let's put a pin in that. I think we think this, I think everyone already feels this, I think this is gonna be a very special conversation. I've been looking forward to chatting with you for a long time, and there's so much that I wanna ask you. The way that I'm thinking we frame this conversation is we go through the story behind the apps that you've built or helped build that have hit the top of the App Store, and basically hear the inside story of what it took to build those apps and to make them successful. And then through that, try to extract as many lessons as we can about what it takes to build a successful viral consumer app these days. How does that sound to you?

   17. NBNikita Bier4:22

       Sounds amazing. And a lot of it was luck, but a lot of it was, uh, very, very tactical work that, uh, went into it all.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky4:31

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2. 6:08 – 8:42

   Nikita’s early ventures: Politify and Outline

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky6:08

      .com/lenny.First, I want to start with something that I think very few people know about you. So the first thing that you built, the first product that you built was, uh, very different from what you do these days, and it was a product called Politify, which something I actually re- really want. It helps you decide who to vote for based on how it would impact your life. Could you just share a bit about just that part (laughs) of your life and why you decided to pivot away from that into consumer apps?

   2. NBNikita Bier6:35

      Yeah. So when I was in college, I was really interested in this kind of, uh, thing that American voters do, which is like they, they vote against their own financial self-interest. Like people in New York and San Francisco, you know, vote for Democrats, for higher taxes. People in Kansas, uh, vote for Republicans, for low taxes and not n- uh, and they, you know, they make less money and so the... fewer g- government benefits. And I wanted to build this tool that would help communicate the financial impacts of these p- policy proposals of presidents. And I, I built it in like my last year of college. And we... it was just a web app that we put out and it would, it would calculate their tax proposals, the government benefits that they were proposing, and you would enter in your basic personal information, how many kids you have, how, uh, if, uh, your age, and then it would just tell you in dollars what the impact would be. And it also tell you... uh, we simulated those policies also against, uh, the tax returns of every ZIP code so you could see how it impacts your community. We went super viral. Um, like I think very few people thought of politics that way, and I think we got like four million, uh, users on it, uh, during that season of the... uh, during that election. And like it was just a... kind of like a project that we raised some grant money for, but it ended up feeding into this company that we, uh, spun up, and that was called Outline, um, because we had a bunch of governments reach out to us asking, "Can you build this for our budget?" So the governor-

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky8:11

      (laughs) .

   4. NBNikita Bier8:11

      ... of Massachusetts actually reached out and I, I flew out there to meet with them and, uh, that was gonna be our first customer. And so I... we, uh, we raised some money. We got a... we won a government contract and, uh, we joined Techstars, uh, the accelerator, and we ended up getting... uh, we, we got a contract in the pipeline with the Obama administration. Uh, and then we, uh, we got this, uh, contract and we started building

3. 8:42 – 13:45

   Transition to consumer apps

   1. NBNikita Bier8:42

      it and the government shutdown happened in the middle of like... as we were building it, and we had one of our contracts canceled. And I realized like I, I actually really don't like selling software to governments, and my core competency all along was making things that go viral on the internet. Uh, like that was, that was what we had built, not this policy simulation tool. And so, you know, we, we went to our investors and we said, "Look, this, uh, this isn't actually what, uh, we're excited about doing anymore." Um, and we, we offered to give the money back, uh, and said, "We- we're, we're going to be building consumer apps and here's a few ideas that we have." None of them took the money back, um, and so then we spent the next, uh, like four or five years building a variety of different kind of consumer, uh, consumer apps. So we, we had a, a few like kind of mild successes during the course of those four to five years, and one of them was a, uh... an app called FiveLabs that ingested your Facebook posts and determine your personality based on the language you use. Uh, and it used this exact same model that Cambridge Analytica used (laughs) . And that was super viral. I, I think, you know, we had like t- tens of millions of profiles in it and, uh, this all... it went viral in like three days. And so we raised some more money based off the success of that, and we, we started focusing a lot more on mobile after that first app, FiveLabs, and we, we launched, you know, uh, basically every type of app you can imagine. We launched mapping apps, chat apps, event meetup apps, a- any... like basically every kind of consumer app on mobile that you could think of. And that actually helped us kind of build a muscle to understand what people want and how to actually make things grow and how to test them. And over time, we started, uh, focusing more on teens. And a lot of people ask why Silicon Valley is so fixated on building apps for teens, and one of the reasons is their habits are pretty malleable. Like as we get older, we like kind of get... kind of fixed, fixed into our, our habits of using certain communication products and we don't really adopt new things. And then the other thing that we discovered was that adults don't really, you know, invite people to new apps. We found that as a user got older from age 13 to 18, like the number of people that they invite to an app just declines almost exponentially. And th- finally the... and the most important thing is they, they see each other every day, and that is so critical. Like c- consumer app developers sometimes say smokers are great for, uh, like targeting an audience 'cause they actually like hang out, you know, serendipitously a lot, uh, outside of, you know, buildings and... so but not, not to say like social apps are cigarettes. I, I, I don't really like that metaphor, but... (laughs)

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky11:50

      Just on the note of you talking about why teens are important, I, I have this quote actually from you that I love where... building on the point you made, that "for every social app I've ever built, the number of invitations sent per user drops 20% for every additional year of age from 13 to 18. So if you build for adults, expect to acquire every user with ads."And, and I love that you have a very clear heuristic of per year the amount of people they invite to the app is 20% lower.

   3. NBNikita Bier12:18

      If your users aren't inviting people to your app, uh, you're gonna have to find another way to, uh, to acquire them, and that most likely means ads. And, uh, if, if a, if you're targeting, uh, older cohorts like adults, y- you're gonna have to, uh, raise a huge amount of venture capital to finance that user acquisition pipeline, and it's gonna be extraordinarily expensive. As a seed stage startup, it's gonna be basically impossible to, uh, to, to grow that, uh, user base, eh, especially to get density if you need, uh, uh, actual network effects among users.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky12:54

      Mm-hmm. So basically you're building this, uh, help me decide who to vote for app that turned into a real business with, like, government contracts coming to you, trying to help you, pushing you to build something that you end up realizing, "I don't want to be doing this. Why am I building this app selling government contracts?" And so what you did is you... and this is a really interesting lesson to take away, is you just realized, "I don't want to be doing this. Investors, don't force me to be working on this. I'm gonna stop this. I'm gonna go work on some other stuff that I'm actually excited about, that I think has a bigger chance of success." And that's where you transition to this startup studio where you're just trying a bunch of apps, and I think it was called Midnight Labs, you said, something like that, right?

   5. NBNikita Bier13:34

      Yeah.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky13:34

      Awesome. So basically, I think that's a really interesting insight of just like if you're working on something you don't enjoy, you can change that. You can pivot. You can tell your investors, "I want to work on something else."

4. 13:45 – 16:43

   The birth of TBH

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky13:45

      Uh, is there anything there that you want to add along those lines?

   2. NBNikita Bier13:49

      It was really hard for us to, uh, pivot to mobile. I think that was one of the most challenging things for me personally because it was a completely different paradigm. Like, I actually have been building web apps since I was 12 years old, and I, I, you know, I, I built a, uh, full e-commerce business selling pirated games on the web and I knew ev- everything about, like, growing a website. But as I, as we pivoted to mobile, I ha- I had to, like, recalibrate my whole brain on how to, how to do that. M- mobile apps have such a, uh, low margin for error when it comes to designing them because... I, I, I s- I have this, like, dogmatic view, uh, that, like, e- every tap on a mobile app is a miracle for you as a product developer because users will turn and bounce to the n- their next app very quickly. Uh, if you actually sit behind someone and watch them use their phone, they actually switch between apps at a pretty high frequency. So every tap that you get, every single one is so scarce that you should be optimizing everything. And so I had to change my whole brain when we started pivoting to mobile and building these mobile apps, uh, and it took a lot of failures. Like, we, w- you know, we, we, we, uh, fo- like, 14 of the apps that we launched were on- basically duds. And then we started fixating on teens, uh, and, and building apps for them, and eventually we figured out an interesting heuristic for identifying consumer product opportunities that ultimately led us to TBH.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky15:26

      You spent four or five years trying a bunch of different ideas. I think people see this headline, and we'll get into TBH, of just, like, "Nine weeks after launch, sells for $30 million to Facebook," and everyone's like, "Oh, okay. That's amazing. I want that for my life." Nobody knows there's this, like, four or five years of trying, you said, 15 different apps, uh, before you got there, learning the things that actually work and don't work.

   4. NBNikita Bier15:49

      W- we built, like, 15 apps over that, the course of that pivot, uh, to consumer, and we built apps for, like every single app, you know, map apps, uh, chat apps, uh, you know, to-do lists. We, we just built every type of consumer app you could possibly think of. And also, we built for every audience too. We built for college students, we built for, you know, post-college, and it was always very difficult to get the flywheel spinning for anyone after, like, 22 years old. That, that was, like, the cutoff of when, uh, people just s- have give up on adopting new products, and, and that was a, kind of like... It took us a few years to really internalize that, um, a lot of failures to realize no one needs another app after

5. 16:43 – 20:00

   Building for teens vs. adults

   1. NBNikita Bier16:43

      that age. (laughs)

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky16:44

      So the thing that you found there, which is really interesting, 'cause most people are building for people older than 22. That's, like, a profound insight you had there. Uh, (laughs) like, every consumer app I see is, like, trying to build for adults, and your lesson there is basically if you're trying to do that, you're probably gonna need to raise money and spend a lot of money on paid ads.

   3. NBNikita Bier17:03

      Yeah, and most likely you'll never get network effects. There's actually an interesting study, like many years ago, that, uh, like, some academics in Spain did, uh, I think it was in Spain, uh, and they looked at how many people you text, you know, per year of your life, and it goes up, like, very quickly from 14 to 18. It, it peaks around 21, so it's growing, the number of people you text is growing up until about 21, and then it just falls, it collapses. Uh, and then it comes back up in, uh, at end of life. And there's a few reasons all this happens, but, uh, basically, you know, once you exit college, you kind of l- reduce the number of contacts you ha- your daily contacts. Once you get married, it's even fewer, and then wh- as you get older, you know, you, uh, and your, your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent, you start texting again more and, or you join a retirement home. But if you're building a product with network effects that's a communication tool, you want to be on that ups- upward curve of adding connections to your social graph, because then the urgency to connect is higher.So i- if you really want to actually innovate at the edges of communication products, you, you, you really have to target that cohort that has the highest urgency to communicate.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky18:26

      Mm-hmm.

   5. NBNikita Bier18:26

      And, and that's teens.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky18:28

      I love that you found these things out not through just, like, research and not through just thinking. It was through actual trying things over and over and over and trying different audiences, trying different experiences. Like, a lot of people see your advice and they're like, "How does he know?" It's just, like, you've done all these things yourself. You've seen them. You're, like, sitting there watching teens use these apps and I think very few people actually do that and they just come up with these theories that aren't based on empirical evidence.

   7. NBNikita Bier18:54

      Yeah, so we, we, we got pretty good at, um, at, uh, building these apps. I think our first mobile app took us about a year, and then our last one took us about two weeks. We also got very good at testing apps and the, the most important thing that I often instruct teams to do is to develop a reproducible testing process and that will actually influence the probability of your success more than anything. It's so unpredictable whether a consumer product idea will work, and so if you actually focus more on your process for taking many shots at bat, that- that's what actually reduces the risk more than anything. And so we figured out ways to seed apps into, uh, into schools. We also, like, during the course of that company, we figured out how to seed it into affinity groups, you know, hobbyists, thi- things like that. So we were on app number 15, uh, you know, where, uh, a lot of failures, um, during, during the course of this, uh, c- company

6. 20:00 – 32:18

   TBH’s viral success

   1. NBNikita Bier20:00

      and I remember a l- a lot of our team members were like, "I, I kind of wanna leave. Uh, I, I think this is it for me." And, uh, one, one of our key team members, uh, actually put in their two weeks notice, uh, the day before we launched our, our final app. We were also running, you know, we were getting kind of low on money. I was tired, um, and I, uh, I called our lawyer, uh, to ask, "How do you dissolve a company?" I messaged a few mentors saying, like, uh, I, uh, people that have been through it and I said, you know, "What, what are the steps to, to do this?" Um, and then I, I, I had a conversation on the way out with that, that team member that wanted to leave and I said, you know, "I understand, uh, wha- wha- but what if the app actually starts charting on the app store?" And I, he said, "What are the chances of that? Uh, you know, it's, it's, w- you know, you know that's not gonna happen." And I said, "Sure, okay." Um, so, uh, we, we launched this, this app and it was, you know, a polling app, TBH, and it immediately, uh, took off in the school that we seeded it into, uh, in, in, uh, Georgia. We picked the one school that had the earliest start date in the United States because we needed to launch as soon as possible given the s- state of the company. Um, and it just, uh, I think it spread to, you know, f- 40% of the school downloaded it in the first 24 hours and rapidly spread to the neighboring schools. Th- and s- suddenly I was like, "Oh, we might have something here." Um, and, uh, servers started crashing and watching it climb the charts, I, I think within ... I, I, I, I looked at our numbers and I'm like, "We will be number one in the United States in, like, six days." Uh, and then I, I looked at our Amazon bill and it was like 120,000. I looked at our bank account, it said 150,000 and I'm like, "Okay, these two numbers don't really, uh, add up" (laughs) . Um, so I, I quickly had to put together a f- funding round and I told our, my team, "Can you guys just pause for, like, two months and just, like, really focus on this? I think I could probably sell this thing." And so it turned into a, a pretty, uh, competitive bidding process actually, um. There, there was a, uh, really, really great moment, uh, (laughs) where, uh, there was... O- one of the acquirers, uh, that, or one of the bidders was based in LA, had told me to fly down, um, and they told me to fly down that day. Uh, so I got on a plane, went to the airport without a ticket, showed up and when we were rolling out this app, we were doing a state-by-state rollout strategy where every state was geo-fenced and we hadn't launched California until that morning and I arrived, uh, at this, uh, this company in, uh, this founder's in LA's house, um, and he said, uh, you know, "Ch- show me the metrics. You guys are like what, number four or something?" And since we just launched California, it's a big state, uh, I said, "No, no, no. We're actually number one. We're the number one app in the United States." And, uh, he said, "Yeah, show me the metrics." And our CTO was a published auth- he's Eric Hazard, uh, he's a p- published author in mapping, uh, and so he c- he created an amazing dashboard that could show real time installs on a map. And it was around 4:00 PM and school had just gotten out, uh, so I zoomed in on the block that we were having that meeting and the entire block was lit up with installs all around us. And so then that's what got the kind of, uh, the ball rolling on a, uh, you know, it was, it was a really, uh, r- really slight cinematic moment of, uh, you know, sh- wa- showing something that you created that literally just took over the entire neighborhood around you.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky24:02

      That's insane.

   3. NBNikita Bier24:03

      Yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky24:03

      I, I, that's gonna be in the movie of Nikita Bjerne in the future. Okay, so a couple questions here. So one, you predicted the chart, you would hit number one. How do you... What does it take to hit number one? Like, what is the number you're looking at? Is it some number downloads to get to number one in the App Store?

   5. NBNikita Bier24:16

      Uh, it fluctuates. It used to be, like, like a hundred thous- 80 to 100,000 installs, uh, but now you have these companies that are just spending extraordinary amounts on ads and, or injecting it into-... one of their other apps. So between Threads, Temu, and all these other apps that are, uh, kind of, uh, spending on acquisition and all that, uh, it, some days it's up to, like, 300,000. Uh- And that's per day? Yeah.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky24:42

      Oh, man.

   7. NBNikita Bier24:42

      Yeah.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky24:42

      Amazing. Okay.

   9. NBNikita Bier24:43

      At the peak of TBH, uh, we were getting 360,000 per day.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky24:49

       Okay. The other two things I wanna spend a little time on here before we move on to the next app is, uh, what was the insight that helped you come up with, "This is a big idea that we should try"? And then what was the insight into how to spread this so virally? And I, I know that one is really clever.

   11. NBNikita Bier25:04

       After building all these apps, we had these kind of, like, uh, lingering users that stuck around and would share feedback with us, uh, on our next app. And so there were a couple, uh... Like, there's this senior in high school that I would send screenshots of our products. And, um, he told me about this trend called TBH that kids were playing on Snapchat, where they would post an image of a bunch of emojis, and it would say, uh, like, "I like you," "You're smart," uh, "Your style is great." And you would just reply to the story with the emoji of what you felt. And I was like, "This is kinda weird. Uh, you post this on your story and then people send you feedback." And I'm like, "So teens are looking for this, uh, this, like, ven- like, this vehicle for disclosure, uh, essentially." And I'm like, "That, that's kinda cool. I wonder if you could make that into an app." We, like, had sketched some things out, and, uh, w- as we were kind of sketching things out, I looked on the app store, and the number one app in the United States was an app called Sarahah. And it was for sending anonymous messages, uh, by adding a link to your Snapchat story. But the thing that was most interesting was the entire app was in Arabic. The number one app in the United States was in Arabic. And that was one of the most, uh, like, the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something. And so when I meet with founders, I often tell them, like, "The way you should be searching for product ideas is this concept of latent demand, where people are trying to obtain a particular value, and going through a very distortive process to obtain that value." And if you can actually crystallize what their motivation is, and build a product around, and, and clear up what they're trying to actually do, you can have this kind of, uh, intense adoption. And, uh, when we saw what people were doing with Sarahah, I, I also looked at some of the tweets, and comments on it, and a lot of people were receiving negative messages. And so, I, what I saw with the game that kids were playing on Snapchat, TBH, and then Sarahah, I realized just people want to know good things about themselves, and that they don't want, like, these bullying messages that they're getting on, uh, these anonymous apps. And I was like, "Well, what if instead of actually typing what you wanted to say about somebody, you, uh, just answered polls?" And we authored those polls so that we ensured everything would be, always be positive. And, I mean, in the back of my head, I always knew anonymous apps go viral, but they always lead to, like, like, these awful news stories of kids committing suicide, you know, self-harm, and all that. And so I was like, "I, I'll never build anything like that." Um, but, uh, when we came up with this new mechanic where you can only say positive things through polls, you know, who has the best smile, who's most likely to be president? And then you receive it, uh, and it's, it's anonymous, but your name is selected. What, we discovered a couple of things is it made users feel a lot better, it actually solved what they were trying to do, and they also sent a much higher volume of messages. And so it was l- it was literally explosive adoption. Like, one school I was looking at, they sent 450,000 messages in the first seven days of adopting it. And when you look at day one, like, volume of messages sent on a messaging app, uh, i- you're lucky if people send, like, three or four or something. But we were sending, like, 60. And we, we couldn't even handle it, s- so we had to, like, we had to geo-fence the app because it w- we, you need to scale our servers, which was actually a pretty controversial decision inside of our company because it was like, "Why would you turn off something that's working?" But I, m- at my core, I knew, like, if it's working at this many s- you know, s- in individual schools, we could just relaunch it any time and it'll just, it'll, it'll go viral. So, uh, w- uh, let's, let's, let's regroup and figure out what's happening here, and then, and relaunch.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky29:27

       So you keep talking about how it went viral and crazy, grew like crazy. I know that there's, like, a little trick that you came up with to help it spread. Can you just briefly talk about what you did there to help it spread so quickly within a school?

   13. NBNikita Bier29:37

       I, I think y- you're referring to, uh, there, there's, like, a BuzzFeed memo that, uh, w- or a memo that was leaked to, uh, BuzzFeed while I was at, at, uh, Facebook. Uh, and the, the main thing we found was, like, to, to be convinced to download an app, you need to see it. You need to see, like, the marketing message, like, three times or so. Uh, so you basically need to saturate an area with every kind of marketing you can. You know, so we ran ads, uh, uh, targeted at this, uh, uh, particular school to, to, to when we were seeding and testing these apps. And we also followed people, creating a dedicated Instagram account, that went to that school. Um, 'cause we, I, we learned that, uh, high schoolers ide- identify their school in their bio. So it says RHS on their bio. And so that was how we tried to get, uh, the entire school to adopt synchronously. We would fo- we'd follow them and then accept the follow backs. B- a big misunderstanding though, and I, I get this DM a lot, and people are like, "I'm trying to replicate your strategy. We've just done it at 15 schools and it's, it's not working anymore."W- this is not the way we grew the app, this is how we tested apps.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky30:51

       Hmm.

   15. NBNikita Bier30:51

       And there's... it's real- it's- it's a little bit nuanced there. That's an important nuance because you need to get, uh, enough intensity of adoption and density for a social network to start... to get the flywheel spinning. But the app should grow by itself after that. And people think we just went like from school to school, following every kid on it. Like you can't... that- that's totally unrealistic. But for like the first 100 users, yes, that's how we got them. And that allowed us to know whether the product was working or not. Like we, we could get enough people on it, and then we could, with conviction, say that whether the app had legs and we wouldn't have this kind of uncertainty like, "Oh, did they, did they add enough friends? Did we get enough people on it? Did they reach the aha moment?" Because you need friends to get on. So we, we wanted to eliminate that confounding variable and so we, we figured out a way to just get a bunch of people to adopt at once. Um, and that's one thing I encourage a lot of founders to do, is figure out a way to eliminate all those potentially confounding variables, uh, so you can know immediately whether something's working or not. You never want to walk away from a, uh, an experiment or test and say, "Well, uh, maybe the, the execution was bad." 'Cause it, it takes a lot of energy to mobilize a team to test something, and you really want to make sure your tests actually are... provide signal.

7. 32:18 – 34:08

   Leveraging live chat

   1. NBNikita Bier32:18

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky32:18

      So your advice here is when you're testing something, test the best possible version of what that could be, whether it takes manual work or something that is never going to scale. Like test the ideal because that'll tell you, even if this could be the best possible version, uh, do people actually care?

   3. NBNikita Bier32:34

      Yeah. We would try to get the, like, uh, an entire school to adopt just to know, like, uh, if, if everyone had 10 friends would, would, would they actually derive value from this app? We also did other things like, you know... and I recommend all companies do this, is, uh, put live chat customer support in your app like, like 24 hours a day. And it sounds insane. It's like f- the whole point of tech is you d- you don't need to do that. That's the whole point of a, of a software. But, uh, then users get this white glove experience and that eliminates another confounding variable. Like did they think they were... their problems were solved or they're, they're treated well? But most of all, one of the reasons I actually recommend people put live chat in their app is it's the best, uh, vehicle for getting feedback and do u- doing user research 'cause users will literally tell you the problem they're having. Um, so we, we had, uh, our person that was running this, uh, his name was Michael Gutierrez, he's, he's done it for all my companies actually. He's the, the, the, uh, community and customer support rep. He would, uh, paste any interesting feedback into Slack and then we would be like, "Oh, this, this, this, uh, user has a great idea. We, we should consider turning that into a feature." Um, so you really want your finger on the pulse as you roll these things out and, uh, so you can get a sense for, uh, what's working, what isn't, and also make users feel great and make sure at the end, uh, they, they promote your app positively

8. 34:08 – 37:00

   Lasting lessons from TBH

   1. NBNikita Bier34:08

      to their peers.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky34:09

      I love that piece of advice. Okay. So to close out the TBH chapter, is there anything else that you think is important for people to know or any other lasting lessons from that part of your journey that you bring with you to new apps that you're building today?

   3. NBNikita Bier34:25

      I think the, the thing that is hard to really understand for first time founders that hit breakout success with a consumer product is how, how draining and how, uh, spread thin you get because everything breaks. Everything that you built needs to be substituted, uh, almost every three days. And I can just like ex- give you an example. Like we were just talking about this customer support system that we had. The first system broke after three days. The next one broke seven days later. We had to replace it with a different one that could scale even better. And if you think about that on every dimension of the company, um, it is absolute like chaos to keep the thing online, uh, as, as it scales up. And so you have to be ruthless with prioritization as something scales up, uh, and put out the largest fires first. Because, uh, I, I... that was something that I, I didn't really, uh, fully understand is how, uh, how, how, how, uh, many things go wrong. And if we didn't geofence the app, it would... there would be no way we would have been able to keep, keep that thing online because that gave us some slack to, uh, control growth.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky35:55

      This is a good example of when people ask like, "Hey, does my app have product market fit?" I think this is an example of this is what it looks like when things are breaking every three days when you have to geofence it to keep it from crashing.

   5. NBNikita Bier36:05

      (laughs) A lot of people ask me like, "What, what are the metrics for, uh... what, what's the benchmark for product market fit?" And I... this, uh, this founder that I'm, uh, friends with, uh, his name's Roger Dickey, uh, h- he had... he told me one time, um, "If your product's working, you'll know." Uh, and there... if there's any uncertainty, it's not working. And it, it really is a binary when it comes to, uh, consumer products. Um, people are gonna be fighting to get into it and you'll, you'll find new measures that you've never heard of. Like our, our metric was hourly actives per day. Not daily active users, hourly active users. And so you'll, you'll start seeing that and it'll be abundantly obvious what product market fit is when... you, you, uh, you'll know it when you see it is the bottom line.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky36:59

      Okay.

9. 37:00 – 42:19

   Selling TBH to Facebook

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky37:00

      So you launched TBH-... goes viral, started getting offers from companies. Nine weeks later after launch, you end up selling it to Facebook. What was it like selling your company, and then what was it like working at Facebook, which you worked at for four years. I was not expecting that when I was looking at your LinkedIn. So yeah, what was it like selling? What was it like working at Facebook?

   2. NBNikita Bier37:22

      Selling your company is one of the most draining processes you could ever go through as a founder. When, when we met with Facebook, they told me they have, uh, 80 people assigned to this deal, um, and, uh, I'm like, "I have, I have one, one person. It's just me." (laughs) Uh, and they were like the SWAT team of M&A. Uh, and the funniest part was, you know, they, they wanted to meet the team as well, and so they, they came out to our office in Oakland, which is a dingy old office, like, that I got for $1,800 a month. That was our rent for the office.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky37:58

      (laughs)

   4. NBNikita Bier37:58

      And they arrive and, uh, they, they walk in. There's, uh, two engineers and one designer, and me, and they're just like, "This is... This is the whole company? This is the number one app in the United States?" I'm like, "Yeah, this is it." And when, when we went there, when we arrived, we so- we joined the youth team which was about like, I don't know, like 150 people, uh, just for this one d- division of, of Facebook. Uh, and it was like... It was my first job that, uh, I, I effectively that I've ever had. When they told me my title, uh, they said I would be a product manager. Um, like I, I was like, "Okay. I, I, I don't, I don't know exactly what that is, but, uh, I, I, yeah, I guess that's what I do." And, uh, I, I arrive and then I get access to a workplace system, uh, where, you know, people post all the things they're working on, and I, I realized it's like, kind of like this almost, uh, academic environment for social networks, like social network development. It's like the Harvard of social networks, like kind- like, of... The, the, uh, I was reading all these studies that people were doing on like, "Oh, if we change that, this is the impact to retention and DAU," and I was just, uh, I, I was so impressed. Like, I, I... There's a whole science here. And, uh, a lot of the stuff that we did was learn- learned from first principles, but then we saw it actually turn into systems and processes here. But the, the, the thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a, in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. You're, you're actually not s- as involved in the product as I had assumed. Like, I, I thought, "Oh, you're the... You're the person who, uh, uh, gets in the pixels and, uh, designs the flows," and n- absolutely not. Like, you're actually more, more... You're det- completely detached from the design process. There's a design vertical of org, org that does all that, and, uh, they don't really want you working on that stuff. And so that was very difficult for me, because actua- when people ask me, like, "Well, what do you think you're good at?" Like, at the core, I'm a designer. Um, I, I don't consider myself a product manager. I'm, you know, great at growing things, looking at Mixpanel, and then designing the things that make it grow. Uh, but there's a v- there's a rift between those two things inside of a large tech company. And so I loved the academic approach to growing, but I, I, I... It was really hard for me personally as I, uh, became disconnected from the design process. And I think that... A lot of my skills atrophied over those, those four years, um, but, um, I, I did stick around. I went through, um, multiple orgs. Favorite one at the end was, uh, new product experimentation where worked with other founders, uh, kind of a bunch of legends in Silicon Valley, building zero to one products, standalone apps. I mean, I was building standalone apps my entire time at Facebook and, uh, I, I think I built probably eight apps while I was at Facebook. Um-

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky41:11

      Wow.

   6. NBNikita Bier41:12

      ... but it is, it is much, much more difficult to build apps at a large company. Um, a lot of the insights that you have are not things that you can necessarily present or put in writing into- in a VP meeting. Like, "We're building an app for teens to flirt." Like, that probably is not what you would present to a bunch of McKinsey consultants at... (laughs) And, and, uh... So I think that makes it really difficult to be completely intellectually honest about what you're building. Um, and when the team isn't honest about it, then it's, it's really hard to iterate toward the right thing in that context.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky41:54

      Mm-hmm.

   8. NBNikita Bier41:54

      Having said that, there's a lot of things you don't have to deal with as a product mana- you know, I don't have to deal about- think about money. I don't have to think about, you know, paying legal bills or doing finance and accounting, and so all that's abstracted away. But there is, you know, regulatory stuff that you have to deal with that I, I had zero exposure to as a, uh, as, as a founder of a small company. Um,

10. 42:19 – 48:46

    Big-tech product management

    1. NBNikita Bier42:19

       yeah.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky42:20

       An insight you're sharing there potentially is... Like, the reason a company like Facebook isn't amazing at launching completely new product zero to one stuff is they might be a little too risk-averse and it's hard to talk about stuff that people actually really, really want deeply. Is that, is that kind of the sense there?

    3. NBNikita Bier42:37

       Uh, it's hard to really, uh, verbalize some of the re- like, the, uh, the things that motivate us as people. And I, uh, I had like a pretty... There's a tweet I put out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of like how I, how I view why people download apps, and it's like... It's very simple. It's like people download apps to f- uh, make or save money. Examples of that might be like, you know, WhatsApp where, you know, free texting.... and then the other reason is to find a mate, so maybe, like, Tinder or Snapchat to find love. And the third is to unplug from reality, uh, maybe like Netflix or Fortnite. There's a bunch of other kind of subcategories that are very utilitarian, like movement, you know, Uber or Airbnb, like, you know, shelter. And so I think putting that in a framing document, and the particular nuanced reason, uh, why people are gonna adopt is- is difficult. Um, as... when you're presenting that to, uh, you know, people, uh, that are, you know, prof- seasoned professionals and, uh, uh, care about how something might reflect on them personally. And so that's really difficult, um, inside of a large company. You'd certainly have distribution advantages. If you want to just inject your app into one of the parent apps and get density within a community, you could do that. But, uh, th- that- that part I think is probably solvable for a startup, uh, if you just want to pay for ads or... Like, getting your app into a dense friend graph is- is overall trivial. Like, you- you... as a founder, you should be able to pull it off after enough tries. So, that advantage that a br- big company brings, I mean, it's- it makes it easier but, uh, it's not- not something that, I think, uh, is something that a founder can't solve for themselves.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky44:38

       So, an interesting takeaway, it sounds like, is (clears throat) many people feel like, "I'm gonna build a social app." They probably often hear, "Facebook's gonna do that. Instagram's gonna copy you. Snap's gonna do that." And what I'm hearing here is it's not as easy as many people think, that it might be actually a lot harder for them to try something.

    5. NBNikita Bier44:54

       It's not only harder for them to, uh, identify these opportunities and to verbalize it internally, uh, and align the company around it, it's- it's also hard to respond to signals in the market. A lot of people thinks, like, uh, these incumbents are gonna steal your ideas, and for the most part it takes a pretty long time for them to respond to even the number one app or, uh, charting in the app- 'cause it'll start charting in the app store. You know, a PM will make a post about it, and then, uh, the- the market's strategy or market research team might do a study to follow up on it. Uh, and it'll kind of float around for a few months. They- they might, uh, put together a framing deck saying, "Hey, we should go after this opportunity. Let's put together this team." It'll go through VP reviews, and then, uh, it'll start development. Development might take six to 12 months. Realistically, I think most companies, uh, large companies take, like, 12 to 24 months to respond to competitive threats in the market.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky46:03

       Mm-hmm. Do you think this is solvable? Is there something a company can change to get better at this? Are there companies that are good at this, in your experience, or is this just as you grow, this is just what happens?

    7. NBNikita Bier46:12

       Th- the incentives within large companies make this very difficult, 'cause you don't want to present something that you have a hunch about being a- a good idea, because if there's not market signals already then it's hard to defend. And people in companies are focused on getting their, you know, yearly bonus or their, uh, you know, uh, they're- they're focused on their performance reviews. And, uh, it's hard to show up into a- a framing meeting saying, like... and a framing meeting is, like, a fr- meeting where you, you know, you posit- you're- you're pre- positioning the opportunity and everything, "Here's what we should go after," it's hard to s- like, to say, "Okay, uh, by first principles, this is a good idea, and here are some, like, very vague market signals." I- in reality, you need to walk in and say, "Here is the number one app in the United States, and we don't- w- we don't own it." And if you present something like that, that's pretty defensible on a, if you fail, uh, because there was market evidence, but if you fail about something that's more based on kind of vague abstract. So, you- you have to generally, like... the only path is to kind of copy existing companies', uh, existing products, if- if you want to really get momentum, uh, insi- inside of a large organization. And for new, completely new concepts, it's v- I think very difficult to present a lot of those ideas, uh, either to verbalize them in- into a document or to even get... rally, uh, the organization around it.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky47:42

       That's a really interesting insight. (instrumental music) This episode is brought to you by Explo, a game changer for customer facing analytics and data reporting. Are your users craving more dashboards, reports and analytics within your product? Are you tired of trying to build it yourself? As a product leader, you probably have these requests in your roadmap, but the struggle to prioritize them is real. Building analytics from scratch can be time-consuming, expensive, and a really challenging process. Enter Explo. Explo is a fully white labeled, embedded analytics solution, designed entirely with your user in mind. Getting started is easy. Explo connects to any relational database or warehouse, and with its low-code functionality, you can build and style dashboards in minutes. Once you're ready, simply embed the dashboard or report into your application with a tiny code snippet. The best part? Your end users can use Explo's AI features for their own report and dashboard generation, eliminating customer data requests for your support team. Build and embed a fully white labeled analytics experience

11. 48:46 – 51:49

    Nikita on why “product management is not real”

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky48:46

       in days. Try it for free at explo.co/lenny. That's E-X-P-L-O.co/lenny. Before we move on to (clears throat) the next chapter, uh, I want to come back to the very first thing you said where product management is not real. Uh, is there (laughs) anything else, uh, that you can say about your insight there, or is it basically what you described where PMs aren't actually involved in design in- in a company like Facebook in your experience?

    2. NBNikita Bier49:14

       The- the functional organization structure of big tech has kind of separated...... product managers from the product development process in many ways. They're not looking at data 'cause data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they get back. They're mainly just writing a f- documents and then kind of being the team secretary and running around getting approvals for, uh, from each cr- uh, cross-functional team, legal, privacy, everything like that. And yeah, i- i- it's, you're act- you're actually v- very much separated from th- the product itself and, and so I, I think like what Snapchat has done, and I think Apple too, to s- uh, su- uh, s- the same extent is that designers run the show and th- uh, I think that's led to some very novel products coming out from both of those companies. But I mean, that, that is its own host of problems because m- actually rolling out a product inside of a large organization, it, it requires a sheer force of will because it's a lot of work. I mean, there's a lot of regulatory scrutiny, you know, the, uh, scaling it up, like th- there's, you do need someone to, to project manage. And so I, I don't know if it's the silver bullet is to give designers the reign to, to control, to run the show, but I also don't think (laughs) th- the current s- the c- uh, the traditional like Google, Facebook style of being q- team secretaries is also the best solution. (laughs)

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky50:44

       To defend product managers, uh, I think many product managers spend a lot of time on designs, spend a lot of time, a lot of time with data science. I think probably what you saw is like the extreme big, big, big tech version of product management. I know even PMs at Facebook can, if they want to, spend time with design. I think it's just obviously very different from a startup world where you're just, that's all you're doing.

    4. NBNikita Bier51:05

       Yeah. It's certainly an exaggerated view. But it's particularly relevant, I think, for all the zero to one initiatives, uh, because like if you're a, if you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large, like you should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything like... And then, yeah, it should be cleaned up, prototyped by a, a technical designer. But that's your idea and products live and die in the pixels, like consumer products. So that, that's on, that's on you. Uh, and that's, that's where I think for maybe larger growth initiatives, yes, you can have, uh, you can, you could be a little more detached from the pixels.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky51:43

       I love that advice. Okay. Before we move on to the next phase of your journey of starting Gas,

12. 51:49 – 53:53

    The Tim Cook painting story

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky51:49

       I heard there was an interesting story around where you were actually put within the Facebook office, uh, physically where your team was put. Is that, is that, is there some there?

    2. NBNikita Bier51:57

       Yeah. So our, our, our team was actually, uh, when we joined the new product experimentation group, uh, we were actually seated I think like at the s- basically the same desk as, uh, Mark Zuckerberg.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky52:08

       Hm.

    4. NBNikita Bier52:09

       Uh, and that, that was pretty cool, uh, to see, you know, how the, how the machine runs, uh, like from the, th- uh, fr- from Z- Zuck's view. But we, uh, we had a few artifacts that we had kept with us from our old office, uh, when we were running, uh, TBH, uh, and one of them was this, uh, this kind of pop art painting that I bought on the street when I needed to get something on the walls for our office. And it was this giant painting of Tim Cook. We had been carrying it between our orgs at F- (laughs) at Facebook just 'cause it was a funny painting. Uh, and I, I kind of got it because like io- it was kind of symbolic of who actually controls our destiny is, uh, is Apple.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky52:52

       (laughs)

    6. NBNikita Bier52:52

       Um, and, uh, so when we relocated to, uh, the area where Zuck was sitting, I, I put up the painting on the wall and it was basically a giant painting of Tim Cook was overlooking Zuck. And eventually one of the, uh, uh, EAs, uh, there said, "Um, actually do you think you could take that home?" Uh, and it ki- it kind of made sense because, uh, (laughs) the, uh, you can't really have a painting of a, of another big tech executive overlooking us. (laughs) .

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky53:20

       What does it look like? Do you happen to have it? (laughs)

    8. NBNikita Bier53:22

       Yeah. I, I act- I actually do. Let me, let me-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky53:24

       Let me see it. (laughs)

    10. NBNikita Bier53:24

        ... let me go grab it. Um...

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky53:26

        Amazing. Oh wow. That's, that's artistic.

    12. NBNikita Bier53:30

        Yeah.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky53:30

        So that's Tim Cook. (laughs) What is the idea there that he's peeking through this darkness staring at you?

    14. NBNikita Bier53:36

        Yeah. Yeah. He's, uh, he's the real boss of all of us. Uh... (laughs)

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky53:41

        I could see, I could see why Zuck would not want that staring at him all day.

    16. NBNikita Bier53:45

        (laughs)

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky53:46

        That's amazing. And I like that you still have that with you.

    18. NBNikita Bier53:49

        Yeah. One, one of the artifacts of, uh, of that, of that chapter of life.

13. 53:53 – 58:02

    Leaving Facebook and starting a new venture

    1. NBNikita Bier53:53

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky53:53

       So good. Okay. So, so that was your Facebook journey. That was four years. That's wild. You left Facebook. At some point you started, and I just, I remember this, you started tweeting like, "Hey, I'm working on a new app." Everyone was going nuts, "What's he working on?" And at this point, I, I think you probably in your mind thought, "I am this one hit wonder. I haven't shown that I can do this again and again." And so I think you probably had this motivation. Maybe talk about that, just like this drive of like, "Hey, I want to do this again." Is that where your mind was at?

    3. NBNikita Bier54:19

       When that, uh, meme started, my intent was to start a venture backed company and build something, you know, uh, that would scale to be a big team and w- this durable thing that l- la- you know, lasted many years and everything. And so I was like, uh, I just made, you know, a post that I was leaving Facebook and looking for, uh, you know, some teammates and, um, I shared, uh, a couple of ideas with, uh, some people privately. And it was, there were some really crazy ideas that I shared. I, I don't, I'm not gonna get into them. But, uh, uh, then people started posting, "Oh my God, I just saw Nikita's app. It's crazy." And what happened was others saw that and then they started memeing it and it became this massive like meme, uh, like where they're like, "Oh, I s- I just, I just tried Nikita's app. It saved my marriage. I, oh, I just quit drinking. Uh, my k- my kids returned home a- uh, after all these..." Like and it just, it turned into this massive meme and like, and...... at the time, I, I didn't even have an app or anything. Like, I wasn't even planning to launch it. A- it wasn't even an app that, the thing that I was, uh, th- some of the ideas I was looking at. And, uh, so it just turned into this viral, uh, moment. Um, I, I wasn't really even that fixated on building, uh, another, like, I wasn't even committed to starting another company at that point. I just, ha- uh, this was an ex- exploration process. But what happened was, uh, the market had crashed shortly thereafter. There was, uh, it was kind of the end of the ZIRP era. Uh, the Fed started hiking rates. I think my portfolio was down, like, 30% or something, and I was like, "Damn, this sucks. Uh, maybe I should think about how to, like, make money today." Uh, (laughs) um, just, you know? That- that's, that's the reason we're in startups, is to m- to make money. Uh, and so there was always in the back of my head this question, uh, that I had, which was, what if we had monetized TBH? 'Cause the number one support message we received was, "Can I pay to reveal who sent me polls?" Um, that was the n- like, number one question. And I, it was like, would it have made even more than the acquisition if we just monetized it? Uh, and so I was, and I'm like, "We could probably build this pretty fast, like probably in a month, month or two." Ended up being a lot longer. But, um, we, uh, we started rebuilding it. It was a new team. Uh, it was, uh, th- uh, one of the, uh, engineers from a company called Paparazzi. His name's, uh, Z- uh, Zea- Zea Turner. And he started building it in my house, and, uh, we, uh, we had tested it, um, to see would this thing, uh, would this- would this- th- this new version of TBH actually resonate with, with kids, uh, this five years later? That was actually the f-... the, the thing I wanted to know most of all was like, would a polling, anonymous polling app actually still be relevant five years later? And so we dropped it into the, uh, this- this school, uh, just to... you know, the same way we, we- I- I've always done it, and-

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky57:36

       Was it the Georgia school again?

    5. NBNikita Bier57:38

       Yes, actually.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky57:39

       (laughs)

    7. NBNikita Bier57:39

       Um, uh, we launched at the exact same school-

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky57:43

       Wow.

    9. NBNikita Bier57:43

       ... uh, that we, uh, we launched TBH on the exact same day-

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky57:48

        Yeah, wow.

    11. NBNikita Bier57:48

        ... five years later.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky57:49

        Fun fact.

    13. NBNikita Bier57:50

        Um, and, uh, people sent a lot of messages. Uh, but it wasn't growing. So let me, let me p- pedal back here a bit.

14. 58:02 – 59:46

    Rebuilding TBH and overcoming challenges

    1. NBNikita Bier58:02

       Um, so TBH grew through variety of things, people sharing their messages to Snapchat, and, uh, text invites. And that was 2017. Uh, and the way you invited your friends on TBH was that you tapped their name, uh, your contact name, and there was a button that said invite, and then we used Twilio to send them a text message. And the regulatory environment actually had changed a lot over those five years. You really can't send texts from a server anymore. It has to be sent from the device, the user's device. And just a point of clarification is, uh, like, a lot of people cloned TBH over the years, and they think that when you voted on people in the polls, it sent them a text. We never did that. That- that's, like, egregiously illegal to do, like, and also u- unethical at a u- user experience level to send texts when people don't even know that that's what's happening. But anyway, we couldn't send texts over, over, uh, Twilio anymore, and that led to people not sending as many invites when we recreated Gas, uh, and, uh... or we created Gas, 'cause they, they had to pop, they had to pop the Compose window and hit Send every-

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky59:13

       Mm-hmm.

    3. NBNikita Bier59:13

       ... they didn't just tap invite on five names. So we actually had to reinvent all the growth systems, and it took about, I think, like nine launches, including renaming the app, including, like, features that just never existed on, uh, TBH. So it was actually a, just a, in many ways, like, yeah, the concept on the surface was the same, but it was a- very much a, uh, a zero to one development cycle of figuring out how to grow this thing, uh, again in this,

15. 59:46 – 1:04:24

    Addressing criticism

    1. NBNikita Bier59:46

       in this climate.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky59:47

       I know that point is really important to you. I think a lot of people are like, "Nikita just sold the same app twice. What a, what a guy." And the point you're making here is, is not only was, like, the infrastructure completely different, the team was different, you had to rethink the entire flywheel of how it worked and how it grew.

    3. NBNikita Bier1:00:05

       Yeah, and there were so many layers of, like, we, we, we, we validated one thing, and then the next thing we weren't able, like, we got stuck on. Like, okay, people will sp- it'll spread, uh, or p- people will send a lot of messages. Cool. Great. The next thing was, will it spread within a school? That took us a while to get right. Will it hop schools? Each of those was a very, very challenging problem, uh, in light of the new climate that we were operating in. And, uh, I, I always do things by the book, like when it comes to, like, operating, you know, like legally within the, the compliance framework. Uh, and that's something I, when I meet founders and they tell me some growth thing that they're doing and I'm like, "You, you can't do that. That, you're, wha- that's gonna cause way more trouble down the line. It's gonna burn users, too." And so we always wanted to make it abundantly clear how our growth system, like how you're inviting friends and all that. Could kinda go on a whole diatribe on that because the thing that I see a lot of founders do is they, in the background, uh, use user data in ways that it shouldn't be used. Uh, like they invite, they invite, uh, people on your behalf and all that. And I have this kind of-... crazy view that the internet is this, like, living and breathing thing. There's Wikipedia ar- article called the Gaia Hypothesis, which is about biology, and it- it's basically like, uh, the earth is kind of living and breathing and can respond to threats, okay? And when, like, you enter the rainforest too deep, Ebola virus will be released. Okay? So, I think the internet operates on a similar paradigm here where if you are, if you do the wrong thing by users, the internet will come back and- and get even and defend itself. And so we've always... Whenever I design products, I try to do right by users because it'll always come back much worse and I think you should always, you know, operate above board with how you design your growth systems. And with- with- with Gas, we had to, you know, do things the right way and we had to figure out at each, uh, each particular kind of moment of how, or problem that we solve. Like, will it spread within schools? Will it hop schools? Will people pay for it? All of the, all of these things we had to, uh... Uh, it was a whole reinvent- reinvention of the original product.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:35

       I love that you shared that because (clears throat) I think a lot of people see you from the outside and they think you're doing all kinds of these skeezy growth hacks and making teens do things that aren't really mentally healthy for them. But it's clear that that's the opposite of how you think about it, that you're trying to stay very positive. Like, you only allow positive communication. You do things that you, as you just said, are gonna be good long term. The internet's not gonna come and try to shut you down.

    5. NBNikita Bier1:03:00

       The point you bring up here, uh, about wanting to build a positive thing. There's this, like... A l- there's this, some people, sometimes I get criticism. It's not actually that often, but they say, "Oh, you're building an app that makes teens feel in- insecure or anything." But with Gas, I think we received a message every single day about, from a user, telling us that they reconsidered suicide or other forms of self-harm. The- the app sent you positive messages and affirmations. Uh, like, it made teens feel really good and I think a lot, that- that is lost on a lot of people. Instagram, you know, uh, it can make you feel jealousy and thing. Like, a lot of other social networks kind of are a mixed bag in terms of impact. But we were s- like, entirely focused on making teens feel better. And some people might say, "Oh, what if someone doesn't get voted for something?" We actually built a system to ensure everyone got to vote.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:57

       Hmm.

    7. NBNikita Bier1:03:57

       And we, what we did was we put your name in polls at a higher frequency to, uh, if you weren't being voted on recently. So like, we wanted to, like, spread the love in every way (laughs) possible and- and that's what really motivated, uh, me to like grow this thing, was watching how it was impacting 10 million kids for just in- in such a short period of time.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:20

       I really appreciate you adding that. I didn't know all those things about the way you thought about these-

16. 1:04:24 – 1:09:51

    The human trafficking hoax

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:24

       these apps. Interestingly, I don't know how much you can go into this, but there's a lot of, uh, stuff going on with Gas around, uh, human trafficking and all this stuff where people thought people were being kidnapped through Gas, which is... Yeah, talk about that whatever you can 'cause that's pretty crazy.

    2. NBNikita Bier1:04:41

       We had this hoax started where, uh, people were saying the app was used for human trafficking and I- I was like, "This is so strange." This is a anonymous polling app without messaging and, uh, the only thing you could do is send compliments to your friends. And I researched into it and I saw that this was actually plaguing a lot of apps. And, uh, any app that has gone viral in any way has actually had this hoax started. And part of the reason it happens is it actually, it gets you attention if you say it, if you say that about an app. As a- as a teenager, if you say, "Oh, this app is dangerous," and then you get a bunch of followers. And w- who doesn't love followers? Uh, so it's actually a really, like, viral piece of content if you put it out. And so we had this hoax started, uh, and we were like, "Th- this could kill the company." And I talked to a bunch of founders that it happened to them and they said, "Yeah, we had to shut down because of that."

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:40

       Wow.

    4. NBNikita Bier1:05:40

       And, uh, and I- I was like, "Is- is this it?" Is like, is this the, you know, the end of, uh, the company? And, uh, I remember it hit number one when, uh, we started getting a few of these reports, like, in our support channels and I was like, "Ugh, I'm just gonna plant the flag and- and on post that we hit number one in the app store because this thing's probably gonna shut down soon." So, I- I make this announcement on Twitter, "I just made the number one app," and I thought it would just be dead in a week. And then, uh, I- I just ha- had this sudden burst of energy and I was like, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna win. I'm gonna fight this. Uh, this is not true. It makes no sense at all." And so we fought it at every vector possible, um, this completely (laughs) made up hoax. We, uh, met with journalists, reporters to make sure that the number one match every time you search Gas App human trafficking was "Gas App is not for human trafficking." And so that ended up being the Washington Post headline. We insisted that that be the headline if we do the interview. So that was the first thing that show up on Google anytime someone searched it. There were schools and even a police station that posted that this app is used for human trafficking. I called those superintendents, I called those police chiefs and have got them to publicly retract it. And we had some of the reviews on the app store, we had, we asked Apple to remove them, uh, 'cause we got review bombed. But the thing that actually was the most impactful was, uh, my girlfriend made a video, a TikTok video explaining that it's not true. And we, uh... Anytime someone deleted their account, they could watch this video explaining it's not true. And at the peak, we had 3% of users deleting their accounts per day.... so it was, like, really catastr- like, it was a, uh, catastrophe for, for, uh, an app. Um, and we got it down to 0.1%, uh, through relentless, relentless effort. And it's, it, it was really just, uh, an unusual thing that happens when you grow really fast is, uh, is this, this, uh, these, these ha- this human trafficking hoax that starts. And y- y- you, you, you don't understand how crazy it is until (laughs) it happens to your company. Um, but it was, it was, it was, it was kind of hilarious to think about. (laughs) Like, this, this app was the most harmless, benign thing you could think of.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:01

       This is insane. I did not know this full story. And you were doing all this while you were trying to scale the app and trying to keep the servers up and try to grow it, right? How, what was that like to try to manage all these things at once?

    6. NBNikita Bier1:08:12

       I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. It was e- e- ext- extraordinarily difficult, uh, to, to do it all. Uh, our team was also relentless though. Like, they would come over to my house, 9:00 AM, stay until midnight, and just do that seven days a week. Um, so yeah, it was, uh, it, it, it was definitely, like, one of the most physically draining things ever. But we were just so tactical. I remember investors were asking to meet with us, and I said, "If you can't get a celebrity to post that this isn't true, then, uh, we're, we're not interested." (laughs) But yeah, we, we, we went after it on every vector and, uh, it ended up being okay. (laughs)

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:59

       I love how this, like, you took your brain to this other completely different problem and thought about all the levers you could use to change the conversation around the app.

    8. NBNikita Bier1:09:09

       Yeah. We, we even, uh, (laughs) I remember we had these TikTok videos that were made that were saying it was true. And I had es- like, I, I cli- I networked my way all the way to the CEO of TikTok, and I said, "Can you delete these?" And we got them del- (laughs) this mis- this information deleted.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:25

       Uh-huh.

    10. NBNikita Bier1:09:25

        Yeah, so it was, uh, it was really a, a, a, a whole new test of, uh, our, our team's capacities was, uh, fighting... The, the key thing that you have to know though when you have a hoax spreading about your app is, uh, you really have to make sure the hoax is less viral than your app. Uh, and it, some, at a few points, the hoax was more viral than our app, and we had to, uh, we had to take this, uh-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:48

        The K-factor of the hoax.

    12. NBNikita Bier1:09:49

        ... yeah.

17. 1:09:51 – 1:11:36

    Selling to Discord and lessons learned

    1. NBNikita Bier1:09:51

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:51

       That's absurd. Okay, so broadly, you built this app. Again, a big success. I saw a stat that you made $10 million or $11 million in sales through the app, 10 million downloads. Is that right?

    3. NBNikita Bier1:10:03

       Yeah, it was a, uh, blowout success in terms of, like, on, on, uh, in t- it, it grew bigger than TVH. Uh, we monetized it. You know, we ran almost entirely on startup credits. Um, so it was basically, you know, 99-

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:17

       Like cloud credits? Like AWS credits?

    5. NBNikita Bier1:10:19

       Yeah.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:19

       Oh, wow.

    7. NBNikita Bier1:10:20

       AWS credits, Mixpanel. I, I, I, I remember I, I was like, uh, when I saw the early data, I'm like, "Okay, now it's time for me to negotiate every bill down to the last cent of margin for every vendor." And I got credits everywhere and, uh, so I, I, we really were tactical with that. Um, and so we ended up being, you know, uh, all, all just, just pure cashflow for the team. No, we had no investors. And, uh, and it was just so interesting though that, like, the way that I started posting about it on Twitter was, it kind of captured the zeitgeist of, of the internet. And, uh, we didn't intend on selling it. We were just gonna let this thing run its course and just be this app that kinda lives in the background of our lives. Um, but, uh, once it started capturing, like, the zeitgeist of Twitter, I was like, "Wait a minute, we could probably sell this thing." And, uh, and that's when we started engaging with, uh, you know, some of these... We, we ended up getting, uh, yeah, three, three companies that wanted to, to buy it. Won't be able to say all, uh, them. But ultimately, we ended up selling to, uh, to Discord-

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:25

       Mm-hmm.

    9. NBNikita Bier1:11:26

       ... um, and we, uh, we, we, we joined Discord. (laughs)

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:29

        Awesome. So before we move on to the next part of the journey and some of the other insights that, uh,

18. 1:11:36 – 1:13:14

    Lasting lessons from Gas

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:36

       I want to get into, is there any lasting lessons that you took away from Gas as a product that you take with you to advising startups in terms of building the product? 'Cause I know there's many, but any that stand out most that you think are really interesting to share?

    2. NBNikita Bier1:11:50

       I think I kind of touched on this before, which was trying to validate things in, in a sequence of, like, will people use the core flow? Will people spread it within their peer group? Will it hop peer groups?

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:02

       Mm-hmm.

    4. NBNikita Bier1:12:02

       And what I think the most important thing is, that I learned, is that's actually a, a really great way to do zero-to-one product development is execute at 100% for the thing you're trying to validate at that specific stage of the product development cycle. And then the rest can kind of, you can kind of half-ass the rest just so you can get 100% signal on that one part. And so we made the polling experience just perfect. The questions were great, you know, push, push notifica- everything worked. And then the next stage was, like, getting sharing and virality working. And so car- compartmentalizing those things because ultimately, you'll have too much scope creep if you try to solve everything at once and validate. And also, you're not gonna get signal too, like, you're trying to test one thing at a time. So the way that now I approach a lot of consumer product development is, like, "If this is true, then what next needs to be true for this thing to work out?" And these layers of conditional statements. And the more layers you have, the higher risk your product is. So you should try to condense it to about, like, four things that must be true-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:04

       Mm-hmm.

    6. NBNikita Bier1:13:04

       ... uh, for the thing to work.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:06

       And this comes back to your advice of the thing you need to get good at is testing and learning and making it really quick.

    8. NBNikita Bier1:13:13

       Yeah.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:13

       Okay, maybe

19. 1:13:14 – 1:22:35

    Building durable consumer apps

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:14

       one last thing along this thread. I'm just really curious how this hoax came to be. Like, who's behind it? How does this happen?

    2. NBNikita Bier1:13:20

       We got a original support message, which, uh, which was a sup- a screenshot of a story on Snapchat.... okay? And it said, "Do not download the Gas app. It's for human trafficking," okay? And it was a screenshot that had like, uh, kind of that mirror effect where you have like, uh, 10, like 10 people that screenshotted it. Like more-

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:44

       Mm-hmm.

    4. NBNikita Bier1:13:44

       ... like 40 people 'cause it had like all the usernames of-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:46

       Mm-hmm.

    6. NBNikita Bier1:13:47

       Uh, so I was looking at this and I'm like, "How much visib- how, like how, how many people have seen this?" Uh, and it looked like a viral thing on Snapchat. And then I went to the app store page and I saw a review that, uh, that said, "This app is for human trafficking." And I went to my team and I said, "You know, we, this, this might, this will probably kill the company. This will kill the product. Um, I, I've seen this before with consumer apps and it's evident to me this is gonna be 10 times bigger tomorrow." And they were like, "No, this is just one, one message. What, what do you mean?" I'm like, "No, no. It's been screenshotted 40 times and now it's on the app store page." Like, an- we got another message four hours later, and, uh, and the next day it was, our entire app store page was just covered with reviews n- uh, saying that the app's for human trafficking. And, uh, we actually had to rebrand the app. We, uh, we relaunched it once, uh, and, uh, we're like, "W- let's just call it something different, just relaunch it on the other side of the country." We did that, started going viral again, and, uh, the c- (laughs) the craziest thing was it reemerged and what happened was one user was friends with another person in another state and they got an invitation and that user told them, "Oh, that was in my state. It's actually for human trafficking." And then it just completely (laughs) started again and, uh, and then a- it was too late at that point to relaunch again. Uh, it was j- uh, uh, we just realized we just gotta, we gotta, we gotta fight this thing and, and, uh, ultimately I, I don't think we'll ever know the true origin but, uh, yeah. It was, uh, it was, it was definitely a, uh, living, breathing, uh, uh, like hoax. (laughs)

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:46

       That is insane. Uh, this story just gets more and more interesting. What are the, what were some of the previous names, by the way? Is that something that you can share?

    8. NBNikita Bier1:15:52

       Yeah. We went through a bunch. We had like, uh, one of them was called Crush, one of them was called Melt, and another was, uh, w- the interesting thing about Crush is we got a great domain. We thought this wa- this would be the name. Uh, this was between the p- some of the, like re- rebrands. We tested it and we saw that invitations dropped significantly under the Crush name and we were like, "What's going on here?" And we found that actually when you invite someone to an app, m- regardless of the app, you, you generally met m- boys invite boys, girls invite girls to apps, and boys didn't want to invite their friends to an app called Crush, a pink, with a pink icon. And then we looked at the data and the app, I mean, T- this was true of TBH too, which was the app indexed about six- 60 to 65% women, so we were just like, "Let's make the app more masculine and see what happens. We need balance on this." So we, we made the icon black with a flame and called it Gas and the invites rate jumped. And, uh, f- you think a name doesn't matter but right at the moment of sending an invite, yeah, you, uh... (laughs) So that, that was one of the interesting insights of on, uh, the, the naming process.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:07

       Man. There's just endless stories that we could keep getting into but, uh, we've also gone very long so I'm gonna try to move on-

    10. NBNikita Bier1:17:13

        Yeah.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:13

        ... to another topic. So I asked people on Twitter what to ask you. Uh, just that question got a thousand likes, just me asking (laughs) what should I ask Nikita? And the most common question, I'm sure you get this a lot, is just people wondering do you ever want to build a durable consumer app? Is it possible to build a durable consumer app? Scott Belsky asked this, uh, Robert at Figmas this, and Scott actually had a really nice way of describing it about why are so many quick sensation coomer- consumer apps proving to be more akin to summer songs than enduring standalone products and businesses? So there's kind of two questions here. One is do you want to build a, do you aim to build a cons- durable consumer app? And two, how possible is it?

    12. NBNikita Bier1:17:54

        A lot of the fundamental, like, tools for communicating with our friends, either, you know, messaging, uh, or posting, broadcasting one to many like on Stories or po- you, you know, those... The incumbents have kind of, uh, built pretty large moats in terms of network effects and to provide true like, uh, like an order of magnitude better experience is non-trivial because they've been actually improving these products so much over the years, and there's actually not, there's not that many entry points. Not, not to say that it's not impossible. Snapchat was, showed that there was a style of messaging that people wanted that the incumbents d- weren't serving, but I think there's these kind of edges that you can go after with a much higher probability of success and they might not actually be something that's durable necessarily. And I think finding durability for a s- like communication or social product, that's a black swan event. You, like, retention for consumer social is like there, there's a tremendous amount of randomness. There's like one every decade. If it was simple, I, I would just be printing $1 trillion companies. Uh, I'd be printing Facebooks, uh, every time I sat down. But I think it's actually, uh, a lot of it is pure randomness. On the other hand, growing a product can be a science. With certainty, if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral. Now-... why haven't I tried to take the viral part and build something that has been durable or long-lasting. I'll tell you a little bit about my motivations. My favorite part about product development is you make this thing, you know, through the night, you build it, and you watch it take over the internet. That is the mo- most thrilling drug, I think, you, you could, you could ever experience. And, and just watching it spread all over the country is like w- you, you drop an app in, you know, the, uh, the Deep South in Georgia, and then you look on your analytics dashboard and 40% of the high school down your street in Los Angeles has downloaded it, uh, one week later. Like, that's a really profound feeling and it's, it's just, it's crazy to have that sort of impact as a three-person team, and I, I live for that. When I joined Facebook, uh, this is, um, like the, here's the, here's an interesting connection here. So I joined Facebook and I saw that many of my peers were, like, looking up to VPs. And they're like, "That's what I, that's what I want to make it to one day, and I want to run a large organization. I want to have lots of reports." And, and then I met with VPs and they were actually jealous of me because, um, m- my quality of life was actually pretty cool. I, I, I got to build something high impact that, uh, made many teens feel better about themselves, made a de- decent amount of money, and then I wasn't, you know, uh, in charge of this, becoming a people manager that has to run this large organization for, for many years. And so I think one day I will, uh, run maybe a venture scale business that, uh... But I, uh, I, I, I, I w- will say that I kind of like the way that I've been doing things so far, uh, in terms of quality of life and being fun. Financially, it's been great. So I think, uh, that, that part is what motivates me. And yeah, I, I'm, I, I don't think, uh, you know, t- uh, running a large corporation is necessarily what I describe as fun.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21:40

        That's amazing, man. I really, I'm really happy we went here. Uh, so much of this resonates with the way I think. And, uh, obviously a big part of this is also just, it's very hard, as you said, to build a durable, build a consumer app that grows, first of all, second, that actually lasts. But that is interesting, that you do hope to one day build a, uh, venture-funded business.

Episode duration: 1:38:21