How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps

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

(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"?

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-

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

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."

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

(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.