How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor)

28:30And so 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 volume of messages sent on a messaging app, you're lucky if people send three or four or something, but we were sending 60. And we couldn't even handle it. So we had to like, we had to geofence the app because you need to scale our servers, which is actually a pretty controversial decision inside of our company, because why would you turn off something that's working? But at my core, I knew like, if it's working at this many, you know, individual schools, we could just relaunch it any time and it'll just, it'll, it'll go viral.

29:21So let's, let's, let's regroup and figure out what's happening here and then, and relaunch. So you keep talking about how 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 and to help it spread so quickly within a school? I think you're referring to, there's like a BuzzFeed memo that was leaked to BuzzFeed while I was at Facebook. And the main thing we found was to be convinced to download an app, you need to see it. You need to see the marketing message like three times or so. So you basically need to saturate an area with every kind of marketing you can.

30:04So we ran ads, targeted at this particular school to when we were seating and testing these apps. And we also followed people creating a dedicated Instagram account that went to that school. Because we learned that high schoolers identify their school in their bio. So it says RHS on their bio. And so that was how we tried to get the entire school to adopt synchronously. We would follow them and then accept the followbacks. A big misunderstanding though. And I get this DM a lot of people like I'm trying to replicate your strategy. We've just done it at 15 schools and it's not working anymore. This is not the way we grew the app.

30:48This is how we tested apps. And there's, it's really, it's a little bit nuanced there. That's an important nuance because you need to get enough intensity of adoption and density for a social network to start, so get the flywheel spinning. But the app should grow by itself after that. And people think we would just went like from school to school following every kid on it, like you can't, that's totally unrealistic. But for like the first hundred users, yes, that's how we got them. And that allowed us to know whether the product was working or not. Like 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 add enough friends?

31:36Did we get enough people on it? Did they reach the aha moment because you need friends to get on? So we wanted to eliminate that confounding variable and so we figured out a way to just get a bunch of people to adopt it once. I mean, that's one thing I encourage a lot of founders to do is figure out a way to eliminate all those potentially compounding variables so you can know immediately whether something is working or not. You never want to walk away from an experiment or test and say, well, maybe the execution was bad because it takes a lot of energy to mobilize a team to test something and you We really want to make sure your tests actually are, provide signal.

32:18So 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 will tell you even if this could be the best possible version, do people actually care? Yeah, we would try to get the, like, an entire school to adopt just to know, like, if everyone had 10 friends, would they actually drive value from the sound? We also did other things like, you know, and I recommend all companies do this is put live chat customer support in your app like 24 hours a day.

32:55And it sounds insane. It's like the whole point of tech is you don't need to do that. That's the whole point of a software. But then users get this white glove experience and that eliminates another confound. variable, like did they think they were their problems are solved or 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 vehicle for getting feedback and doing user research. Because users will literally tell you the problem they're having. So we had our person that was running this, the same was Michael Gutierrez, he's done it for all my companies actually, he's the the community and customer support rep, he would paste any interesting feedback into Slack, and then we would be like, oh, this user has a great idea.

33:50We should consider turning that into a feature. So you really want your finger on the pulse as you roll these things out and see what's working, what isn't, and also make users feel great and make sure at the end, they promote your app positively to their peers. I love that piece of advice. Okay, so to close out the TPH 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? I think the thing that is hard to really understand for first time founders that hit breakout success with a consumer product is how draining and how spread thin you get because everything breaks.

34:45Everything that you built needs to be substituted almost every three days. And I can just like 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, it is absolutely like chaos to keep the thing online as it scales up. And so you have to be ruthless with prioritization as something scales up and put out the largest fires first. Because that was something that I didn't really fully understand is how many things go wrong.

35:40If we didn't geofence the app, there would be no way we would have been able to keep keep that thing online because that gave us some slack to control growth. This is a good example of when people ask like, hey, this may 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 the geofence to keep it from crashing. A lot of you last me like, what are the metrics for what's the benchmark for product I'm hard to fit. And this founder that I'm friends with, his name is Roger Dickey. He's told me a lot at one time, if your product's working, you'll know.

36:24And if there's any uncertainty, it's not working. And it really is a binary when it comes to consumer products. People are gonna be fighting to get into it. and you'll find new measures that you've never heard of. Our metric was hourly active per day, not daily active users, hourly active users. So you'll start seeing that, and it'll be abundantly obvious what product market fit is. You'll know it when you see it as the bottom line. Okay, so you launch DBH, it goes viral, start 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?

37:15I was not expecting that when I was looking your LinkedIn. So yeah, what was like selling? What was it like working at Facebook? Selling your company is one of the most draining processes you could ever go through as a founder. When we met with Facebook, they told me they have 80 people assigned to this deal. And I'm like, I have one person, that's just me. And they were like the SWAT team of M &A. And the funniest part was, you know, they wanted to meet the team as well. And so they came out to our office in Oakland, which is a dingy old office like that I got for $1800 a month. That was our friend for the office.

37:57And they arrive and they walk in. There's two engineers and one designer and me. And they're just like, this is the whole company. This is the number one app in the United States. Like, yeah, this is it. And when we went there, when we arrived, we joined the youth team, which was about like, I don't know, like 150 people, just for this one division of Facebook. And it was like, it was my first job that effectively that I've ever had. When they told me my title, they said I would be a product manager. Like I was like, okay, I don't know exactly what that is, but yeah, I guess that's what I do. And I arrive and then I get access to a workplace system where people post all the things they're working on.

38:52And I realized it's like kind of like this almost academic environment for social networks, like social network development. It's like the Harvard of social networks, like I was reading all these studies that people were doing on like, oh, if we change that, this is the impact to retention in DAU. And I was just, I was so impressed. There's a whole science here. A lot of the stuff that we did was learned from first principles, but then we saw it actually turn into systems and processes here. But 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.

39:40You're actually not as involved in the product as I had assumed. Like, I thought, oh, you're the person who gets in the pixels and designs the flows and absolutely not. Like, you're actually more completely detached from the design process. There's a design vertical or org that does all that. And they don't really want you working on that. So that was very difficult for me. Because actually, when people ask me, like, what do you think you're good at? Like, at the core, I'm a designer. I don't consider myself a product manager. I'm great at growing things, looking at mixed panel, and then designing the things that make it grow.

40:22But there's a rift between those two things inside of a large tech company. And so I loved the academic approach to growing, but it was really hard for me personally as I became disconnected from the design process. us. And I think that, a lot of my skills atrophied over those four years. But I did stick around, I went through multiple orgs. Favorite one at the end was a new product experimentation, where I worked with other founders, 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 I think I build probably eight apps while I was at Facebook.

41:11But it is much, much more difficult to build apps at a large company. A lot of the insights that you have are not things that you can necessarily present or put in writing into 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. And so I think that makes it really difficult to be completely intellectually honest about what you're building. And when the team is honest about it, then it's really hard to iterate toward the right thing in that context. Having said that, there's a lot of things you don't have to deal with as a product man.

41:59I don't have to deal with that. Think about money. I don't have to think about paying legal bills or doing finance and accounting. So all that subtracted away. But there is regulatory stuff that you have to deal with that I had zero exposure to as a founder of a small company. Yeah. And insight you're sharing there potentially is like the reason a company like Facebook is an amazing, a launching, completely new product, zero to one stuff, is there might be a little too risk averse, and it's hard to talk about stuff that people actually really, really want deeply, is that kind of the sense there?

42:37It's hard to really verbalize some of the things that motivate us as people. And I had like a pretty, there's a tweet I put out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of how I view why people download apps. And it's very simple. It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be like, what's app where free texting. And then the other reason is to find a mate. So maybe Tinder or Snapchat find love. And the third is to unplug from reality, maybe 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.

43:28And so I've been putting that in a framing document, and the particular nuanced reason why people are going to adopt is difficult. as when you're presenting that to people that are seasoned professionals and care about how something might reflect on them personally. And so that's really difficult. 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 that part, I think, is probably solvable for a startup. If you just want to pay for ads, or like getting your app into a dense friend graph is overall trivial.

44:23As a founder, you should be able to pull it off after enough tries. So that advantage that a big company brings, I mean, it makes it easier, but it's not something that I think is something that a founder can't solve for themselves. So an interesting takeaway, it sounds like, is 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. It's not only harder for them to identify these opportunities and to verbalize it internally in a line the company around it.

45:04It's also hard to respond to signals in the market. A lot of people think 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 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 the market strategy or market research team might do a study to follow up on it. And it will kind of float around for a few months. They might put together a framing deck saying, hey, we should go after this opportunity. Let's put together this team. We'll go through VP reviews.

45:47And then it'll start development. Development might take six to 12 months. Realistically, I think most companies, large companies take like 12 to 24 months to respond to competitive threats in the market. 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 and your experience is just as you grow? This is just what happens. The incentives within large companies make this very difficult because you don't want to present something that you have a hunch about being a good idea, because if there's not market signals already, then it's hard to defend.

46:28And people in companies are focused on getting their yearly bonus or their, you know, they're focused on their performance reviews. And it's hard to show up into a framing meeting saying like, and a framing meeting is like like a free meeting where you positioning the opportunity and everything, here's what we should go after. It's hard to just say, okay, by first principles, this is a good idea, and here's some very vague market signals. In reality, you need to walk in and say, here's the number one app in the United States, and we don't own it. And if you present something like that, that's pretty defensible on a, if you fail, because there was a market evidence.

47:14But if you fail about something that's more based on kind of vague abstract, so you have to generally, like, the only path is to kind of copy existing companies, existing products. If you want to really get momentum inside of a large organization. And for new, complete new concepts, it's I think very difficult to present a lot of those ideas either to verbalize them and into a document or to even get rally the organization around it. That's a really interesting insight. 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?

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48:32The best part, your end users can use Explo's AI features for their own report and dashboard generation. Illuminating customer data requests for your support team. Build and embed a fully white labeled analytics experience in days. Try for free at explo .co slash Lenny. That's exp .pl .co slash Lenny. Before we move on to the next chapter, I want to come back to the very first thing you said where product management is not real. Is there anything else that you can say about your insight there? or is it basically what you describe where PMs aren't actually involved in design and company like Facebook in your experience?

49:13The 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, because data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they get back. They're mainly just writing documents and then kind of being the team secretary and running around getting approvals for from each cross -functional team, legal privacy, everything like that. And yeah, you're actually very much separated from the product itself. And so I think what Snapchat has done, and I think Apple too, that's the same extent, is that designers run the show.

49:59And I think that's led to some very novel products coming out from both of those companies. but I mean, that is its own host of problems because actually rolling out a product inside of a large organization, 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, scaling it up. Like, you do need someone to project manage. And so, I don't know if it's the silver bullet is to give designers the rain to run the show, But I also don't think the current, the traditional Google Facebook style of being team secretaries is also the best solution.

50:44To defend product managers, I think many product managers spend a lot of time in design, spell out 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 is obviously very different from a startup world where you're just, that's all you're doing. Yeah, it's certainly an exaggerated view, but it's particularly relevant, I think, for all the zero to one initiatives, because if you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large, you should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything.

51:22And then, yeah, it should be cleaned up, prototype, by a technical designer, but that's your idea, and products live and die in the pixels, like consumer products. So that's on you. And that's where I think for maybe larger growth initiatives, yes, you can be a little more detached from the pixels. I love that advice. Okay, before we move on to the next phase of your journey of starting gas, I heard there's an interesting story around where you were actually put within the Facebook office, physically, where your team was put. Was that, was there something there? Yeah, so our team was actually, when we joined the new product experimentation group, we were actually seated, I think, at basically the same desk as Mark Zuckerberg.

52:09And that was pretty cool to see how the machine runs from the Zux view. But we had a few artifacts that we had kept with us from our old office. when we were running TBH. And one of them was 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 Facebook, just because it was a funny painting. And I kind of got it because like, it was kind of symbolic of who actually controls our destiny is Apple. And so when we relocated to the area where Zuck was sitting, I put up the painting on the wall, and it was basically a giant painting of Tim Cook was overlooking Zuck.

53:02And eventually one of the EA's there said, actually, do you think you could take that home and kind of made sense because you can't really have a painting of another big tech executive of overlooking. What does it look like? Do you happen to have it? Yeah, I actually do. Let me go grab it. Amazing. Oh, wow. That's artistic. That's Tim Cook. What is the idea there that he's peeking through this darkness staring at you? Yeah. Yeah. He's the real boss of all of us. I could see I could see why I said, I would know I'm on that staring at him. That's amazing. and I like that you still have that with you.

53:49Yeah, one of the artifacts of that chapter of life. So good. Okay, so that was your Facebook journey of those four years. That's wild. You left Facebook. At some point you started, I just, I remember this. You started tweeting like, hey I'm working on you app, everyone was going nuts, so it's working on. And at this point, I think you probably in your mind thought, hey I'm this one hit one, or I haven't shown that I can do this again and again. And so I think you probably have this motivation. Maybe talk about that just like this drive, I was like, hey, I want to do this again. Is that where your mind was at?

54:18When that meme started, my intent was to start a venture backed company and build something that would scale to be a big team and this durable thing that lasted many years and everything. And so I was like, I just made a post that I was leaving Facebook and looking for some teammates. and I shared a couple of ideas with some people privately. And there were some really crazy ideas that I shared. I'm not gonna get into them, but 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 meaming it. And it became this massive meme, where they're like, oh, I just tried to keep his app and save my marriage.

55:15I just quit drinking. My kids returned home after all these, and it just turned into this massive meme. And at the time, I didn't even have an app or anything. I wasn't even planning to launch it. It wasn't even an app that the thing that I was, the some of the ideas I was looking at. And so it just turned into this viral moment. I wasn't really even that fixated on building another, like I wasn't even committed to starting another company at that point. I just, this was an exploration process. But what happened was the market had crashed shortly thereafter. There was, it's the kind of the end of the Zurb era.

55:59The Fed started hiking rates. I think my portfolio was down like 30 % or something and I was like, damn this sucks. Maybe I should think about how to make money today. Just, you know, that's the reason we're in startups is to make money. And so there was always in the back of my head this question 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? It was like number one question. And I was like, would it have made even more than the acquisition if we just monetized it? And so I was, and I'm like, we could maybe build this pretty fast, like probably in a month, months or two.

56:49I ended up being a lot longer, but we started rebuilding it. It was a new team. It was one of the engineers from a company called Poperazzi, his name is Zay Turner. and he started building it in my house and we had tested it to see what this new version of TBH actually resonate with kids this five years later. That was actually the thing I wanted to know most of all was like, would an anonymous polling app actually still be relevant five years later? And so we dropped it into the school just, you know, the same way we, I've always done it and... Is it the Georgia school again? Yes, actually. We launched the exact same school that we launched TBH on the exact same day, five years later, in fact.

57:50And people sent a lot of messages, but it wasn't growing. So let me pedal back here a bit. So TBH grew through a variety of things, people sharing their messages to Snapchat and text invites. And that was 2017. And the way you invited your friends on TBH was that you tapped their name, your contact name, and the browser button that said invite. And then we used Twilio to send them a text message. And the regulatory environment actually changed a lot over those five years. You really can't send text from a server anymore. It has to be sent from the device, the user's device. And just the point of clarification is, like a lot of people clone TBH over the years and they think that when you voted on people and the polls that sent them a text, we never did that.

58:47That's like, egregiously illegal to do it. And also, on ethical at a user experience level to send texts when people don't even know that that's what's happening. But anyway, you couldn't send texts over Twilio anymore and that led to people not sending as many invites when we recreated gas and, or we create gas because they had to pop the compose window and hit send every, you're gonna 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 TV.

59:30So it was actually just a, in many ways like, yeah, the concept on the surface was the same, But it was a very much a zero to one development cycle of figuring out how to grow this thing again in this climate. 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 guy. And point you're making here is it was not only was like the infrastructure completely different, the team was different. You had to rethink the entire live wheel of how it worked and how it grew. Yeah, and there were so many layers of like we validated one thing and then the next thing we weren't able like we got stuck on like okay people will it'll spread Or people 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 in light of the new climate that we were operating in.

1:00:35And I always do things by the book, like when it comes to operating, like legally within the compliance framework, 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 can't do that. 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 are inviting friends and all that, you kind of go on a whole diet tribe on that because the thing that I see a lot of founders do is they in the background use user data in ways that it shouldn't be used.

1:01:17Like they invite 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 this Wikipedia article called the Gaia Hypothesis, which is about biology. And it's basically like 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 get even and defend itself. So 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 operate above board with how you design your growth systems.

1:02:12And with gas, we had to do things the right way and we had to figure out at each particular kind of moment of problem that we solve. Like, will it spread within schools, will it hop schools, will people pay for it? All of these things we had to was a whole reinvention of the original product. I love that you shared that because I think a lot of people see you from the outside and they think you're doing all kinds of these scheezy 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.

1:02:53You 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. The point you bring up here about wanting to build a positive thing, there's this like, there's 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 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 Like it made teens feel really good and I think a lot that that is lost on a lot of people Instagram, you know It can make you feel jealousy and they like a lot of other social networks kind of are a mixed bag in terms of impact But we were like entirely focused on making teens feel better.

1:03:48And some of you might say, oh, what if someone doesn't get voted for something? We actually built a system to ensure everyone got a vote. And what we did was we put your name and polls at a higher frequency to if you weren't being voted on recently. So like we wanted to like spread the love in every way possible. And that's what really motivated me to like grow this thing was watching how it was impacting 10 million kids for just in such a short period of time. I really appreciate you're adding that. I didn't know all those things about the way you thought about these these apps. Interestingly, I don't know how much you can go into this, but there's a lot of stuff going on with gas around human trafficking and all this stuff where people thought people are being kidnapped through gas, which is yeah, talk about that, whatever you can because that's pretty crazy.

1:04:41We had this hoax started where people were saying the app was used for human trafficking. And I was like, this is so strange. This is an anonymous polling app without messaging. And the only thing you could do is send compliments to your friends. And I researched into it and I saw that this is actually plaguing a lot of apps. and 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 that about an app. As a teenager, if you say, oh, this app is dangerous, and then you get a bunch of followers.

1:05:24And who doesn't love followers? So it's actually a really viral piece of content if you put it out. And so we have this hoax started, And we were like, this could kill the company. And I talked to a bunch of founders that had happened to them. And they said, yeah, we had to shut down because of that. Wow. And I was like, is this it? Is this the end of the company? And I remember it hit number one when we started getting a few of these reports in our support channels. And I was like, I'm just going to plant the flag and on post that we hit number one in the app store because this thing's probably gonna shut down soon.

1:06:05So 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 I just had this sudden burst of energy and I was like, I'm gonna win, I'm gonna fight this. This is not true, it makes no sense at all. And so we fought it at every vector possible. This completely made up, folks. We 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.

1:06:44So 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 I got them to publicly retract it. And we had some of the reviews on the App Store. We asked Apple to remove them because we got review bombed. But the thing that actually was the most impactful was my girlfriend made a video, a TikTok video explaining that it's not true. And anytime someone deleted their account, they could watch this video explaining it's not true.

1:07:20And at the peak, we had 3 % of users deleting their accounts per day. So it was like really, it was a catastrophe for an app. And we got it down to 0 .1 % through relentless, relentless effort. And it was really just an unusual thing that happens when you grow really fast is this human trafficking hoax that starts. and you don't understand how crazy it is until it happens to your company. But it was kind of hilarious to think about. This app was the most harmless, benign thing you could think of. This is insane. I did not know this whole 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.

1:08:09What was that like to try to manage all these things at once? I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. It was extraordinarily difficult to do it all. Our team was also relentless though. Like they would come over to my house, 9 a .m. stay until midnight and just do that seven days a week. So yeah, 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 we were not interested. But yeah, we went after it on every vector and it ended up being okay.

1:08:59I 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. Yeah, we even remember we had these TikTok videos that were made that were saying it was true. And I had asked, like, I, I, I, I networked my way all the way to the CEO of TikTok. And I said, can you delete these? And we got them to this, this information deleted. Yeah. So it was, it was really a, a whole new test of our, our team's capacities was, uh, fighting 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.

1:09:42And at some, at a few points, the hoax was more viral than our app, and we had to take this. Okay, factor of the hoax. 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, that right? Yeah, it was a blowout success in terms of like like on a grew bigger than TBH. We monetized it. You know, we ran almost entirely on startup credits. So it was basically, you know, like, like, like, like, like AWS credits, like AWS credits, like, it's mixed panel. I remember I was like, when I saw the early date, I'm like, okay, now it's time for me to negotiate every bell down to the last cent of margin for every vendor.

1:10:33And I got credits everywhere. and so we really were tactical with that. And so we ended up being, you know, all just pure cash flow for the team. We had no investors. 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 the internet. And we didn't intend on selling it. We were just gonna let this thing run its course and just be this app that kind of lives in the background of our lives. But once it started capturing the zikai Twitter, I was like, wait a minute, we could probably sell this thing. And that's when we started engaging with some of these, we ended up getting three companies that wanted to buy it.

1:11:21Won't be able to sell them, but ultimately we ended up selling to Discord. And we joined Discord. Awesome. So before we move on to the next part of the journey and some of the other insights that I want to get into, is there any lasting lessons they took away from gas as a product that you take with you to advising startups in terms of building the product? Because I know there's many, but any that stand out most, they think are really interesting to share. I think I kind of touched on this before, which was trying to validate things in a sequence of like, will people use the core flow? Will people spread it within their peer group?

1:12:01Will it hop peer groups? And what I think the most important thing is that I learned is that's actually a really great way to do is year -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, push notification, everything worked. And then the next stage was like getting sharing and virality working. And so compartmentalizing those things, because ultimately you'll have too much scope creep if you try to solve everything at once and validate.

1:12:43And so 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 for the thing to work. 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. Yeah. Okay, maybe one last thing along this thread.

1:13:15I'm just really curious how this hoax came to be like, who's behind it? How does this happen? We got a original support message, which was a screenshot of a story on Snapchat. And it said, do not download the GAS app. It's for human trafficking. And it was a screenshot that had that mirror effect where you have like 10 people at screenshot at it, like more than 40 people. Because it had all the usernames. So I was looking at this and I'm like, how much, how many people have seen this? And it looked like a viral thing on Snapchat. And then I went to the App Store page and I saw a review that said this app is for human trafficking.

1:14:06And I went to my team and I said, you know, we, this might, this will probably kill the company. This will kill the product. I've seen this before with consumer apps, and it's evident to me this is going to be 10 times bigger tomorrow. And they were like, no, it's just one message. What do you mean? I'm like, no, no, it's been screen shot at 40 times, and now it's on the App Store page. Like, and we got another message four hours later. And in the next day, it was, our entire App Store page was just covered with reviews, saying that they apps for human trafficking. And we actually had to rebrand the app.

1:14:47We relaunched it once. And we're like, 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 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 started again and then it was too late at that point to relaunch again. I would just realize we just got it, we got to fight this thing and ultimately I don't will ever know the true origin.

1:15:35But yeah, it was, it was, it was definitely a living breathing, like hoax. That is insane. The story just gets more and more interesting. What are the, what were some of the previous names, by the way, is that something you can share? Yeah, we went through a bunch. We had like one of them was called crush, one of them was called melt and another was, The interesting thing about Crush is we got a great domain. We thought this would be the name. This was between some of the like rebrands. We tested it and we saw that invitations dropped significantly under the Crush name. And we were like, what's going on here?

1:16:18And we found that actually when you invite someone to an app, regardless of the app, you generally met boys and boys, girls and white 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, this was true of TBH2, which was the app indexed about 60 to 65 % women. So we're just like, let's make the app more masculine and see what happens. We need balance on this. So we made the icon black with a flame called a gas and the invites rate jumped. Jump and you think a name doesn't matter, but right at the moment of sending an invite.

1:17:01Yeah, you So that was one of the interesting insights of on the the naming process. Man There's just endless stories that we could keep getting into but we've also gotten very long So I'm gonna try to move on yeah to another topic. So I asked people on Twitter what to ask you Just that question got a thousand likes just me asking which I asked 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 Belsk has this, Robert at Big Mask this, and Scott actually had a really nice way of describing it, about why are so many quick sensation consumer apps proving to be more akin to summer songs than enduring standalone products and businesses?

1:17:45So there's got a two questions here. One is, do you want to build a, do you aim to build a considerable consumer app and to how possible is it? A lot of the fundamental tools for communicating with our friends, either messaging or post -intestive broadcasting, one to many, like on stories or post, you know, those, the incumbents have kind of built pretty large moats in terms of network effects. and to provide true, 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.

1:18:30I'm not to say that it's not impossible. Snapchat was showed that there was a style of messaging that people wanted that the incumbents do 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 communication or social product, that's a black swan event. Like retention for consumer social is like there's a tremendous amount of randomness. There's like one every decade. If it was simple, I would just be printing $1 trillion companies, I'd be printing Facebook's every time I sat down.

1:19:18But I think it's actually 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 most thrilling drug. I think you could you could ever experience and and and just watching it spread all over the country It's like you drop an app and you know the 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 a one week later Like that's a really profound feeling.

1:20:20It's just it's crazy to have that sort of impact as a three -person team and I live for that. When I joined Facebook, this is, here's an interesting connection, you say, 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 wanna make it to one day. And I wanna run a large organization, I wanna have lots of reports. And then I met with VPs and they were actually jealous of me because my quality of life was actually pretty cool. I got to build something high impact that made many teens feel better about themselves, made decent amount of money.

1:21:02Then I wasn't in charge of this becoming a people manager that has to run this large organization for many years. So I think one day I will run maybe a venture -scale business, but I will say that I kind of like the way that I've been doing things so far in terms of quality of life and being fun financially, it's been great. So I think that part is what motivates me and yeah, I don't think, you know, running a large corporation is necessarily what I describe as fun. That's amazing, man. I'm really happy we went here so much of this resonates with the way I think. And obviously a big part of this is also just, it's very hard, as you said, to build a consumer app that grows, first of all, second, that actually lasts.

1:21:56But that is interesting. That you do hope to one day build a venture -funded business. I mean, TBH was venture backed, but I just don't, like, I think I'm gonna have to, like, do I wanna sign up for 10 years? And if you actually look at some of the numbers on like the actual proceeds that some of these founders get after an IPO, after seven rounds of dilution. A lot of them are pretty comparable to what we get from our apps for 90 days of work. So, yeah, the trade -offs there are pretty, pretty faithful. Actually, just on that note, so what would make you actually decide to go venture funded? Did you talk about how, if you're going more mainstream, non -teens, folks after 20 -years -old, is that why you would go that route?

1:22:47I don't think that, like, it's necessarily that part. It's more, I think, if I could keep the team lean and scale up, I think, you know, there's some of the actual founders that actually operate very lean teams and have reached very large scale in terms of the valuations of the company. Actually, the most iconic example is Elon Musk. His teams are actually pretty thin overall. He's in the weeds doing product development. If I was to ever do it, I would do it under a very specific set of operating principles versus turning it into a big tech company. Q investors email you right now with term sheets.

1:23:37Okay. This has been amazing. There's one last segment I want to spend a little time on, which is just kind of a rapid fire of pieces of advice you've shared that I think is incredibly insightful about how to build a successful consumer app. And so thinking I'll just go through like three to five and see what you think and see what you can add to the device. How does that sound? Sounds great. Okay. Cool. So the first is just contact permissions in iOS 18. Changes the game in how people can grow apps. Basically makes it harder to invite your friends, thoughts on how people should be thinking about this in their products.

1:24:14When I first saw it, I was really concerned. This is the tweet about it. You're like, that's the end. Game over. Just let me frame things up for you. The contact permission screen, you know, So you average about 65 % approval rate across all apps. It's higher for teens, lower for adults. But if you have a 65 % consenting to contacts access, then the next step on this new iOS 18 change is you select which contacts you want to allow the app to access. And it's an alphabetical list. And that alphabetical list for me, I have 550 contacts or something. the first 10 contacts are punctuation symbols from whatever like dirty entry I put when I was driving or something.

1:25:04So you have to scroll down and find that name. So I have to find Lenny. I have to add you. And what if you're not an app user? So I just added you and or three others. Assuming users are willing to even do that. And then you like you and then the three others never sign up. but maybe three of your friends do. But I never get connected to them because there's no over. So my expectation is it's going to be very difficult to find friends on apps going forward, to invite friends on apps going forward. And that founders will need to rethink how they do it. And of the companies I'm working with on intro, So we are looking at ways to reinvent what context sync is or what purpose it served.

1:25:56It's not promising, but we have some good leads and I think we'll have a whole new set of apps emerging as a consequence. But if you're betting on context sync as a company right now, yeah, you better start thinking about Plan V. So, I take away here is just, it is now much different and there's an opportunity to think of something really clever that would give you a huge advantage if you can crack it. Yes, but most likely, I think most apps will not have social graphs going forward and this will entrench incumbents even more. I don't think Apple acknowledged that. I think the person that designed the feature probably has never built an app or done on context sync before because the flow is egregiously bad.

1:26:45And it doesn't actually even, I think, benefit the users' privacy because it just completely eliminates the feature altogether. OK. Next topic. So you helped this product all dop succeed. It's doing incredibly well from what I can see. And I say tweet about one of the key things that you helped them through, which is to invert. I'm reading this quote, inverting the time to value so that the user experiences the aha moment in seconds. Talk about that insight and how important that is to building a successful consumer social app. This kind of concept of getting users to the aha moment is something I recurrently bring up to every company I work with.

1:27:24And you have to understand that in 2024, people's attention spans are like three seconds. It's really sad, but we are spread thin through so many notifications, products, everything that if you can't demonstrate value in the first three seconds, it's over. And this also leads back to the context in question that you talked about was you have to sign up and then the first night you have to see all of your friends on the app and experience it, otherwise you'll churn. So this idea of inverting the value, when I was working with Duke, they had this kind of shopping app that had a bunch of different features and there was one feature that I saw that was interesting called DealHop.

1:28:07And it allowed you to just put in a product page, and it would find the cheapest version of it online. Something I already do, kind of through a bunch of duct taped methods of Google, image search, Google Ns. And I was like, that should be a whole company. But how are we going to teach users to do it? And how do we expose them to that aha moment as fast as possible in a memorable iconic way. And I had this product, I built a while back where you just typed the domain in front of an existing URL. I said, I should, I should told them, you should try this. It's like very marketable. And, but you need to get a very short domain that matches what you're doing.

1:28:53And so he went out and bought Duke .com for, I don't know how much, but it was, when he bought that, I was pretty excited. I'm like, well, if this doesn't work, I'm going to feel terrible, but if it does work, it's going to be a blowout success. And so we put out a couple of videos about it, and then it was iconic, went viral, the videos, users remembered to do it, to type duped .com in front of a URL. And now I think they're making millions in ARR, in a matter of like, and I think under 60 days of launching. And that was a blood success. And yeah, of the companies I work with, like, like, you know, that rare, like I would say it happens about 50 % of the time we hit that much success, but the, we hit success.

1:29:37I think 50 % of time is outright failure because consumers are so random. And so what I'm hearing is a big insight is just, ideally get the three seconds time to value. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds great. Easy peasy. Yeah. You really have to craft, you know, on boarding everything to ensure that. And it's, yeah, that's where the design part comes in of being a great product person. I imagine a big part of this is just cutting things you think, like killing your darlings, cutting things you think people need and just being really ruthless with that. Really ruthless, but also being extraordinarily creative with how you use the tools available to activate a user.

1:30:32And I think extraordinary product people are deeply aware of every possible API and how it can be used in non -traditional ways. Like this URL trick was something that I think was non -traditional that people adopted very quickly. I have a whole laundry list of iOS mechanisms that people use for a certain way today, but you can invert them. Contact sync is a great example because you sync your contacts and then it finds all the friends and then ranks the people who are not on the app yet, but have a bunch of friends on it. There's a bunch of ways that you can one tap expose a ton of value to users that I think founders often neglect.

1:31:19And yeah, a lot of founders will go and say, oh, they can just exchange usernames. And that's how they can add each other. That is the most like unrealistic thing ever. Because that means you have to see the username, type it into the app. If you do that, what? 50 times to get a 50 -person friend list. So we're thinking we're looking at like 10 ,000 taps versus one. So that's what I mean by trying to get people to the activation moment, the aha moment, and get them to value. I love that advice. So maybe as a just the last question along these lines, when you come to a founder or a relationship that you're a startup, you're trying to help.

1:32:02Is there one more thing that you find often and so being really helpful to them, any common piece of advice that's like, oh, this is probably what's going to help you. Talked about this aha moment step, the sharing, contact sharing stuff. I guess there's anything else that's just like, this is something that's probably going to help you with your app. Right now, I think I advise around 35, 36 companies. And all of them are at kind of different stages of challenges they're facing. Some of them are pure at the product concept stage. Some of them are venture backed billion dollar companies, and each of them faces different problems.

1:32:44I think the first thing I often do is I ask them to show me the analytics. We look at how people are distributing the app today. What is the milestone that a user must hit to become activated and what's getting in the way of that? I also take a very deep look at every funnel that users come through. And I think a lot of founders separate marketing and product growth, like top of funnel growth from the actual products growth mechanisms, but they're both the same. They're both, like they both should be treated as the same. Like if if you're targeting a community, you want them to all adopt and get saturation.

1:33:37You need to build marketing that shows imagery of that community or whatever. And then when you get in the app, you have to be able to join that community. And when you invite people from that app, that community needs to be mentioned. So you need to actually cover the mark, like everything from the ads to the in -app experience to the ship. All of that needs to be aligned for or a user acquisition and flywheel to spin. A lot of people really screw that up. That's kind of my initial kind of rough approximation of what I do when I come in and try to fix some of the, or try to help with some of the challenges these companies are facing.

1:34:14Okay, so this is actually a great segue to the final thing I want to make sure people understand is you help companies through this. Talk about how you work with companies where they can find you, what kind of companies you're looking to work with and how all that works. Yeah, so I work across the gamut. Most of them are like consumer mobile companies. And there certainly are web ones too, but I work with companies across stages. Typically I recommend that you don't book me unless you're venture backed, because it's little expensive. But my main goal when someone does seek my advice through intro is I try to make them like 10 times back their money in the first 30 days.

1:35:00And so far, I think I've managed to do that with anyone who's mad with me. And that means like, get all the table stakes, growth things out of the way at the minimum. Then identify two to three step function changes that could change their growth trajectory. And these are higher scope, fundamental changes to the product. So I try to couple both, explain to them which direction I believe they should go. It's a conversation and we talk about it. And then once they kind of settle on a direction, I tend to get into pixels, I go into Figma, and we do a live session together and kind of clean things up.

1:35:40I identify, oh, that's gonna convert at this percent. That's gonna, and then I like just manage all that. And then, but yeah, it's generally like post series A, some seed stage companies, and it's been really fun. It's kept my mind sharp on where the market's headed. I've also over the years of building all these apps. I've accrued all these growth hacks that still are nobody knows about. I share those with when it's relevant for the company. It's been great. Doop was one of them. I was advising Saturn. I rebuilt their friend Finder. I think, believe, they're number one in the productivity section above chat GPT as of today.

1:36:23I think I've, but I think I've generally invested in about maybe 10 % of the companies that seek out my advice. Amazing. Well, I know it feels expensive to some people, but if I were a company with cash, it feels like the best deal I could find someone like you to come in and actually help me think through deeply like in the pixels how to make my thing work. So I think you're still undercharging and I hope you keep raising your prices because is clearly there's a lot of demand. Nikita, this was incredible. I feel like people see you on Twitter and they're like, oh, this guy is such a jerk sometimes, but like meeting you in person and talking to you, it's very clear, you're really kind, dude, really thoughtful.

1:37:03All your advice is based on like real things you have done. It's not just you sitting around pontificating and I think that's incredibly valuable. And I'm excited, people are tapping me in all of the time, you're sharing it with people in a wider scale. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. We covered a lot and there's plenty more to come back after the next viral hit. Oh man, it's so I was going to ask you, is there anything you're working on now or is this stage is what can you share? The next thing you have. Stay tuned. Here we go. Amazing. I always ask people, how can listeners be useful to you?

1:37:37So let me just ask you that as a final question. How can listeners be useful to you? Follow me on Twitter and enjoy my ship posts. And I hope you have as much fun with me as me on Twitter. I do, man. I love your tweets. And, Nikita, thank you so much for doing this and for being here. Yeah, thanks a lot. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com.

1:38:17See you in the next episode!