Nikita Bier is Out Of Office

28:32That's pretty cool. awesome feature to roll out and just see the numbers. But when we rolled it out, the feedback from users was like, with any feature on X, like 50 percent hate it, 50 percent love it. But the data spoke for itself. Yeah, of course. As I built this audience on X, a lot of people, let's call them normies, that don't use the platform, they, I would tell them why X is so great, and they wouldn't understand. and I was like, how can I ramp these people up? And I'm like so glad that now there's a way to just get them ramped up, the people that I know in real life. That's awesome. So I feel like that was a really key feature.

29:15I feel like there have been others that I, at least as an outsider, have found very interesting. Obviously, a thing that X has always had to deal with is identity and verifying the identity of a person, getting rid of bad actors who are sort of manipulating the feed by pretending to be someone and posting content. And you launched a feature that I think addresses this in some way, but kind of in a way that I wouldn't expect. I thought it was really clever, the thing that you did with the country of origin. Talk about that and how that came together and what the purpose of it was and why you chose that as the way to sort of combat problems with identity.

29:52So X is the only at-scale social network that has true free speech. That's like a core value of the platform, kind of one of our guiding principles. And why it's so valuable to the world. It's why it's the global town square. And no other product has kind of filled that role since X. And the content that people read, they have to verify the authenticity of what they're reading. Because certainly you can try to manipulate discourse by making it seem like something is more supported or more people are against something than by, you know, posting comments. And we had to work within the constraints of like, OK, we're a free speech network.

30:36How can we enable users to verify the authenticity and make sure that what they read is truly representative of what people think? Meaning, how do you balance the sort of mission, the edict of free speech with the idea that with free speech inevitably becomes misinformation and deception? And obviously you don't want to be a platform for deception and misinformation. Yeah. So if people are forming their opinions based off what they read on X, they need to know that the content they read is authentic. And this feature came about like users actually had suggested it. And I kind of had it in the back of my mind as something that could potentially resolve this.

31:24Country of origin? What do you mean specifically? Yeah. Why does that solve it? So when you read maybe a political post, you'll know, like, is it actually an American that's saying that? Is it actually a person in France saying that? Someone who has no stake in this problem and why are they speaking on behalf of it? So it's specifically meant to combat political misinformation. Truly, like in any form, you should just be able to verify anything that you read. And when we were like building it out, this was a pretty controversial feature. Historically, X had been, you know, you could be on a pseudonym, you could be posting from, you could claim you're from one place and be in another.

32:03And what we did was, in the way that I said, like we're building in public, we decided to preview the feature first to get feedback on it. So we announced it and we learned a lot. Like in countries that have limitations on like penalties for things you might say, we have to have enough privacy safeguards so you can still speak your mind. But the counterparty to that still knows generally where something's coming from. And so we added this region toggle. That allowed us to launch the precise feature that solved this problem. And it was a huge undertaking to actually verify that someone is actually from this place because people use VPNs.

32:48And I think some of my kind of hacker roots, thinking like an adversary, really, really helped here. And then the other side was like a privacy dimension, too. Like if you're traveling, should it be in real time updating your location? So we had to think through all those scenarios. And so when we launched it, it ended up unmasking all of these, like, they're basically like grifters that were pretending to be Americans or pretending to be in Japan. And, like, I think the Ivanka Trump fan club account with millions of followers was based in Nigeria. And when you're working there, you stumble across this stuff regularly.

33:29Yeah. Internally, you see, like, oh, this account is not who they say they are. I mean, it was really unsettling when you see that. Yeah. And I'm like, well, we can't suspend them. Right. Because this is a free speech network. But we can add transparency that shows you, you know, is this person who they say? Right. So instead of silencing or banning or whatever, it's like, actually, let's just add more context, more information. It's like the whole sunlight is the best disinfectant thing. Yeah. What are the other ways that you can provide more? So Country of Origin is actually really, really interesting because, yeah, like you said, it helps.

34:08It sounds like it helps specifically with political content, but what are the other ways that you could provide transparency to help users better judge the authenticity of content? So, I mean, we have community notes. Right. Yeah, that's great. And then Grok. Grok, yeah, Grok's a good one. Yeah. You mean just how everyone is now asking Grok to verify something. I'm seeing that on, I feel like I see that on like 50 % of posts now. Yeah. So all these products are like perfect complements to what X is. And X is a perfect complement to Grok because, I mean, the mission of XAI has been to build the maximally truth-seeking AI.

34:42And you can only have that when you have a true free speech network. Yeah. Because ultimately, truth is debated, discussed, and determined on X every day. Yeah. How do you verify human-generated content? Is that something you've thought about? Whether it's using AI to confirm that something was written by a human, or I've heard rumors of OpenAI wanting to build a network that only allows people who have scanned. I think this is one of the great challenges of the next few years. With LLMs basically at our fingertips, it's been extraordinarily easy for people to spam. And it's hard to define what actually, where is the line?

35:33Where is the line? Is AI a tool or is it replacing humans? Yeah. Some people, when they draft a post, they run it through AI to, you know, clean up the language, like make it sound smoother. And so I don't think the jury's out really on how this problem should be solved. Yeah. The one glimmer of hope here is that I don't think we'd have a path out at X unless we were the same company building a frontier AI model. Yeah. And the smartest AI model. You need to align those interests. You need to align the missions to solve this stuff. Yeah. If the companies had it merged, I don't think we'd have a solution to this.

36:15We're making progress, but this is a really challenging problem. Each day, content that's written by AI is harder and harder to tell that it was written by AI. Yeah. The other feature or area of X that I feel is probably the most discussed since even before you joined, or actually even before it became X, is links. Posting links. Does posting links get penalized? Does it not get penalized? Should you post without a link and then reply with a link? This has been a huge topic for a long time. And then obviously very recently, or I guess within the past couple of months, you launched a feature that I think is meant to address this.

36:53Like, give us the real story of links on X. Yeah. General principle has been that social networks discourage links because it pushes you off platform and you spend less time in the app. We want to keep you on platform. That's why Instagram does not allow links in the captions, why there's no links on TikTok, and why Facebook has demoted them. Facebook demotes them? Yeah. Oh, wow. Like in the algorithms. Yeah. Okay. But what about X? So when you view a link on X, you open the page, the web view opens up, you read this article, and then it actually blocks all the engagement buttons while you're reading it.

37:36There's no like button. Takes over the whole screen. There's no comment. You read it, you close it, you go back to timeline. and then X can't get any signals about whether or not that content was any good. And not only that, I mean, I imagine oftentimes people then also choose to open in Safari, which takes them out of the app completely. When I was seeing that happen, and I knew like a lot of writers are on X, a lot of journalists, and they were complaining about this. And it was an issue that I, you know, genuinely felt we had to solve. So I kind of sat down with a pen and paper and I was like, how can we allow you to engage while you're reading a web page on X?

38:16And so I designed this mechanic where the engagement, the caption, the actual post is right below the page. We prototyped it, made it feel really smooth so that while you're reading something, you can engage, you can like it. And suddenly we saw link impressions go way up. But the thing we were like really mindful of was would it actually lead to less time spent in the app? And it was actually flat. And that was a huge success. Because now writers could post links, and you have to. I mean, if you're building an audience, you're selling something, it's part of what you post. When we finally saw that this was working so well, like we scaled it out and it's now the exact same UI has been adopted by threads and Reddit.

39:06Yeah, crazy. And it was kind of cool. It was cool to set the industry standard on how links should be viewed on social networks. The really awesome part, though, is I'm actually really proud of the design. It actually feels really nice with the haptics and everything. I think we hit that one out of the park. And so it's win-win for everyone, the writers, the platform, and the readers. So basically what you're saying is the algorithm that controls the timeline, historically, it would not deprioritize links, but it would prioritize content that led to more engagement. And links inevitably lead to less engagement because it's taking people off the platform.

39:48So those posts would get deprioritized. But now with this new feature, what you're seeing is because you keep the like button, the repost button visible, and people stay in the app, you're actually getting signals while people are reading this content, which means the algorithm can now prioritize this content or does prioritize this content. Finally, we can get signal about whether someone actually liked this post. That was ultimately the core problem. Yeah, that's cool. That's really cool. They would get no engagement. It wasn't any intentional act of demoting links. It was just a byproduct of the UI.

40:24Reflecting on it now is like, all that we had to change was just some of the core product. I actually built some of it myself with Claude Code, actually. Oh, really? You five-coded it? Yeah, so I shipped some of them. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I shipped some production code to X for that. That's awesome. Tell me, what's it been like now a year in working for Elon? What's that like? I mean, obviously, we've all read the stories, the Walter Isaacson book. We know the intensity he brings, the passion he brings, but tell us what it's really like. So I worked at Meta, I worked at Discord, and I've basically done the roadshow around all the social networks and seeing how all these organizations operate.

41:09At an Elon company, it's a very flat organization. Large number of people report direct to Elon, and there's very few managers. Everyone has an incredible amount of agency. We come up with an idea. We build it in a week and it's out. You know, at Facebook, things would take months to get approvals, even after engineering was done. But working with Elon, I've never seen an executive with his amount of responsibility that is that deep in the weeds. He cares a lot. He does weekly reviews basically with every engineer at the company. Wow. And you just go around with, you have one or two slides, you present what you got done that week.

41:46He gives feedback. The amount of contact switching that he has to do between SpaceX, Tesla, and XAI and X, and Boring Company and Neuralink, it's incredible. And he has, you know, just an incredible perspective on each of these problems. And I think the thing that I didn't really fully internalize before working, you know, directly with him is Elon always takes the high road. Like he will always do the hard things. When you're a consumer product builder, you're often looking for like short-term growth hacks, quick wins. And like I'd present some of these options and he'd be like, no, we're going to do the hard thing.

42:30He says, we have to do this. This is the most important thing we have to do. We have to rebuild the algorithm or we have to build these data centers. And I think that's the reason so much wealth has been created with his companies and his shareholders and why investors kind of are ready to, you know, finance his next project, because he will always do the hard thing. And that was such a profoundly different approach to what I had been, you know, used to, you know, working at other companies or a lot of stuff I've seen in tech. Like a lot of these things, those hard things seem absolutely impossible.

43:08But when he gives engineers agency to do it and says, let's make it two weeks, like rebuild the algorithm in two weeks. Yeah. Amazing things happen. Yeah, it motivates them. Yeah. And when you have very little communication overhead, small teams, these miracles happen. Yeah. And that's how he built a data center in two months when everyone said it would take two years. Yeah. Any crazy stories to share? Yeah, I think like when we're in a conference room, like presenting slides, you kind of like lose context on the amount of impact this single person has had on the world. We had this little incentive for if you refer to a bunch of people, got them hired at the company, you go to Starbase and see a rocket launch.

43:54Oh, that's sweet. When I arrived at Starbase, I was like, that is a crazy place. Elon has essentially built like a city in Texas for the pure purpose of, you know, going to Mars. Yeah. When you're just surrounded by rockets and you see this whole infrastructure, like the city that's developed around, there's like restaurants. Oh, wow. And then as far as the eye can see, you can see factories. And the same thing happened when we were going out, you know, to fundraise for XAI's last round. We flew out to the Gigafactory in Austin. And you just look around and you see just miles of just factories coming up, the Optimus factory, the Tesla.

44:43And then you see the cars coming out of the assembly line autonomously. Yeah. So when I'm deep in the pixels on X, I sometimes forget. The way that Elon always does the hard things is the reason that all of this infrastructure has been built. and all this huge impact to society has happened. Wild. I'd love to see more of Redondo. Yeah, let's do it. All right, cool. Let's go.

45:15So what is next for you at X? We're building a lot of new things on timeline for the different niches on the platform. One of the things I'm most excited about is a feature called Smart Cash Tags, which show real-time financial data, like charts, and allow you to effectively trade from timeline. You just type a ticker, and then you'd be able to click it, and then you'd see the chart and all the conversations around it. A lot of money is allocated based off of what people read on X. You know, hedge fund managers are on there. People are trying to gauge sentiment. I think it'll benefit like the financial community, also the crypto community.

46:00So that's super exciting. The key problems I'm looking to solve is the app's 20 years old at this point. And everyone has created an account at one point or another. And what we're trying to do is like we have billions of accounts that only check in for news. And I'd like to get them ramped up on their interests. a lot of resurrections of dormant users that we'd like to do. That'll be much easier now that we have a new onboarding flow with starter packs. What about, you know, I've noticed in recent months now I have like a, I have money in my X account. There's like a, I guess, is it sort of like a bank now?

46:43What's the plan for all those features? I mean, Elon originally, he's wanted to turn X into this kind of financial network where you can do your banking. So you want to be able to do like banking, financial services, all right on X. Yeah. The vision has always been like the everything app. And but like I for the last six months, I've just been so focused on making sure that the areas that we have deep product market fit, like timeline, works for everyone. And that's ramping them up on the accounts that they should be following. Because ultimately, when you look at a social network, the most important thing is having good inventory of content.

47:24Right. And then the XAI team works on the algorithm to decide who it's most relevant for. But I think the links feature certainly created a vastly more friendly environment for creators to post links as a form of content. Do you think there's an opportunity to take some of these financial features and the fact that you're already compensating creators and, I don't know, like merge those together? Like basically incentivize creators more through liquidity and use that to get enough sort of money into the system that people start now like actually transacting either with themselves or maybe to buy things on the platform?

48:07Is that like part of the vision? Yeah, I mean, if users can transact directly from their timeline, buy products that are recommended to them, that's the ultimate vision here. And I've bought so many things off the recommendations of users on X. What have you bought? You get companies like Eight Sleep that have just built their entire brand and business off of sentiment on X. When an advertiser thinks about where they want presence, I think a lot of them ignore that X is where sentiment and public opinion is determined, and everything else is downstream of there. Like, as a business, you kind of want to win the hearts and minds of users on X because everything is downstream from there.

48:53Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I know, like, when Twitter became X, you know, there was this whole notion of advertisers leaving the platform. And I think I've heard maybe you say or seen Elon posts that like advertisers have come back. Like, is that an area of the business that's really growing again and getting revitalized? Yeah, I think, you know, we had 90 percent of advertisers return to the platform. I think it's actually higher than that since the acquisition. And I think they're starting to realize, you know, the highest agency, most influential people in the world are on X.

49:32And if you want to reach them, you have to have a presence here. So where are we going now? Where are you taking me? So we're going to check out the Strand, which is probably one of the most beautiful places, I think, in the world. You'll see where I grew up, and you'll see a beautiful Redondo Beach. Awesome.

50:02We're looking at where I grew up. There? That's Palos Verdes, one of the most beautiful places in LA. Nice. Awesome. Yeah, it's super beautiful around here and we got the perfect day. So I feel like you're kind of famous for building and selling the same app twice. Maybe that's unfair, but that's kind of the legend. So I think we need to unpack that a little bit and learn about TBH and gas. I started that, the first company - TBH. Out of college. Yeah. That's when I kind of realized I love building consumer products. The company actually originally started as a tool called Politify that would tell you the financial impact of different presidential policies.

50:49This was while you were at Berkeley? Yeah, I started it in my senior year at Berkeley. And that's when I made this kind of change where I'm like, I don't want to go to law school. I don't want to be a consultant or anything. I love building consumer apps. And that product went super viral. And we raised some money. We were going to... This is the politics app. Yeah. We were going to make it into this economic simulator company that was licensing software to governments. After doing that for a year, we encountered the government shutdown in the middle of the fundraising process. I realized it actually kind of sucks to sell software to the government.

51:34And what was actually really fun was building this viral app that really resonated with users. and so I pivoted the company to be this consumer app studio. And we probably built like 15 apps during the course of that, the history of that company. And we were on our last legs and I started seeing a pattern on Snapchat of teenagers sending their friends compliments and the game was called TBH. We're like, could we productize this and actually turn it into like a whole experience? And we unpacked what those people were doing. And they were just looking for like this avenue to disclose their feelings in a safe space.

52:19And we launched it as TBH to send anonymous compliments to your friends using a poll mechanic where you answer polls. I ended up writing all the polls. Yeah, what are examples? Who has the best smile, great fashion sense. like love their taste in music, and then you'd pick one of the four names, and then they'd say, you know, a girl in ninth grade picked you for this one. These all sound positive. Is that the idea? Yeah. There were a lot of anonymous apps that had come before us, and most of them actually had to shut down because of bullying. And we were like, well, how can we capture the value of why these anonymous apps were created and still make sure that, you know, people weren't bullied?

53:04And we came up with this mechanic, and it immediately went viral. It went to number one in the App Store in a matter of like two weeks and we just launched it in one city in Georgia and it just spread through the rest of the country like wildfire. What was kind of energizing about building that product though was like we would get messages every day from kids who said, you know, I was considering like self-harm, like suicide, but then I got all these affirmations from my friends and I felt that I was actually valued in the world and they reconsidered their decisions. And we get those messages every single day.

53:45So it was hugely impactful for teens from that generation. And then also, within 30 days of launching, Facebook showed up and said, we love what you're doing, we'd like to acquire you. And we sold it within two months of launching. That's wild. That's great. I mean, so many social apps, I feel like, have this viral sort of flash in the pan moment, and then they sort of fizzle out. You know, maybe TBH would have sustained forever, but it's probably not a bad idea to sell and strike while the iron's hot in those first few months. Yeah, I mean, things that rise very fast tend to also crash really fast.

54:25But what we kind of understood in retrospect was that many of these kind of viral apps have a short shelf life. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're not valuable to society. A lot of these viral apps basically are like films. You watch it, it has this cultural impact. And then people move on. So it's like almost a piece of content. It was good timing to sell. And I was proud of the impact we had. And then I got my first job ever, which was working at Facebook, which was a huge change because we were like a four-person company before this. And suddenly we joined the youth team, which was like, I think like 150 people.

55:14And it was crazy to see just one small part of the company was that much larger than what our team was. That's wild. And you mentioned you launched in one school in Georgia. What does that mean? And then how did you, why Georgia? How did you launch in one school? Like, what was the point of that? So I think with any kind of social network, the hardest part is getting enough density so that the value can emerge. So we knew we could validate the concept if one cluster of friends were all on the app. And so we kind of developed a reproducible model to just flood the school with ads, do highly relevant marketing.

55:58You mean on Instagram or Facebook or something? Just like point everyone from that school to this app. Yeah, and try to get everyone to download at the exact same time and try to get critical mass. And so we were doing that with all our apps that we had launched over months, just getting quick signal. And then if it didn't resonate, we'd go and launch again. That's really smart. So then you would just pick more schools and then you would sort of replicate it or all you really need to do was Georgia and then it just kind of took off. It was just a validation tool was because we knew if the product resonated, it would grow organically.

56:37So we we just did that at a handful of schools. Like each time we test a new product, we would we would do that. And usually within 48 hours, we'd know if it was working. and with TBH, we knew that night. It was like, you know, a lot of my team was pretty fatigued after five years of building apps. Two engineers of the four gave their two weeks notice the day before we launched. Oh, wow, whoa. And I said, well, let's launch this last one. Let's give it our best. And, you know, what if it gets to number one and then they all just kind of laughed? It caught like wildfire and it's kind of like, It was like a movie almost.

57:21Wow. What was it like working in Meta, especially as your first job? I guess back then it was Facebook. Yeah. I saw how these large tech organizations are run. I was wearing all the hats when I was running the startup. It was a lot easier to focus on the things I cared about. But there's huge amounts of communication overhead, a lot of stakeholders. As an entrepreneur, it's like a very jarring change, but I'm glad I did it. And I spent four years there, and I primarily focused on building zero-to-one social apps and testing them. But I also advised Instagram and Messenger, and yeah, it was a good experience.

58:06And then, so you eventually left, obviously, after four years. And then, you know, I think there's like this kind of this joke that you then built the same app and sold the same app. Is that kind of how you see it? It was called gas. Yeah. I always wondered, you know, like if we monetized it, would we have had to have sold? And I was curious, like, would it work again, you know, four years later? And so there was an engineer that his name was Isaiah. and he said, I just left my job. Is there anything you want to build? I said, I have one idea. And he came over to my house and started building it.

58:48The idea being the same idea or was gas different? Yeah, yeah. Well, the optics of it were largely the same, like the value proposition, but... Meaning like, let's do these polls or some sort of polling mechanism that's positive and sort of gets people to bring their friends in. Yeah. Okay. But a lot of the kind of growth systems and certain mechanics had to be reinvented because the landscape had changed. So we had to rebuild invitations, but I think the thing that I've been exceptionally good at when it comes to doing social app product development is getting the social graph right, which is, so when someone signs up, can they find everyone that they know?

59:37And when we launched it, we launched actually in the same school. The same school in Georgia? On the same day, five years later. Five years is interesting because now you're dealing with people that definitely didn't try it before, didn't try TBH before. Yeah. You know, a lot had changed over the years, but it took off just like it had five years ago. That's wild. But this time we had all these learnings from the previous app, and it grew way faster. Oh, wow. And that was wild to see. Like TBH, we suddenly had a bunch of companies interested in buying us. and Discord reached out. And I thought, you know, this is a fast growing social app that we could help fuel their growth.

1:00:37And that also happened in a matter of like a couple months. Wow. And so once again, it's like, strike while the iron is hot. You don't know what's going to happen. Let's sell to Discord. Yeah, but I mean, there was no urgency and that wasn't the like plan because we monetized it. There's a little subscription that was optional for users. And it made$10 million in 90 days. Wow, that's pretty good. I mean, the entire company was run on free startup credits too. And there were no salaries. We just used, everyone had equity. So it was like, it was a home run on that front. And then when - And you didn't raise money either.

1:01:16We didn't, it was, I self-financed it. It cost$25 ,000 to get it started up, and that was it. That's wild. Yeah. And so this myth started. You can sell the same app twice. But I think it was like the circumstances just emerged again. Good timing. Yeah. Speaking of timing, I'd love to see more of Redondo and PV. You want to grab some food or something? Yeah, let's get some tacos. All right, let's do it.

1:01:55So what is this place? We're at the Redondo Beach Pier. This place used to be like totally packed in the 90s. Kind of a lesson of innovator die. But it still kind of gives this nostalgic vibe of an era past. Would you come here a lot when you were a kid? Yeah. We'd hang out here. There's an arcade down over there. And this is like the equivalent of... Yeah, there's nobody here. So this is like where you would come with friends and hang out like after school and stuff? Yeah, I went like fishing on the docks that we're going to work by in a second. Want to get some tacos here? Yeah, let's do it.

1:02:33All right. Oh, wow. So when you and I first started talking a lot, you had stepped away from Discord and you were... The thing I found fascinating is you were basically like consulting on growth for a living. Like you were like the product growth expert. I think you were doing it on Intro. Like how did that all come together? I've been sharing sort of my learnings over the years on X since like 2017. And that's kind of how this like big audience grew around me. And I realized a lot of people reached out for advice on their apps. And a friend of mine in LA, I started a company called Intro Rod.

1:03:15And he said, you should offer help through our service. And so it was kind of a cool way to off board from my full time job and just help a bunch of startups get a bunch of exposure to all different things happening in the ecosystem. It was a lot of fun. It started off with mostly like, you know, really small companies like Series A and then public companies started reaching out. You know, I was talking to like Coinbase and Sweetgreen, like all over the place. What I learned was like, you know, a lot of the lessons and tactics to grow kind of a social network apply to many other products. There's a lot of like hard fought lessons that I picked up over the years, like undisclosed growth hacks and things like that, that have been super helpful.

1:04:01And the most amazing part is just, you know, you're helping a company. They have kind of a novel concept, but they haven't gone through the years of learning on how to grow things. and just to watch their apps suddenly hit the top of the app store. Yeah. Any good examples or stories for that time? After I joined X, there was an app called Bible Chat. Yeah, of course. It's an app for like prayer. And I was advising them for like six months. And right when X kind of hit the top of the charts, they unseated us. No way. So the same app that I had been helping and giving the tactics to unseated. What did it?

1:04:42Like what was the magical feature or growth hack that like made it possible for them to do that? When it comes down to it, there's really no silver bullet to growth. When I start any sort of advisory engagement, I'm like, we're going to not leave a single stone unturned. We're going to, you know, juice every surface we can to make sure that if people are having a great time on the app, that they can tell their friends about it. And ultimately, to get virality, you have to just incrementally find bits of K-factor, because you need to get to a 1.0 K-factor to be truly viral. For a lot of apps, like utility apps and not social networks, there isn't necessarily a path to get to a full 1.0 K-factor, but what I was helping to do was at least get them above 0.5.

1:05:35Yeah. And then they'd augment that with paid acquisition. Right. And obviously, organic distribution is ideal because you get genuine users from referrals from their peers. But, you know, the only way apps can grow, aside from word of mouth, is referrals like invitations, like one to one acquisition. And then the other is sharing one to many. So like, you know, posting on your story. and you really have to unpack those funnels. A lot of people conflate, you know, going viral on TikTok, having a video about your product, but that's not true. That's not organic. That's not organic. Yeah, it's kind of like a press bump.

1:06:15True product-led growth is where the mechanics of the product are actually driving the acquisition. So you're really, I mean, the two things you're really focusing then on are people inviting their friends and people sharing on one-to-many channels. Like, those are the two tactics. Yeah, but I mean, sometimes I meet with a, I met with a company and I'm like, we need to rename the app. And if you read, why is that? Because it was hard to communicate the value proposition. It wasn't the conversion rates to download were really poor. And an example of that was, it was kind of a controversial decision, but it was a longevity app that I've been advising for a couple of years.

1:06:53And they were originally called most days. And I said, let's just call it Def Clock. and it communicated exactly what the product did. So in addition to all the virality mechanisms that they employed, it was actually a great story that the press talked about. And once they did the renaming, they had a bid on it on Stephen Colbert. Oh, wow. And I was like, well, that was the right decision. But it's all in service of the funnel, right? It's like if we get the positioning right, we get the name right, then when the person lands on the App Store page, they'll more easily understand it and it'll lead to higher install.

1:07:28Yeah, I think the biggest gap I see with startups when they try to grow, they're not actually methodically looking at every part of the funnel. And there's crazy places that users drop off that you wouldn't ever anticipate. And it starts with just instrumentation and knowing what's happening through the whole thing. Are you starting from the top of the funnel when you do this? Like, do you basically look at is the first step to look at, you know, whatever install rate, then it's like, OK, who taps? How many people tap the sign up button? OK, how many people put in their name? Like, are you literally going one step at a time or is there a or is the order in which you tack the funnel kind of random or doesn't matter?

1:08:12What I try to do is like to see where is there already organic distribution happening? So that's like my first kind of overview is like I ask a question, how is it growing today? and how can we augment that? So that often looks at like trying to attribute traffic where are these downloads coming from? And, but I mean, on a lot of the stuff, like an onboarding funnel, I could look at it in, you know, 30 seconds and just immediately see. Know where the issue is. Yeah. That's what was a really fun period of like where I was still figuring out what I wanted to do. And I got to meet some really awesome people over that year.

1:08:50Doing the consulting work. Yeah. Yeah. And then like with some of these, I think you also end up becoming an angel investor or you have become an angel investor. And tell us about that. What has that been like? What are some of your favorite investments? So one of my childhood friends that lived in PV with me, Rahul, he was actually a police officer initially. He told me he wanted to start a tech company. So I invested in his first company. What was that? So that one was called Spider Tech. And it was like a CRM for police officers. If you call, it'll send you like a feedback note, things like that.

1:09:28Wasn't really a big hit. Got my money back. But then he came to me a second time. I was like, there's a really big opportunity here with using drones for public safety, for firefighters, for police officers. Started this company called Aerodome. Redondo Beach PD is a customer. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. And if you look at... That must be cool for him. He's a reserve for Redondo Beach PD still. Oh, wow. Yeah, but I mean, these drones, they basically eliminated car break-ins in San Francisco. Rates are down like 80 % now. So it's really a technology that I was proud to get behind because it actually has an immediate impact to quality of life for people.

1:10:07Yeah, that's really cool. What are you thinking now about kind of how AI changes app building and maybe even more specifically growth of products? The role of engineers is changing rapidly, almost too fast. But what I've seen at X and at startups I've been talking to is like, engineers are effectively conductors at this point. And they're spending way less time doing more of the boilerplate code writing. And I think we're going to see one of the biggest kind of economic booms because of it. On the other end of it, I've seen many products from non-technical people get built that otherwise would have never been built.

1:10:55And it's amazing to watch. Yeah, it's crazy the way that people are able to build stuff now. Like, what impact do you think that has on startups and startup building? Like, are we going to still see people, you know, raising a bunch of money, hiring a bunch of people, you know, hiring a bunch of engineers? Or do you think the role of the engineer changes such that people are more like PMs and kind of anyone can build? I think engineers are still going to have a critical role in the company. But I think the validation process is going to be much faster. and ultimately I think when you're building production code, especially like back-end code, you probably want to harden it against security vulnerabilities, things like that.

1:11:37Don't want to really vibe code a database of social security numbers or something. Do you think this changes kind of the platform dynamics of say the app store or the traditional ways in which products are distributed, monetized, who gets to distribute and monetize them? How do you think about that? Well, one thing that we're seeing right now is the number of apps submitted to the app store has kind of skyrocketed in the last few months. So I think it's going to unlock a whole other level of creativity and personalization for products that weren't economically viable. Because traditionally, it would have cost$200 ,000,$250 ,000 to get a fully baked production app into the app store.

1:12:22or sign-up flows, we're sharing all that. Now, a lot of smaller niche markets can have products built for them. And I think that's really exciting because you'd go to a VC and say, I wanna raise money for this idea. And they'd be like, what's the TAM? And then you'd be like, oh, it's a few hundred million, not big enough. But I think that's gonna change now. And I'm pretty excited for that. Yeah, for sure. Me as well. I may have seen on X that you choked recently. Is this a thing? Yeah, I was eating some fried chicken and it got like stuck and scratched my throat and I posted about it. And I mean, this has happened to me a couple of times.

1:13:04Where you've choked or you've gotten something stuck in your throat? Yeah, where I've got stuff stuck in my throat and the ex-users found all the posts of me talking about it over the years. and they were like memeing it. But then one guy replies, you have this disease, a cellophilus esophagitis. Apparently it's like an inflamed esophagus. I went to see a doctor and they did an endoscopy and the diagnosis was that. I thought we hit AGI. It was the power of the hive mind. It wasn't even AI. It was just the community. Yeah. It was like honestly one of the greatest marketing moments for X. But also there was a post that said, And Nikita thought he was building products for users, but he was actually building a product for himself.

1:13:48Saves your life. It's so funny. Whenever I post anything on X, I look at Google Alerts, and they write an article about it. So the SpaceX doctor reached out and said, I read about the chicken getting stuck in your throat. I'm like, what? And I was like, where do they write that? But yeah, that was a funny experience. I guess that happens almost every day on X. That's wild. Well, I'm glad you're okay. Yeah, show me a little bit more of the pier. Yeah. Let's do it.

1:14:25Well, I know you got to get back to work. Thank you so much for showing me around Redondo Beach. It's been a lot of fun seeing where you grew up. Thanks for having me. All right, man. I'll see you soon. I'll see you on X. Yes, see you on X later, man. All right, see you. All right. Thank you so much for tuning into this special episode of Out of Office with Nikita Beer. If you don't already subscribe to the show, go ahead and hit that subscribe button or that follow button, depending on whatever platform you're watching this on. And of course, if you want to learn more about Lightspeed, you can follow us at LightspeedVP.

1:14:57Or if you want to follow me, you could follow me at Magnano. Out of Office is a production of Lightspeed and Pod People. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next time. Thank you.