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

honored to be on a product management

podcast for a person who doesn't believe

product management is real. We're

already We're already getting into the

hot takes. You launched TBH, went viral,

and you end up selling it to Facebook.

What was the insight that helped you

come up with this is a big idea that we

should try?

I looked on the App Store, and the

number one app in the United States was

an app called Sarahah. But, the entire

app was in Arabic. Like, the strongest

signal that you could ever have that

people want something.

This is insane. I I did not know this

full story. So, we launched this app. It

immediately took off. Servers started

crashing. I looked at our numbers, and

I'm like, we will be number one in the

United States in like 6 days.

The tip that you're sharing here is look

for latent demand.

Where people are trying to obtain a

particular value and going through a

very distorted process. If you can

actually crystallize what their

motivation is, you can have this kind of

intense adoption.

I I didn't know you're actually a

product manager at Facebook.

The thing I didn't realize as a product

manager in a large tech company is there

is very little product management that

you do. They're mainly just writing of

documents and then kind of being the

team secretary and running around

getting approvals. But, products live

and die in the pixels. You should be

designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the

flows, everything. That's on you.

At some point, you started tweeting

like, "Hey, I'm working on a new app."

Everyone was going nuts. I saw a stat

that you made $11 million in sales, 10

million downloads.

The thing that is hard to really

understand is it is absolute chaos to

keep the thing online. I was sleeping 3

hours a day for 3 months. Our team was

also relentless though. They would come

over to my house 9:00 a.m., stay until

midnight, and just do that 7 days a

week.

anything else that's just like, "This is

something that's probably going to help

you with your app?"

With certainty, if you're good at your

job, you can make an app grow and go

viral. Over the years of building all

these apps, I've accrued all these

growth hacks that still nobody knows

about.

Today, my guest is Nikita Bier. Nikita

has built, launched, and helped get more

apps to the top of the App Store than

any human I've ever come across. He sold

his first big hit, TBH, to Facebook for

over $30 million.

He sold his second big app, Gas, to

Discord for many millions more. He did

this all with a tiny team and very

little funding. He's also helped dozens

of founders and apps, and is an advisor

or investor to companies like Flow,

Citizen, BeReal, Lockit, and

Wealthsimple, and many more. Today, he

spends his time advising companies on

viral growth strategies, design

feedback, structuring their product

development process, and a lot more.

What I love about Nikita is that he has

very strong opinions about how to build

successful products that are rooted in

him actually doing the work over the

past decade to see for himself what

works and what doesn't. Nikita has been

the single most requested guest on this

podcast, and you'll soon see why. This

episode is packed with tactics and

stories and lessons that I am sure will

leave you wanting more. If you want to

work with Nikita on your app, you can

actually book his time at

intro.co/nikitabier.

And if you enjoy this podcast, don't

forget to subscribe and follow it in

your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

It's the best way to avoid missing

future episodes, and helps the podcast

tremendously. With that, I bring you

Nikita Bier.

Nikita, thank you so much for being

here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for

having me. I'm excited to to dive in.

I'm also I feel

honored to be on a product management

podcast for a person who doesn't believe

product management is real. We're

already We're already getting into the

hot takes. Uh we're definitely going to

chat about Wait, and you said not real.

Okay, I thought you were going to say

not not useful. Okay, this is good.

Okay, let's put a pin in that. I think

we think this. I think everyone already

feels this. I think this is going to be

a very special conversation. I've been

looking forward to chatting you for a

long time.

And there's so much that I want to ask

you.

The way that I'm thinking we frame this

conversation is we go through the story

behind the apps that you've built or

helped build that have hit the top of

the App Store. And basically hear the

inside story of what it took to build

those apps and to make them successful.

And then through that, try to extract as

many lessons as we can

about what it takes to build a

successful viral consumer app these

days.

How's that sound to you? Sounds amazing.

And a lot of it was luck, but a lot of

it was

very very tactical work that went into

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First, I want to start with something

that I think very few people know about

you. So, the first thing that you built,

the first product that you built was

uh very different from what you do these

days, and it was a product called

Politify, which something I actually

would really want. It helps you decide

who to vote for based on how it would

impact your life.

Can you just share a bit about just that

part of your life and why you decided to

pivot away from that into consumer apps?

Yeah, so when I was in college, I was

really interested in this kind of uh

thing that American voters do, which is

like they they vote against their own

financial self-interest. Like, people in

New York and San Francisco, you know,

vote for Democrats for higher taxes.

People in Kansas uh vote for Republicans

for low taxes and not

uh and they, you know, they make less

money and so they fewer government

benefits. And I wanted to build this

tool that would help communicate the

financial impacts of these policy

proposals of presidents. And I I built

it in like my last year of college, and

we it was just a web app that we put

out, and it would it would calculate

their tax proposals, the government

benefits that they were proposing, and

you would enter in your basic personal

information, how many kids you have, uh

if uh your age, and then it would just

tell you in dollars what the impact

would be. And it also tell you uh we

simulated those policies also against uh

the tax returns of every zip code, so

you could see how it impacts your

community. We went super viral. Um like,

I think very few people thought of

politics that way, and I think we got

like 4 million uh users on it uh during

that season of the uh during that

election.

And like, it was just a kind of like a

project that we raised some grant money

for, but it ended up feeding into this

company that we uh spun up. And that was

called Outline um because we had a bunch

of

Massachusetts actually reached out, and

I I flew out there to meet with them,

and uh that was going to be our first

customer. And so, I we uh we raised some

money, we got a we won a government

contract, and

uh we joined Techstars uh the

accelerator. And we ended up getting uh

we we got a contract in the pipeline

with the Obama administration.

Uh and then we uh we got this uh

contract, and we started building it,

and the government shutdown happened in

the middle of like as we were building

it, and we had one of our contracts

canceled. And I realized like I I

actually really don't like selling

software to governments. And my core

competency all along was making things

that go viral on the internet. Uh like

that was that was what we had built, not

this policy simulation tool. And so, you

know, we we went to our investors, and

we said, "Look, this uh this isn't

actually what

uh we're excited about doing anymore. Um

and we we offered to give the money back

uh and said, "We're we're we're going to

be building consumer apps, and here's a

few ideas that we have." None of them

took the money back. Um

and so, then we spent the next

uh

like four or five years building a

variety of different kind of consumer

uh consumer apps. So, we we had a a few

like kind of mild successes during the

course of those four to five years, and

one of them was a uh an app called Five

Labs that ingested your Facebook posts

and determined your personality based on

the language you use.

Uh and it used this exact same model

that Cambridge Analytica used. And that

was super viral. I I think you know, we

had like

tens of millions of profiles in it and

this all it went viral in like 3 days.

And so we raised some more money based

off the success of that and

we we started focusing a lot more on

mobile after that first app 5 labs and

we we launched you know, uh

basically every type of app you can

imagine. We launched mapping apps, chat

apps, event meetup apps, any like

basically every kind of consumer app on

mobile that you could think of and that

actually helped us kind of build a

muscle to understand what people want

and how to actually make things grow and

how to test them. And over time we

started focusing more on teens and a lot

of people ask why Silicon Valley is so

fixated on building apps for teens and

one of the reasons is their habits are

pretty malleable. Like as we get older

we like kind of get kind of fix fixed

into our our habits of using certain

communication products and we don't

really adopt new things.

And then the other thing that we

discovered was that adults don't really

you know, invite people to new apps. We

found that as a user got older from age

13 to 18 like the number of people that

they invite to an app just declines

almost exponentially. And finally the in

the most important thing is they they

see each other every day and that is so

critical. Like this is consumer app

developers sometimes they smokers are

great for like targeting an audience cuz

they actually like hang out you know,

serendipitously a lot outside of you

know, buildings and so but I'm not to

say like social apps are cigarettes. I I

don't really like that metaphor but Just

on the note of you talking about why

teens are important. I I have this quote

actually from you that I love

where building on the point you made

that for every social app I've ever

built

the number of invitations sent per user

drops 20% for every additional year of

age from 13 to 18.

So if you build for adults expect to

acquire every user with ads.

And I love that you have a very clear

heuristic of per year the amount of

people they invite to the app is 20%

lower. If your users aren't inviting

people to your app,

you're going to have to find another way

to

to acquire them and that most likely

means ads and

if if if you're targeting older cohorts

like adults, you're going to have to

raise a huge amount of venture capital

to finance that user acquisition

pipeline. And it's going to be

extraordinarily expensive. As a seed

stage startup it's going to be basically

impossible to to to grow that user base

especially to get density if you need

uh

actual network effects among users.

So basically you're building this help

me decide who to vote for app that

turned into a real business with like

government contracts coming to you

trying to help you

pushing you to build something that you

end up realizing I don't want to be

doing this. Why am I building this app

selling government contracts? And so

what you did is you and this is a really

interesting lesson to take away is you

just realized I don't want to be doing

this.

Investors don't force me to be working

on this. I'm going to stop this.

I'm going to go work on some other stuff

that I'm actually excited about that I

think has a bigger chance of success.

And that's where you transition to this

startup studio where you're just trying

a bunch of apps and I think it was

called midnight labs you said something

like that, right? Yeah. Awesome. So

basically I think that's a really

interesting insight of just like if

you're working on something you don't

enjoy, you can change that. You can

pivot. You can tell your investors I

want to work on something else.

Is there anything there that you want to

add along those lines?

It was really hard for us to pivot to

mobile. I think that was one of the most

challenging things for me personally

because it was a completely different

paradigm. Like I actually have been

building web apps since I was 12 years

old and I I you know, I I I built a full

e-commerce business selling pirated

games on the web and I knew everything

about like growing a website. But as I

as we pivoted to mobile, I I had to like

recalibrate my whole brain on how to how

to do that.

Mobile apps have such a low margin for

error when it comes to designing them

because I I I I have this like dogmatic

view

that like every tap on a mobile app is a

miracle for you as a product developer

because users will churn and bounce to

the their next app very quickly.

If you actually sit behind someone and

watch them use their phone, they

actually switch between apps at a pretty

high frequency. So every tap that you

get, every single one is so scarce that

you should be optimizing everything. And

so I had to change my whole brain when

we started pivoting to mobile and

building these mobile apps

and it took a lot of failures. Like we

you know, we

we uh

for like 14 of the apps that we launched

were basically duds and then we started

fixating on teens

and and building apps for them and

eventually we figured out an interesting

heuristic for identifying consumer

product opportunities that ultimately

led us to TBH. You spent four or five

years trying a bunch of different ideas.

I think people see this headline and

we'll get into TBH of just like 9 weeks

after launch sells for $30 to Facebook

and everyone's like okay, that's

amazing. I want that for my life. Nobody

knows there's this like four or five

years of trying you said 15 different

apps

before you got there learning the things

that actually work and don't work. We

built like 15 apps over that the course

of that pivot

to consumer and we built apps for like

every single app, you know, map apps,

chat apps,

you know, to-do list. We just built

every type of consumer app you could

possibly think of and also we built for

every audience too. We built for college

students, we built for

you know, post college and it was always

very difficult to get the flywheel

spinning for anyone after like

22 years old. That That was like the

cutoff of when

uh

people just have give up on adopting new

products. And and that was a kind of

like it took us a few years to really

internalize that.

A lot of failures to realize no one

needs another app after that age.

So the thing that you found there which

is really interesting cuz most people

are building for people older than 22.

That's like a profound insight you had

there.

Like every consumer app I see is like

trying to build for adults. And your

lesson there is basically if you're

trying to do that you're probably going

to need to raise money and spend a lot

of money in paid ads.

Yeah and most likely you'll never get

network effects.

There's actually an interesting study

like many years ago that

like some academics in Spain did I think

it was in Spain and they looked at how

many people you text you know, per year

of your life and it goes up like very

quickly from 14 to 18.

It peaks around 21. So it's growing. The

number of people you text is growing up

until about 21 and then it just falls it

collapses.

And then it comes back up in at end of

life. And there's a few reasons all this

happens but

basically you know, once you exit

college you kind of

reduce the number of contacts you have

your daily contacts. Once you get

married it's even fewer and then when as

you get older, you know, you

and your kids start having kids and you

become a grandparent, you start texting

again more and or you join a retirement

home. But if you're building a product

with network effects that's a

communication tool, you want to be on

that ups upward curve of adding

connections to your social graph because

then the urgency to connect is higher.

So

if you really want to actually innovate

at the edges of communication products

you you you really have to target that

cohort that has the highest urgency to

communicate.

And and that's teens.

I love that you found these things out

not through just like research and not

through just thinking. It was through

actual trying things over and over and

over and trying different audiences,

trying different experiences. Like a lot

of people see your advice and are like

how does he know?

It's just like you've done all these

things yourself. You've seen them.

You're like sitting there watching teens

use these apps and I think very few

people actually do that and they just

come up with these theories that aren't

based in empirical evidence.

Yeah, so we we we got pretty good at

at building these apps. I think our

first mobile app took us about a year

and then our last one took us about 2

weeks.

We also got very good at testing apps

and the most important thing that I

often instruct teams to do is to develop

a reproducible testing process and that

will actually influence the probability

of your success more than anything. It's

so unpredictable whether a consumer

product idea will work and so

if you actually focus more on your

process for taking many shots at bat,

that that's what actually reduces the

risk more than anything. And so we

figured out ways to seed apps into

into schools. We also like during the

course of that company we figured out

how to seed it into affinity groups, you

know, hobbyists, things like that.

So we were on app number 15.

You know, we're a lot of failures during

during the course of this

uh

company and I remember a lot of our team

members were like I I kind of want to

leave. I think this is it for me. And

one one of our key team members actually

put in their two weeks notice uh the day

before we launched our our final app. We

were also running, you know, we were

getting kind of low on money.

I was tired

um

and

I

I called our lawyer to ask how do you

dissolve a company? I messaged a few

mentors saying like uh I

one people that have been through it and

I said, you know, what what are the

steps to to do this? Um and then I I I

had a conversation on the way out with

that that team member that wanted to

leave and I said, you know, I understand

uh

but what but what if the app actually

starts charting on the App Store?

And I he just said, what are the chances

of that? Uh you know, it's it's

you know, you know, that's not going to

happen. And I said, sure, okay.

Um so

uh we

we launched this this app and it was,

you know, a polling app TBH and it

immediately

took off in the school that we seeded it

into

uh in in Georgia. We picked the one

school that had the earliest start date

in the United States because we needed

to launch as soon as possible given this

state of the company.

Um and it just I think it spread to, you

know,

40% of the school downloaded it in the

first 24 hours

and it rapidly spread to the neighboring

schools. And suddenly I was like, oh, we

might have something here.

Um and

uh

servers started crashing and

watching it climb the charts. I think

within I I I I looked at our numbers and

I'm like, we will be number one in the

United States in like six days. Uh and

then I looked at our Amazon bill and it

was like 120,000. I looked at our bank

account. It said 150,000.

I'm like, okay, these two numbers don't

really uh

Um so I quickly had to put together a

funding round and I told our my team,

can you guys just pause for like two

months and just like really focus on

this? I think I could probably sell this

thing. And so it turned into a

pretty competitive bidding process

actually. Um

there there was a

really really great moment uh

where uh

there was one of the acquirers

or one of the bidders was based in LA

had told me to fly down

and they told me to fly down that day.

So I got on a plane, went to the airport

without a ticket, showed up. And

when we were rolling out this app, we

were doing a state by state rollout

strategy where every state was

geo-fenced. And

we hadn't launched California until that

morning and

I arrived

at this uh this company and this

founder's in LA's house

and

he said

uh

you know, show me the metrics. You guys

are like, what number four or something?

And since we just launched California,

it's a big state

as in, no, no, no, we're actually number

one. We're the number one app in the

United States. And I said, yeah, show me

the metrics. And our CTO was a published

off is Eric Hazard is a published author

in mapping. Uh and so he he created an

amazing dashboard that could show

real-time installs on a map.

And it was around 4:00 p.m. and school

had just gotten out. Uh so I zoomed in

on the block that we were having that

meeting and the entire block was lit up

with installs all around us. And so then

that's what got the kind of the ball

rolling on a uh

you know, it was it was a really

really select cinematic moment of uh you

know,

showing something that you created that

literally just took over the entire

neighborhood around you. That's insane.

I That's going to be in the movie of

Nikita Beer in the future. Okay, so a

couple questions here. So one, you

predicted the chart it would hit number

one. How do you What does it take to hit

number one? Like what is the number

you're looking at? Is it some number

downloads to get to number one in the

App Store?

Uh it fluctuates. It used to be like

like 100 80 to 100,000 installs but now

you have these companies that are just

spending extraordinary amounts on ads

and or injecting it into one of their

other apps. So between Threads, Temu and

all these other apps that are kind of

spending on acquisition and all that,

some days it's up to like 300,000. And

that's per day? Yeah. Oh man, amazing.

Okay.

At the peak of TBH, we were getting

360,000 per day.

Okay. The other two things I wanted

spend a little time on here before we

move on to the next app is

what was the insight that helped you

come up with this is a big idea that we

should try? And then what was the

insight into how to spread this so

virally? And I I know that one is really

clever. After building all these apps,

we had these kind of like lingering

users that stuck around and would share

feedback with us

on our next app. And so there were a

couple like there's this senior in high

school that I would send screenshots of

our products.

And

he told me about this trend called TBH

that kids were playing on Snapchat where

they would post an image of a bunch of

emojis and it would say

like, I like you, you're smart, your

style is great and you would just reply

to the story with the emoji of what you

felt. And I was like, this is kind of

weird. You post this on your story and

then people send you feedback. And I'm

like, so teens are looking for this

this like like this vehicle for

disclosure essentially. And I'm like,

that's kind of cool. I wonder if you

could make that into an app. We like had

sketched some things out and

uh

as we were kind of sketching things out,

I looked on the App Store and the number

one app in the United States was an app

called Sarahah.

And it was for sending anonymous

messages

by adding a link to your Snapchat story.

But the thing that was most interesting

was the entire app was in Arabic. The

number one app in the United States was

in Arabic.

And that was one of the most

uh

like the strongest signal that you could

ever have that people want something.

And so when I meet with founders, I

often tell them like the way you should

be searching for product ideas is this

concept of a latent demand where people

are trying to obtain a particular value

and going through a very distortive

process to obtain that value. And if you

can actually crystallize what their

motivation is

and build a product around

and and clear up what they're trying to

actually do you can have this kind of uh

intense adoption.

And

uh when we saw what people were doing

with Sarahah, I I also looked at some of

the tweets and comments on it. A lot of

people were receiving negative messages.

And so what I saw with the game that

kids were playing on Snapchat TBH and

then Sarahah, I realized just people

want to know good things about

themselves. And they don't want like

these bullying messages that they're

getting on these anonymous apps.

And I was like, well, what if instead of

actually typing what you wanted to say

about somebody you uh just answered

polls and we authored those polls. So

that we ensured everything would be

always be positive. And

I mean, in the back of my head I always

knew anonymous apps go viral. But they

always lead to like like these awful

news stories of kids committing suicide,

you know, self-harm and all that. And so

I was like, I'll never build anything

like that. Um

but

uh when we came up with this new

mechanic where you could only say

positive things through polls, you know,

who has the best smile who's most likely

to be president and then you receive it

uh

and it's it's anonymous but your name is

selected. What we discovered a couple of

things is it made users feel a lot

better. It actually solved what they

were trying to do

and they also sent a much higher volume

of messages.

And so it was

it was literally explosive adoption.

Like one school I was looking at, they

sent 450,000

messages in the first seven days of

adopting it.

And when you look at day one like volume

of messages sent on a messaging app uh

you're lucky if people send like three

or four or something. But we were

sending like 60 and

we we couldn't even handle it. So we had

to like we had to geo-fence the app

because it we needed to scale our

servers which was actually a pretty

controversial decision inside of our

company because like, 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, in individual schools

we could just relaunch it anytime and

it'll just it'll it'll go viral. So

uh let's let's let's regroup and figure

out what's happening here and then and

relaunch. So you keep talking about how

it went viral, went 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 I think

you're referring to there's like a

BuzzFeed memo that

a memo that was leaked to BuzzFeed while

I was at at uh

And

the the main thing we found was like to

to be convinced to download an app, you

need to see it. You need to see like the

marketing message like three times or

so.

Uh so, you basically need to saturate an

area with every kind of marketing you

can. You know, so we ran ads

uh at targeted at this uh our particular

school to to when we were seeding and

testing these apps. And we also followed

people creating a dedicated Instagram

account that went to that school.

Um cuz we I we learned that

uh

high schoolers I identify their school

in their bio. So, it says RHS on their

bio. And so, that was how we tried to

get uh the entire school to adopt

synchronously. We would we'd follow them

and then accept the follow-backs.

A big misunderstanding though, and I I

get this DM a lot and people like, "I'm

trying to replicate your strategy. We've

just done it at 15 schools and it's it's

not working anymore."

This is not the way we grew the app.

This is how we tested apps. And there's

it's really it's it's a little bit

nuanced there. That's an important

nuance because you need to get uh enough

intensity of adoption and density for a

social network to start to get the

flywheel spinning, but the app should

grow by itself after that. And people

think we would just went like from

school to school following every kid on

it. Like, you can't that that's totally

unrealistic. But for like the first 100

users, yes, that's how we got them. And

that allowed us to know whether the

product was working or not. Like, we we

could get enough people on it, and then

we could with conviction say

that whether the app had legs, and we

wouldn't have this kind of uncertainty

like, "Oh, did they did they add enough

friends? Did we get enough people on it?

Did they reach the aha moment?" Because

you need friends to get on So, we we

wanted to eliminate that confounding

variable, and so we we figured out a way

to just get a bunch of people to adopt

at once. Um and that's one thing I

encourage a lot of founders to do is

figure out a way to eliminate all those

potentially confounding variables

uh so you can know immediately whether

something's working or not. You never

want to walk away from a an experiment

or test and say, "Well, uh maybe the the

execution was bad." Cuz it takes a lot

of energy to mobilize a team to test

something, and you really want to make

sure your tests actually

provide signal. So, your advice here is

when you're testing something, test the

best possible version of what that could

be.

Whether it takes manual work or

something that is never going to scale,

like test the ideal because that'll tell

you even if this could be the best

possible version.

Uh do people actually care? Yeah, we

would try to get the like uh an entire

school to adopt just to know like uh if

if everyone had 10 friends, would would

would they actually derive value from

this app? We also did other things like,

you know, and I recommend all companies

do this is

put live chat customer support in your

app like like 24 hours a day. And it

sounds insane. It's like

the whole point of tech is you you don't

need to do that. That's the whole point

of a of a software.

But

then users get this white glove

experience, and that eliminates another

confounding variable. Like, did they

think they were their problems were

solved or they're they're treated well?

But most of all, one of the reasons I

actually recommend people put live chat

in their app is it's the

best uh vehicle for getting feedback and

do you doing user research cuz users

will literally tell you what the problem

they're having.

Um so, we we had uh our person that was

running this uh his his name was Michael

Gutierrez. He's he's done it for all my

companies actually. He's the the the uh

community and customer support rep. He

would uh paste any interesting feedback

into Slack, and then we would be like,

"Oh, this this this uh user has a great

idea. We we should consider turning that

into a feature." Um so, you really want

your finger on the pulse as you roll

these things out and uh so you can get a

sense for

uh what's working, what isn't, and also

make users feel great and make sure at

the end uh they they promote your app

positively to their peers. I love that

piece of advice. Okay, so to close out

the TBH chapter,

is there anything else that you think is

important for people to know or any

other lasting lessons from that part of

your journey that you bring with you to

new apps that you're building today?

I think the the thing that is hard to

really understand for first-time

founders that hit

breakout success with a consumer product

is how how draining and how s- uh spread

thin you get because everything breaks.

Everything that you built needs to be

substituted

uh

almost every 3 days. And I 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 3 days. The

next one broke 7 days later. We had to

replace it with a different one that

could scale even better.

And if you think about that on every

dimension of the company,

um

it is absolute like chaos to keep the

thing online uh as as it scales up. And

so, you have to be ruthless with

prioritization as something scales up uh

and put out

the largest fires first.

Because uh I I that was something that I

I didn't really

uh

fully understand is how uh

how how how uh many things go wrong, and

if we didn't geofence the app, it would

would there would there would be no way

we would have been able to keep the keep

that thing online because that's gave us

some slack to

uh control growth.

This is a good example of when people

ask like, "Hey, does my app have

product-market fit?"

I think this is an example of this is

what it looks like when things are

breaking every 3 days, when you have to

geofence it to keep it from crashing.

A lot of people ask me like, "W- what

what are the metrics for uh what's the

benchmark for product-market fit?" And I

this this founder that I'm uh friends

with

his name is Roger Dickey. Uh he he had a

he he told me a lot one time, um "If

your product's working, you'll know." Uh

and the there if there's any

uncertainty, it's not working. And it

really is a binary when it comes to uh

consumer products.

Um

People are going to be fighting to get

into it, and you'll you'll find new

measures that you've never heard of like

our our metric was hourly actives per

day. Not daily active users, hourly

active users. So, you'll you'll you'll

start seeing that, and it'll be

abundantly obvious what product-market

fit is when you you uh you'll know it

when you see it is the bottom line.

Okay, so you launch TBH,

goes viral, start getting offers from

companies. 9 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 4

years. I was not expecting that when I

was looking at your LinkedIn. So, yeah,

what was it like selling? What was it

like working at Facebook? Selling your

company is one of the most draining

processes you could ever go through as a

founder. When when we met with Facebook,

they told me they have

uh 80 people assigned to this deal. Um

and uh I'm like

I have I have one one person. It's just

me. There's no

uh

and they were like the SWAT team of M&A.

And the funniest part was, you know,

they they wanted to meet the team as

well. And so, they they came out to our

office in Oakland, which is a dingy old

office like that I got for $1,800 a

month. That was our rent for the office.

And they arrive, and uh they they walk

in. There's

uh

two engineers and one designer and me.

And they're just like, "This is this is

the whole company? This is the number

one app in the United States?" I'm like,

"Yeah, this is it." And when when we

went there, when we arrived,

we saw we joined the youth team, which

was about like, I don't know, like 150

people

uh just for this one division of of

Facebook. Uh And it was like it was my

first job that uh I I effectively that

I've ever had. When they told me my

title, uh they said I would be a product

manager. Um

like I I was like, "Okay, I I I don't I

don't know exactly what that is, but

uh I I yeah, I guess that's what I do."

And

uh I I arrive, and then I get access to

a workplace system

uh where, you know, people post all the

things they're working on. And I I

realized it's like kind of like this

almost uh academic environment for

social networks, like social network

development. It's like the Harvard of

social networks. Like kind like of

the the uh

I was reading all these studies that

people were doing on like, "Oh, if we

change that, this is the impact to

retention and DAU." And I was just uh I

I was so impressed like I I

there's a whole science here. And

uh a lot of the stuff that we did was

learn learned from first principles. But

then we saw it actually turn into

systems and processes here.

But the the the thing I didn't realize

as a product manager in a in a large

tech company is there is very little

product management that you do. You're

you're actually not as involved in the

product as I had assumed. Like I

thought, oh, you're the you're the

person who uh uh gets in the pixels and

uh designs the flows and absolutely not.

Like you're actually more more you're

completely detached from the design

process. There's a design vertical of

org org that does all that and uh they

don't really want you working on that

stuff. And so that was very difficult

for me. Because actually when people ask

me like what do you think you're good

at? Like at the core I'm a designer.

Um I I don't consider myself a product

manager. I'm, you know, great at growing

things, looking at Mixpanel, and then

designing the things that make it grow.

Uh but there's a there's a rift between

those two things inside of a large tech

company. And so I loved the academic

approach to growing, but I I I was

really hard for me personally as I

became disconnected from the design

process. And I think that a lot of my

skills atrophied over those those four

years. Um

but um

I I did stick around. I went through um

multiple orgs. Favorite one at the end

was uh new product experimentation.

Where

worked with other founders, uh

kind of a bunch of legends in Silicon

Valley building zero-to-one products,

standalone apps. I mean, I was building

standalone apps my entire time at

Facebook. And uh

I I think I built probably eight apps

while I was at Facebook. Um Wow. But it

is it is much much more difficult to

build apps at a large company. Um

a lot of the insights that you have are

not things that you can necessarily

present or put in writing into in a VP

meeting.

Like we're building an app for teens to

flirt. Like that probably is not what

you would present to a bunch of McKinsey

consultants at in uh so

I think that makes it really difficult

to be completely intellectually honest

about what you're building. Um

And when the team isn't honest about it,

then it's it's really hard to iterate

toward the right thing in that context.

Having said that, there's a lot of

things you don't have to deal with as a

product man you I don't have to deal

with that think about money. I don't

have to think about, you know, paying

legal bills or doing finance and

accounting. And so all that's abstracted

away, but there is, you know, regulatory

stuff that you have to deal with that I

I had zero exposure to as a uh

as as a founder of a small company.

Um

Yeah. An insight you're sharing there

potentially is

like the reason a company like Facebook

isn't amazing at launching completely

new product zero-to-one stuff is they

may be a little too risk-averse and it's

hard to talk about stuff that people

actually really really want deeply.

Is that is that kind of the sense there?

Uh it's hard to really uh verbalize some

of the re- like the uh the things that

motivate us as people. And

I uh

I had like a pretty

there there's a tweet I put out that's

kind of dogmatic in terms of like how

how I view why people download apps. And

it's like it's very simple. It's like

people download apps to

uh make or save money. Examples of that

might be like you know, WhatsApp where,

you know, free texting. And then the

other reason is to find a mate. So maybe

like Tinder or Snapchat, find love. And

the third is to unplug from reality.

Uh maybe like Netflix or Fortnite.

There's a bunch of other kind of

subcategories that are very utilitarian

like movement, you know, Uber or Airbnb,

like, you know, shelter. And so I think

putting that in a framing document and

the particular nuanced reason

uh why people are going to adopt it is

is difficult um as when you're

presenting that to uh you know, people

uh

that are, you know,

season professionals and uh uh care

about how something might reflect on

them personally. And so that's really

difficult um

inside of a large company. You 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 that part I think is probably

solvable for a startup. Uh if you just

want to pay for ads or like getting your

app into a dense friend graph is is

overall trivial. Like you you

as a founder you should be able to pull

it off after enough tries. So that

advantage that a big company brings

I mean, it's it makes it easier, but uh

it's not not something that I think uh

is something that a founder can't solve

for themselves. So an interesting

takeaway it sounds like is many people

feel like I'm going to build a social

app. They probably often hear it.

Facebook's going to do that. Instagram's

going to copy you. Snap's going to 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 uh identify these

opportunities and to verbalize it

internally uh and align the company

around it. It's it's also hard to

respond to signals in the market. A lot

of people think like uh these incumbents

are going to steal your ideas. And for

the most part it takes a pretty long

time for them to respond to even the

number one app or uh charting in the

app. Cuz it'll start charting in the app

store. You know, a PM will make a post

about it. And then

uh the the markets strategy or market

research team might do a study to follow

up on it. Uh and it'll kind of float

around for a few months. They they might

uh put together a framing deck saying,

hey, we should go after this

opportunity. Let's put together this

team. It'll go through VP reviews. And

then

uh it'll start development. Development

might take 6 to 12 months.

Realistically, I think most companies

uh large companies take like 12 to 24

months to respond to competitive threats

in the market.

Do you think this is solvable? Is there

something a company can change to get

better at this? Are there companies that

are good at this in your experience or

is this just

as you grow, this is just what happens?

The incentives within large companies

make this very difficult. Cuz you don't

want to present something that you have

a hunch about being a a good idea.

Because if there's not market signals

already, then it's hard to defend.

And people in companies are focused on

getting their, you know, yearly bonus or

their

uh you know,

uh they're focused on their performance

reviews. And uh

it's hard to show up into a a framing

meeting saying like and framing meeting

is like a framing meeting where you, you

know, you position you're you're you're

positioning the opportunity and

everything. Here's what we should go

after. It's hard to like just say, okay,

uh by first principles this is a good

idea and here's some like very vague

market signals.

In reality, you need to walk in and say,

here is the number one app in the United

States and we don't we don't own it. And

if you present something like that,

that's pretty defensible on a if you

fail uh because there was market

evidence. But if you fail about

something that's more based on kind of

vague abstract So you you have to

generally like the only path is to kind

of copy existing companies uh existing

products if if you want to really get

momentum uh inside inside of a large

organization. And for new completely new

concepts, it's I think very difficult to

present a lot of those ideas uh either

to verbalize them and into a document or

to even get rally uh the organization

around it. That's a really interesting

insight.

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Before we move on to the next chapter,

uh I want to come back to the very first

thing you said where product management

is not real. Uh is there anything else

that you can say about your insight

there? Or is it basically what you

described where PMs aren't actually

involved in design in a company like

Facebook in your experience? The the

functional organization structure of Big

Tech has kind of separated product

managers from the product development

process in many ways. They're not

looking at data cuz 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 uh

from each uh cross-functional team,

legal, privacy, everything like that.

And yeah, it's you're you're actually

very much separated from the product

itself. And and so I I think like what

Snapchat has done, and I think Apple too

to

to the same extent, is that designers

run the show. And

I think that's led to some very novel

products coming out from both of those

companies. But I mean, that that is its

own host of problems because actually

rolling out a product inside of a large

organization, it it requires a sheer

force of will because it's a lot of

work. I mean, there's a lot of

regulatory scrutiny, you know, the

scaling it up like there's you do need

someone to to project manage. And so I

don't know if it's the silver bullet as

to give designers the reign to control

to run the show, but I also don't

the the current

traditional like Google Facebook style

of being team secretaries is also the

best solution.

To defend product managers, I think many

product managers

spend a lot of time in design, spend a

lot of time a lot of time with data

science. I think probably what you saw

is like the extreme big big big tech

version of product management. I know

even PMs at Facebook

can, if they want to, spend time with

design. I think it's just obviously very

different from a startup world where

you're just that's all you're doing.

Yeah, it's certainly an exaggerated

view, but it's particularly relevant I

think for all the zero-to-one

initiatives because like if you're if

you're a product manager on a standalone

app inside of a large like you should be

designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the

flows, everything. Like and then yeah,

it should be cleaned up prototype by a a

technical designer, but that's your idea

and products live and die in the pixels

like consumer products. So that that's

that's on you. And that's that's where I

think for maybe larger growth

initiatives, yes, you can have

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. Is that Is that

Is there something there? Yeah, so our

our team was actually

when we joined the new product

experimentation group,

we were actually seated I think like at

the basically the same desk as Mark

Zuckerberg.

And that that was pretty cool to see,

you know, how they how the machine runs

like from the

from

Zuck's view. But we

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

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 at Facebook just cuz

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

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. And eventually one

of the

EAs there said, "Actually, do you think

you could take that home?" And kind of

made sense because uh

the you can't really have a painting of

a of another big tech executive

overlooking us. What does it look like?

Do you happen to have it? Yeah, I I

actually I actually do. Let me let me

let me go grab it.

Amazing.

Oh, wow, that's that's artistic. So

that's Tim Cook.

What is the idea there that he's peeking

through this darkness staring at you?

Yeah, yeah, he's

he's the real boss of all of us.

I could see I could see why Zuck would

not want that staring at him.

That's amazing and I like that you still

have that with you. Yeah, one one of the

artifacts of that of that chapter of

life. So good.

Okay, so so that was your Facebook

journey. That's 4 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 a new app."

Everyone was going, "What's that? What's

he working on?" And at this point I I

think you probably in your mind thought,

"Hey, I'm this one-hit wonder. I haven't

shown that I can do this again and

again." And so I think you probably had

this motivation. Maybe talk about that

just like this drive like, "Hey, I want

to do this again." Is that where your

mind was at? When that

meme started, my intent was to start a

venture-backed company and build

something, you know, that would scale to

be a big team and

this durable thing that

you know, last many years and

everything. And so I was like

I just made, you know, a post that I was

leaving Facebook and I'm looking for,

you know, some teammates. And um

I shared

a couple of ideas with some people

privately and it was there were some

really crazy ideas that I shared. I'm

not going to 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 meaning it. And it

became this massive like meme like where

they're like, "Oh, I just I just tried

Nikita's app. It saved my marriage. I I

just quit drinking.

My my kids returned home after all these

like" and it just it turned into this

massive meme

and at the time I I didn't even have an

app or anything. Like I wasn't even

planning to launch it. It wasn't even an

app that the thing that I was some of

the ideas I was looking at. And

so it just turned into this viral

moment.

I 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 uh

the market had crashed shortly

thereafter. There was

the kind of the end of the ZIRP era.

The Fed started hiking rates. I think my

portfolio was down like 30% or something

and I was like, "Damn, this sucks."

Uh

maybe I should think about how to like

make money today.

Um just you know, that that's that's the

reason we're in startups is to 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?" Cuz the number one support message

we received was, "Can I pay to reveal

who sent me polls?" Um those are the

like number one question. And I it 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

probably build this pretty fast, like

probably in a month, month or two."

Ended up being a lot longer, but um

we we started rebuilding it. It was a

new team.

It was uh

one of the

engineers from a company called

Poparazzi. His name's

Ze Ze Turner. And he started building in

my house and uh

we we had tested it to see would this

thing

would this would this

this new version of TBH actually

resonate with kids

uh this 5 years later. That was actually

the the the thing I wanted to know most

of all was like would a polling

anonymous polling app actually still be

relevant 5 years later? And so we

dropped it into the uh this this school

just you know, the same way we we I've

always done it and

Was it the Georgia school again?

Yes, actually.

We launched at the exact same school

Wow. that we

we launched TBH on the exact same day

Oh, wow. 5 years later. In fact. Um

and

uh

people sent a lot of messages,

but it wasn't growing. So let me let me

pedal back here a bit.

So

TBH grew through 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 there was a 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 5 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 a

point of clarification is

like a lot of people cloned TBH over the

years and they think that when you voted

on people in the polls, it sent them a

text. We never did that. That's like

egregiously illegal to do and also

unethical at a

user experience level to send text when

people don't even know that that's

what's happening. But anyway, you

couldn't send text over over

Twilio anymore and that led to people

not sending as many invites when we

recreated Gas

and

when we created Gas cuz they they had to

pop they had to pop the compose window

and hit send every you couldn't just tap

invite on five names. So we actually had

to reinvent all the growth systems and

it took about I think like nine launches

including renaming the app, including

like features that just never existed on

TBH. So 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

figuring out how to grow this thing

again in this 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

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 flywheel of how it worked and

how it grew. Yeah, and there were so

many layers of like we we we we

validated one thing and then the next

thing we weren't able like we got stuck

on. Like, okay, people will 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. And I I always do things

by the book like when it comes to like

operating, you know, like legally within

the 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 you can't do that. That you what

that's going to cause way more trouble

down the line. It's going to burn users

too. And so we always wanted to make it

abundantly clear how our growth system

like how you were inviting friends and

all that. Can kind of go on a whole

diatribe on that because

the thing that I see a lot of founders

do is they in the background

uh

use user data in ways that it shouldn't

be used.

Like they invite 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 there's

Wikipedia article called the Gaia

hypothesis which is about biology. And

it 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 and get

even and defend itself. And so we've

always Whenever I design products, I try

to do right by users because it'll

always come back much worse and I think

you should always you know, operate

above board with how you design your

growth systems. And with with with Gas,

we had to you know, do things the right

way and we had to figure out at each

each particular kind of moment of how

problem that we solved like will it

spread within schools? Will it hop

schools? Will people pay for it? All of

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 skeezy growth hacks and

making teens do things that aren't

really mentally healthy for them, but

it's clear that that's the opposite of

how you think about it that you're

trying to stay very positive like you

only allow positive communication. You

do things that you as you just said are

going to be good long-term. The

internet's not going to come and try to

[ __ ] you down. The point you bring up

here

about wanting to build a positive thing,

there's this like

there's this some people sometimes I get

criticism. It's not actually that often,

but they say, oh, you're building an app

that makes teens feel 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 of that that is lost on a

lot of people. Instagram, you know, can

make you feel jealousy and 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. And some people might

say, oh, what if someone doesn't get

voted for something? We actually built a

system to ensure everyone got a vote.

And we what we did was we put your name

in 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 and that's what

really motivated uh

me to like grow this thing was watching

how it was impacting 10 million kids for

just in in such a short period of time.

I really appreciate you 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 is a lot of

stuff going on with Gas around human

trafficking and

all the stuff where people thought

people were being kidnapped through Gas

which is yeah, talk about that whatever

you can cuz that's pretty crazy. We had

this hoax started where people were

saying the app was used for human

trafficking and

I I was like this is so strange. This is

a

anonymous polling app without messaging

and

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 if you say that

about an app. As a as a teenager if you

say, oh, this app is dangerous and then

you get a bunch of followers. And who

doesn't love followers? So, it's

actually a really like viral piece of

content if you put it out. And so we had

this hoax started and we were like,

this could kill the company and I talked

to a bunch of founders that it happened

to them. And they said, yeah, we had to

shut down because of that. Wow. And

and I I was like, is is this it? Is like

is this the you know, the end of the

company and uh

I remember it hit number one when

we started getting a few of these

reports like in our support channels.

And I was like, I'm just going to plant

the flag and and on post that we hit

number one in the App Store because this

thing's probably going to shut down

soon. So I I make this announcement on

Twitter. I just made the number one app

and I thought it would just be dead in a

week. And then

I I just had this sudden burst of energy

and I was like, I'm going to I'm going

to win. I'm going to fight this. This is

not true. Makes no sense at all.

And so we fought it at every vector

possible.

This completely made up hoax. 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. So that was the first thing

that show up on Google anytime someone

searched it. There were schools and even

a police station that posted that this

app is used for human trafficking.

I called those superintendents. I called

those police chiefs and I've got them to

publicly retract it. And we had some of

the reviews on the App Store. We had we

asked Apple to remove them

cuz 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

we anytime someone deleted their

account, they could watch this video

explaining it's not true. And at the

peak, we had 3% of users deleting their

accounts per day. So it was like really

it was a catastrophe for for an app. And

we got it down to 0.1%

through relentless relentless effort.

And

it's it was really just

an unusual thing that happens when you

grow really fast is

is this this

this this this human trafficking hoax

that starts. And

you you you don't understand how crazy

it is until it happens to your company.

But it was it was it was it was kind of

hilarious to think about.

This this app was the most harmless

benign thing you could think of.

This is insane. I did not know this full

story. And you were doing all this while

you were trying to scale the app and

trying to keep the servers up and try to

grow it, right? How what was that like

to try to manage all these things at

once? I was sleeping 3 hours a day for 3

months. It was

extraordinarily difficult

to to do it all.

Our team was also relentless though.

Like they would come over to my house

9:00 a.m. stay until midnight

and just do that 7 days a week.

Um so

yeah, it was

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 we're not interested.

But yeah, we we we went after it on

every vector and

it ended up being okay.

I love how this like you took your brain

to this other completely different

problem and thought about all the levers

you could use to

change the conversation around the app.

Yeah, we we even remember we had these

TikTok videos that were made that were

saying it was true and I had

like I I client I network my way all the

way to the CEO of TikTok and I said, can

you delete these? And we got them this

this information deleted. Yeah, so it

was uh it was really a

a whole new test of our team's

capacities was

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.

And at some at a few points the hoax was

more viral than our app and we had to

we had to take this uh The K 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

or $11 million in sales through the app,

10 million downloads, is that right?

Yeah, it was a blowout success in terms

of like on on

it grew bigger than TBH. We monetized

it.

You know, we ran almost entirely on

startup credits.

So it was basically, you know, like

cloud credits. Like AWS credits? AWS

credits, Mixpanel.

I I I remember I I was like Uh when I

saw the early data I'm like, okay, now

it's time for me to negotiate every bill

down to the last cent of margin for

every vendor. And I got credits

everywhere and

so I I we really were tactical with

that. And so we ended up being, you

know, all all just pure cash flow for

the team. No we had no investors and Uh

and it was just so interesting though

that like the way that I started posting

about it on Twitter was it kind of

captured the zeitgeist of of the

internet. And we didn't intend on

selling it. We were just going to let

this thing run its course and just be

this app that kind of lives in the

background of our lives.

Um but

uh

once it started capturing like the

zeitgeist of Twitter I was like, wait a

minute, we could probably sell this

thing. And and that's when we started

engaging with

you know, some of these we ended up

getting yeah three three companies that

wanted to to buy it. Won't be able to

say all of them but ultimately we ended

up selling to

Discord

and we uh we we 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 that you

took away from Gas as a product that you

take with you to advising startups in

terms of building the product design? I

know there's many but any that stand out

most that you think are really

interesting to share? I think I kind of

touched on this before which was trying

to validate things in in a sequence of

like

will people use the core flow? Will

people spread it within their peer

group? Will it hop peer groups? And what

I think the most important thing is

that I learned is that's actually a a

really great way to do a zero to one

product development is execute at 100%

for the thing you're trying to validate

at that specific stage of the product

development cycle. And then the rest can

kind of you can kind of half-ass the

rest just so you can get 100% signal on

that one part. And so we made the

polling experience just perfect. The

questions were great, you know, push

push 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. And also you're not

going to get signal to 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. I'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

uh

which was a

a screenshot of a story on Snapchat.

Okay? And it said, do not download the

Gas app, it's for human trafficking.

Okay? And it was a screenshot that had

like

uh kind of that mirror effect where you

have like uh 10 like 10 people had

screenshotted it. Like more like 40

people cuz it had like all the usernames

of

So I was looking at this and I'm like,

how much visible how like how how many

people had seen this? Uh and it looked

like a viral thing on Snapchat. And then

I went to the App Store page and I saw a

review that

that said this app is for human

trafficking. And I went to my team and I

said you know, we

this this might this will probably kill

the company. This will kill the product.

I 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 one

message. What do you mean? I'm like, no,

no, it's been screenshotted 40 times and

now it's on the App Store page. Like and

we got another message 4 hours later.

And uh

and the next day it was our entire App

Store page was just covered with reviews

saying that the app's for human

trafficking. And

we actually had to rebrand the app. We

we relaunched it once uh

and we're like

we let's just call it something

different. Just relaunch it on the other

side of the country. We did that.

Started going viral again. And uh

the

the craziest thing was

it

re-emerged. 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

and then it was too late at that point

to relaunch again.

I would just realize we just got it we

got to we got to fight this thing and

and uh

ultimately I don't think we'll ever know

the true origin but

yeah, it was

uh

it was it was definitely a living

breathing

like

hoax.

That is insane. That 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 Uh 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 was

this would be the name. Uh this was

between the 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? And we found that actually when

you invite someone to an app

regardless of the app you generally met

boys invite boys, girls invite girls to

apps.

And boys didn't want to invite their

friends to an app called Crush a pink

with a pink icon. And then we looked at

the data and the app I mean this was

true of TBH too 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 we made the icon

black with a flame, called it Gas and

the invites rate jumped. And uh

you think a name doesn't matter but

right at the moment of sending an invite

yeah, you uh

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 gone very long. So I'm going to 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 what should I ask Nikita?

And the most common question I'm sure

you get this a lot is just people

wondering do you ever want to build a

durable consumer app? Is it possible to

build a durable consumer app? Scott

Belsky asked this. Robert at Figma asked

this and Scott actually had a really

nice way of describing it. About why are

so many quick sensation consumer

consumer apps proving to be more akin to

summer songs than enduring standalone

products and businesses. There's kind of

two questions here. One is

do you want to build a

do you aim to build a

durable consumer app and two

how possible is it?

A lot of the fundamental like

tools for communicating with our friends

either you know

messaging

or posting broadcasting one to many like

on stories or

you know, those

the incumbents have kind of built pretty

large moats in terms of network effects

and to provide true like

like an order of magnitude better

experience is non-trivial because

they've been actually improving these

products so much over the years. And

there's actually not there's not that

many entry points. Not not to say that

it's not impossible. Snapchat was showed

that there was a style of messaging that

people wanted that the incumbents

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

like communication or social product

that's a black swan event.

You 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 I would just

be printing one trillion dollar

companies.

I'd be printing Facebooks every time I

sat down. But 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

is like you you drop an app in, you

know, the uh

the deep south in Georgia, and then you

look on your analytics dashboard, and

40% of the high school down your street

in Los Angeles has downloaded it 1 week

later. Like that's a really profound

feeling, and it's it's just it's crazy

to have that sort of impact as a

three-person team, and I I live for

that. When I joined Facebook, uh this is

I'm

like the here's here's an interesting

connection. You So, I joined Facebook,

and I saw that many of my peers were

like looking up to VPs, and they're

like, "That's what I That's what I want

to make it to one day."

And I want to run a large organization.

I want to have lots of reports.

And and then I met with VPs,

and they were actually jealous of me.

Because

my quality of life was actually pretty

cool. I I I got to build something high

impact that uh made many teens feel

better about themselves, made a de-

decent amount of money, and then I

wasn't, you know, uh in charge of this

becoming a people manager that has to

run this large organization for for many

years. And so,

I think one day I will

uh run maybe a venture scale business

that uh but I uh

I I I I will say that I kind of like the

way that I've been doing things so far

uh in terms of quality of life and being

fun. Financially, it's been great. So, I

think uh that that part is what

motivates me. And yeah, I'm I'm I don't

think

uh

you know,

running a large corporation is

necessarily what I describe as fun.

That's amazing, man. I really I'm really

happy we went here. Uh so much of this

resonates with

the way I think. And uh obviously, a big

part of this is also just it's very

hard, as you said, to build build a

consumer app that grows, first of all,

second, that actually lasts. But that is

interesting that you do hope to one day

build a

uh venture-funded

business.

I mean, TBH was venture-backed, but uh

I I just don't like I I I think I'm

going to have to like do I want to sign

up for 10 years? And if you actually

look at some of the numbers uh on like

the the actual proceeds that some 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, um

yeah, they uh the tradeoffs there are

pretty uh pretty favorable.

Actually, just on that on that note, so

what would make you actually decide to

go venture-funded? You talked about how

if you're going more mainstream,

non-teens, folks after 22 years old, is

that why you would go that route?

I don't think that like it's necessarily

that part. It's more uh I think if

uh the

if I if if I could keep the team lean

and and scale up I I think, you know,

there's there's some actual uh

founders that actually operate very lean

teams and have reached very large scale

in terms of the valuations of the

company. Like actually, the the most uh

iconic example is Elon Musk. His teams

are actually pretty thin overall, and

he's he's in the weeds doing product

development. And so, I I think yeah, if

if I was to ever do it, I'd do it under

very specific set of

uh operating principles

uh versus turning it into a big tech

company.

Q investors emailing you right now uh

with term sheets.

Okay.

Nikita, this has been amazing. Uh

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 uh I think is incredibly

insightful about how to build a

successful consumer app.

And so, Nikita, I'll just go through

like three to five and see what you

think and see what you can add to the

advice. That's How does that sound?

Sounds great. Okay, cool. So, so the

first is just uh 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

in their products? I uh when I first saw

it, I was I was really concerned. Uh

this is the

about it. You're like, "That's the end.

Game over."

Just let me let me frame things up for

you. The contact permission screen,

you you know, you you average about 65%

approval rate across all apps. Higher

It's higher for teens, uh lower for

adults. And

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. So, 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.

Like as 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

uh there's there's no over So, it

the my ex- expectation is

the 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 of the companies I'm working with

on on intro, we are looking at ways to

reinvent what contact sync is, or what

it what what purpose it served. It's not

promising, but we have 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

contact sync as a company right now,

yeah, you you better

uh better start

uh thinking about plan B.

So, the what 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 I don't think

Apple uh acknowledged that. I think the

person that designed the feature

probably have has never

built an app or done contact sync before

because the flow is egregiously bad, and

it

it doesn't actually even, I think,

benefit the user's privacy because it

just completely eliminates

the feature altogether. Okay. Next

topic. So, you uh helped uh this product

called Dupe succeed. It's doing

incredibly well from what I can see, and

I saw your 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.

The this kind of concept of getting

users to the aha moment is something I

recurringly bring up to every company I

work with. And

you have to understand that in 2024,

people's attention spans are like 3

seconds. It's really sad, but, you know,

we are we're we're spread thin through

so many notifications, products,

everything,

that if you can't demonstrate value in

the first 3 seconds, it's over. And And

this also leads back to the contact sync

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 you'll churn. So, this

idea of like inverting the value, uh

when I was working with Dupe, 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. And it

allowed you to just, you know, put in a

product page, and it would find uh the

cheapest version of it online.

Um something I already do kind of

through a bunch of duct-taped methods of

Google image search, Google Lens.

And uh I was like, "That should be a

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 I built a while

back where you just type the domain in

front of an existing URL. So, I said I

should told them, uh you should try

this. Uh it's like very marketable, and

but you need to get a very short domain

that matches the what you're doing. And

so, he went out and bought dupe.com for

I don't know how much. But it was when

he bought that, I was pretty uh pretty

excited. I'm like, "Well, I I 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 he put out a couple videos about it,

and then, you know, it was iconic, went

viral uh the videos. Users remembered to

do it, to type dupe.com in front of a

URL. And now I think they're you know

making millions in ARR

in a matter like and and I think on

under 60 days of launching and that that

was a blood success and

of the companies I work with 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. I think 50% of the time

it's outright failure because

consumer is so random. And so what I'm

hearing is a

big insight is just

ideally get the 3 seconds time to value.

Is that the advice? Yeah. Yeah.

Sounds great. Easy peasy.

Yeah.

You you really have to craft you know

onboarding everything to to ensure that

and it's yeah it's it's uh

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

and 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 you know was non-traditional that

people adopted very quickly.

I have like a whole laundry list of

iOS mechanisms that could be read that

people use for a certain way today but

you could invert them

contact sync is a great example because

you you know 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.

So there's there's a bunch of

ways that you can one tap

expose a ton of value to users that uh

that I think founders often neglect and

the

yeah a lot 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 friend person

friend list?

So we're think we're looking at

like 10,000 taps versus one.

So that's that's what I mean by trying

to get people to to the activation

moment the aha moment and get them

get get get them to value. I love that

advice.

So maybe as a just a last question along

these lines when you come to a a founder

relationship that you're

a startup you're trying to help

is there one more thing that you find

often ends up being really helpful to

them any common piece of advice that's

like oh this is probably what's going to

help you. You talked about this aha

moment step the sharing contact sharing

stuff. I guess is there 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 you know pure at the

product concept stage some of them are

you know venture backed billion dollar

companies and each of them faces

different problems and I 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's the what is the

milestone the 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

uh

a lot of founders separate marketing and

product growth

like top of funnel growth from from from

the actual product's growth mechanisms

but they're they're both the same.

They're both like they both should be

treated as the same.

Like if

if you're targeting a a community and

you want them to all adopt and get

saturation you 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

that and when you invite people to the

from that app that community needs to be

mentioned. So

you need to actually cover every the

mark like everything from the ads to the

in-app experience to the all of that

needs to be aligned for a user

acquisition and flywheel to spin.

A lot of people really screw that up.

That's kind of kind of my initial kind

of rough approximation of what I do when

I come in and try to fix some of the

try to help with some of the challenges

these companies are facing.

Okay. 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