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

Honored to be on a product management podcast. For a person who doesn't believe product management is real, we're already already getting.

Into the hot takes. You launch CBH went viral, you end up selling it to Facebook. What was the insight that helped you come up with this is a big idea that we should try?

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

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

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

A tip that you're sharing here is look for latent demand, where people are.

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

I didn't know you're actually a product manager at Facebook, but the thing I.

Didn'T realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. They're mainly just writing 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 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. And it is absolute chaos to keep the thing online. I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. Our team was also relentless, though. They would come over to my house 9am, stay until midnight, and just do that seven days a week.

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

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

Today, my guest is Nikita Beer. 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, Locket and wealthsimple and many more. Today he spends his time advising companies on viral growth strategies, design feedback, structuring their product development process, and a lot more. What I love about Nikita is that he has very strong opinions about how to build successful products that are rooted in him actually doing the work over the past decade to see for himself what works and what doesn't. Nikita has been the single most requested guest on this podcast and you'll soon see why. This episode is packed with tactics and stories and lessons that I am sure will leave you wanting more. If you want to work with Nikita on your app, you can actually book his time at Intro co nikitabeer. 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 Beer. Nikita, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited 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.

Already getting into the hot takes we're definitely going to chat about and you said not real. Okay, I thought you were going to say 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 it's 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 does 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 it all.

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Yeah, so when I was in college I was really interested in this kind of thing that American voters do which is like 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 vote for Republicans for low taxes and not, and they, you know, they make less money and so that 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 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 your age and then it would just tell you in dollars what the impact would be and it also tell you we simulated those policies Also against the tax returns of every zip code, so you could see how it impacts your community. We went super viral. Like, I think very few people thought of politics that way. And I think we got like 4 million users on it during that season of the they're doing that election. And, like, it was just a kind of like a project that we raised some grant money for, but ended up feeding into this company that we spun up. And that was called Outline, because we had a bunch of governments reach out to us asking, can you build this for our budget? So the governor of Massachusetts actually reached out and I flew out there to meet with them, and that was going to be our first customer. And so we raised some money, we won a government contract, and we joined techstars, the accelerator, and we ended up getting. We got a contract in the pipeline with the Obama administration. And then we got this 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 actually really don't like selling software to governments. And my core competency all along was making things that go viral on the Internet. Like, that was. That was what we had built, not this policy simulation tool. And so, you know, we went to our investors and we said, look, this, this isn't actually what we're excited about doing anymore. And we offered to give the money back and said, we're going to be building consumer apps, and here's a few ideas that we have. None of them took the money back. And so then we spent the next, like, four or five years building a variety of different kind of consumer apps. So we had a few, like, kind of mild successes during the course of those four to five years. And one of them was a. An app called Five Labs that ingested your Facebook posts and determine your personality based on the language you use. And it used this exact same model that Cambridge Analytica used, and that was super viral, I think. You know, we had like tens of millions of profiles in it, and this all. It went viral in like, three days. And so we raised some more money based off the success of that, and we. We started focusing a lot more on mobile after that first app, Five Labs, and we, we launched, you know, 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 fixed into 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 in the most important thing is they see each other every day. And that is so critical. Like consumer app developers sometimes say smokers are great for like targeting an audience because they actually like hang out, you know, serendipitously a lot outside of, you know, buildings and so. But not to say like social apps are cigarettes. I don't really like that metaphor.

But just on the note of you talking about why teens are important, 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 acquire them. And that most likely means ads. And if you're targeting older cohorts, like adults, you're gonna have to raise a huge amount of venture capital to finance the 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 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 realize, 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. 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. 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 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 turn 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, 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 million to Facebook. And everyone's like, oh, okay, that's amazing. I want that for my life. Nobody knows. There's this like four or five years of trying. You said 15 different apps 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 lists. 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 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 because 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 20, 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, your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent, you start texting again more, 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 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 really have to target that cohort that has the highest urgency to communicate, 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 they're like, how does he Know, it's just like you've done all these things yourself. You've seen them, you're like sitting there watching teens use these apps. And I think very few people actually do that. And they just come up with these theories that aren't based 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 two weeks. We also got very good at testing apps. And the, the most important thing that I often instruct teams to do is to develop a reproducible testing process. And that will actually influence the probability of your success more than anything. It's so unpredictable whether a consumer product idea will work. And so if you actually focus more on your process for taking many shots at bat, that'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 company. And I remember a lot of our team members were like, 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 the day before we launch our final app. We were also running, you know, we were getting kind of low on money. I was tired and I called our lawyer to ask, how do you dissolve a company? I messaged a few mentors saying like, one people that have been through it. And I said, you know, what are the steps to do this? And then I had a conversation on the way out with that, that team member that wanted to leave. And I said, you know, I understand, but what if the app actually starts charting on the app store? And he said, what are the chances of that? You know, it's, it's, you know, you know, that's not going to happen. And I said, sure. Okay. So 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, 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 the state of the company. And it just, I think it spread to, you know, 40% of the school downloaded it in the first 24 hours and rapidly spread to the neighboring schools. And suddenly I was like, oh, we might have something here. And servers started crashing and watching it climb the charts, I think within, I looked at our numbers and I'm like, we will be number one in the United States in like six days. And then I looked at our Amazon bill and it was like 120,000. I looked at our bank account, it said 150,000. And I'm like, okay, these two numbers don't really add up. So I quickly had to put together a funding round and I told my team, can you guys just pause for two months and just really focus on this? I think I could probably sell this thing. And so it turned into a pretty competitive bidding process. Actually, there was a really, really great moment where there was one of the acquirers or one of the bidders was based in L. A. 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, this company and this founder in L. A. S house and he said, 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. I said, 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. Eric Hazard is a published author in mapping. And so he created an amazing dashboard that could show real time installs on a map. And it was around 4pm and school had just gotten out. 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. You know, it was a really, really select cinematic moment of, 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 you would hit number one. How do you. What does it take to hit number one? Like, what is the number you're looking at? Is it some number of downloads to get to number one in the app store?

It fluctuates. It used to be like a hundred thousand, 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.

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

Okay. The other two things I want to 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 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.

And so there were a couple. Like, there's the 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, ven. Like, this vehicle for disclosure, essentially. And I'm like, that. That's kind of cool. I wonder if you could make that into an app. We, like, had sketched some things out, and 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 Sarah. 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, like, the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something. And so when I meet with founders, I often tell them, like, the way you should be searching for product ideas is this concept of latent demand, where people are trying to obtain a particular value and going through a very distortive process to obtain that value. And if you can actually crystallize what their motivation is and build a product around and. And clear up what they're trying to actually do, you can have this kind of intense adoption. And when we saw what people were doing with Sarah, I, I also looked at some of the tweets and comments on it. A lot of people were receiving negative messages. And so I, what I saw with the game that kids were playing on Snapchat, tbh And then Sarah, 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 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. But when we came up with this new mechanic where you can only say positive things through polls, you know, who has the best smile, who's most likely to be president, and then you receive it 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, 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 geofence 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 go viral. So let's regroup and figure out what's happening here and then and relaunch.

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

I think you're referring to, there's like a BuzzFeed memo that or a memo that was leaked to BuzzFeed while I was at. At Facebook. And the main thing we found was, like, to be convinced to download an app, you need to see it. You need to see the marketing message, like, three times or so. So you basically need to saturate an area with every kind of marketing you can. So we ran ads targeted at a particular school to when we were seating and testing these apps. And we also followed people creating a dedicated Instagram account that went to that school because we learned that high schoolers identify their school in their bio. So it says RHS on their bio. And so that was how we tried to get the entire school to adopt synchronously. We'd follow them and then accept the followbacks. 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 enough intensity of adoption and density for a social network to start to get the flywheel spinning. But the app should grow by itself after that. And people think we just went, like, from school to school, following every kid on it. Like, you can't. That's totally unrealistic. But for, like, the first hundred users, yes, that's how we got them. And that allowed us to know whether the product was working or not. Like, we could get enough people on it. And then we could, with conviction, say that whether the app had legs and we wouldn't have this kind of uncertainty, like, oh, did they. Did they add enough friends? Did we get enough people on it? Did they reach the aha moment? Because that. 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. 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 so you can know immediately whether something's working or not. You never want to walk away from an experiment or test and say, well, maybe the execution was bad because it takes a lot of energy to mobilize a team to test something, and you 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. Do people actually care?

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

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

A lot of people ask me, what are the metrics for? What's the benchmark for product market fit? This founder that I'm friends with, his name's Roger Dickey, he told me one time, if your product's working, you'll know, and if there's any uncertainty, it's not working. And it really is a binary when it comes to consumer products. People are going to be fighting to get into it, and you'll find new measures that you've never heard of. Like, our metric was hourly actives per day, not daily active users. Hourly active users. So you'll start seeing that, and it'll be abundantly obvious what product market fit it is when you.

You.

You'll know it when you see it as the bottom line.

Okay, so you launch TBH goes viral, start getting offers from companies. Nine weeks later after launch, you end up selling it to Facebook. What was it like selling your company? And then what was it like working at Facebook, which you worked at for four years? I was not expecting that when I was looking at your LinkedIn. So, yeah, what was it like selling. What was it like working in 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 80 people assigned to this deal. And I'm like, I have. I have one. One person. It's just me. And they were like the SWAT team of M and A. And the funniest part was, you know, they wanted to meet the team as well. And so they came out to our office in Oakland, which is a dingy old office like that I got for eighteen hundred dollars a month. That was our rent for the office. And they arrive and they. They walk in, there's 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. 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 just for this one division of Facebook. And it was like, it was my first job that I effectively that I've ever had. When they told me my title, they said I would be a product manager. Like, I was like, okay, I don't know exactly what that is, but yeah, I guess that's what I do. And I arrive and then I get access to a workplace system where, you know, people post all the things they're working on. And I realized it's like kind of like this almost academic environment for social networks, like social network development. It's like the Harvard of social networks. Like, I was reading all these studies that people were doing on like, oh, if we change that, this is the impact to what retention and dau. And I was just, I was so impressed. Like, there's a whole science here. And 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 actually not as involved in the product as I had assumed. Like, I thought, oh, you're the person who gets in the pixels and designs the flows and absolutely not. Like, you're actually more. You're completely detached from the design process. There's a design vertical of Org that does all that and they don't really want you working on that. So that was very difficult for me because actually when people ask me, like, what do you think you're good at? Like, at the core, I'm a designer. I don't consider myself a product manager. I'm, you know, great at growing things, looking at mix panel and then designing the things that make it grow. 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, it was really hard for me personally to. As I became disconnected from the design process. And I think that a lot of my skills atrophied over those four years, but I did stick around. I went through multiple orgs. Favorite one at the end was new product experimentation where worked with other founders. Kind of a bunch of legends in Silicon Valley building zero to one products, standalone apps. I mean, I was building standalone apps my entire time at Facebook. And I think I built probably eight apps while I was at Facebook.

Wow.

But it is, it is much, much more difficult to build apps at a large company. A lot of the insights that you have are not things that you can necessarily present or put in writing into in a VP meeting. Like we're building an app for teens to flirt. That probably is not what you would present to a bunch of McKinsey consultants at. So I think that makes it really difficult to be completely intellectually honest about what you're building. And when the team isn't honest about it, then it's really hard to iterate toward the right thing in that context. Having said that, there's a lot of things you don't have to deal with as a product man. I don't have to deal about, think about money. I don't have to think about, you know, paying legal bills or doing finance and accounting. And so all that's abstracted away. But there is, you know, regulatory stuff that you have to deal with that I had zero exposure to as a, as a founder of a small company. 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 might be a little too risk averse. And it's hard to talk about stuff that people actually really, really want deeply. Is that, is that kind of the sense there?

It's hard to really verbalize some of the reason, like the, the things that motivate us as people. And I, I had like a pretty. 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 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. 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 why people are going to adopt is, is difficult as when you're presenting that to, you know, people that are, you know, seasoned professionals and care about how something might reflect on them personally. And so that's really difficult inside of a Large company, you'd certainly have distribution advantages. If you want to just inject your app into one of the parent apps and get density within a community, you can do that. But that part, I think is probably solvable for a startup. If you just want to pay for ads or like, getting your app into a dense friend graph is overall trivial. 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 makes it easier, but it's not something that I think is something that a founder can't solve for themselves.

So an interesting takeaway, it sounds like, is many people feel like, I'm going to build a social app. They probably often hear, 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 identify these opportunities and to verbalize it internally and align the company around it, it's also hard to respond to signals in the market. A lot of people think like 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 charting in the app, because it'll start charting in the app Store. You know, a PM will make a post about it and then the market strategy or market research team might do a study to follow up on it, and it'll kind of float around for a few months. They might put together a framing deck saying, hey, we should go after this opportunity. Let's put together this team. It'll go through VP reviews and then it'll start development. Development might take six to 12 months. Realistically, I think most companies, large Companies take like 12 to 24 months to respond to competitive threats in the market.

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

The incentives within large companies make this very difficult because you don't want to present something that you have a hunch about being a good idea. Because if there's not market signals already, then it's hard to defend. And people in companies are focused on getting their, you know, yearly bonus or their, you know, they're focused on their performance reviews. And it's hard to show up into a framing meeting saying like a framing meeting is like a 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 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 because there was market evidence. But if you fail about something, that's more based on kind of vague abstract. So you have to generally like the only path is to kind of copy existing companies, existing products. If you want to really get momentum inside of a large organization and for new completely new concepts, it's I think very difficult to present a lot of those ideas, either to verbalize them into a document or to even get rally the organization around it.

That's a really interesting insight. This episode is brought to you by Xsplo, a game changer for customer facing analytics and data reporting. Are your users craving more dashboards, reports and analytics within your product? Are you tired of trying to build it yourself? As a product leader, you probably have these requests in your roadmap, but the struggle to prioritize them is real. Building analytics from scratch can be time consuming, expensive, and a really challenging process. Enter Xsplo. Xsplow is a fully white labeled embedded analytics solution designed entirely with your user in mind. Getting started is easy. Xsplo connects to any relational database or warehouse, and with its low code functionality, you can build and style dashboards in minutes. Once you're ready, simply embed the dashboard or report into your application with a tiny code snippet. The best part? Your end users can can use Xsplo's AI features for their own report and dashboard generation, eliminating customer data requests. For your support team. Build and embed a fully white labeled analytics experience in days. Try it for free at Xsplo Co. Lenny that's E X P L O Colenny before we move on to the next chapter, I want to come back to the very first thing you said where product management is not real. Is there anything else that you can say about your insight there? Or is it basically what you described where PMs aren't actually involved in design in a company like Facebook?

In your experience, 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 because data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they get back. They're mainly just writing documents and then kind of being the team secretary and running around getting approvals for from each cross functional team, legal privacy, everything like that. And yeah it's, you're act, you're actually very much separated from the product itself. And, and so I think like what Snapchat has done and I think Apple too 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 has its own host of problems because actually rolling out a product inside of a large organization, it requires a sheer force of will because it's a lot of work. I mean there's a lot of the regulatory scrutiny, you know, scaling it up. Like there's, you do need someone to project manage. And so I don't know if it's the silver bullet is to give designers the reign to control to run the show. But I also don't think the current, the 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, 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, prototyped by a technical designer, but that's your idea. And products live and die in the pixels like consumer products. So that's on you. And that's where I think for maybe larger growth initiatives, yes, you can be a little more detached from the pixels.

I love that advice. Okay, before we move on to the next phase of your journey of starting gas, I heard there's an interesting story around where you were actually put within the Facebook office physically where your team was put. Is there some there?

Yeah. So our, our team was actually, when we joined the new product experimentation group, we were actually seated I think, like at basically the same desk as Mark Zuckerberg. And that was pretty cool to see, you know, how the, 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 Facebook just because it was a funny painting. And I kind of got it because it was kind of symbolic of who actually controls our destiny is Apple. And so when we relocated to the area where Zuck was sitting, I put up the painting on the wall and it was basically a giant painting of Tim Cook was overlooking Zuckerberg. And eventually One of the EAs there said, actually, do you think you could take that home? And it kind of made sense because you can't really have a painting of another big tech executive overlooking us.

What does it look like? Do you happen to have it?

Yeah, I actually do. Let me go grab it.

Amazing. Oh, wow. That's artistic. 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 my son would now want that staring at you. That's amazing. And I like that you still have that with you.

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

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

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, lasted many years and everything. And so I was like, I just made, you know, post that I was leaving Facebook and looking for, you know, some teammates. And 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 memeing it and it became this massive, like, meme, like, where they're like, oh, I just tried Nikita's app. It saved my marriage. I. Oh, I just quit drinking. My. My kids returned home after all these, like, and it just, it turned into this massive meme. And like, and at the time, 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 wasn't really even that fixated on building another. Like, I wasn't even committed to starting another company at that point. I just. This was an exploration process. But what happened was the market had crashed. Shortly thereafter, there was kind of the end of the Zurb era. The Fed started hiking rates. I think my portfolio was down like 30% or something. And I was like, damn, this sucks. Maybe I should think about how to, like, make money today. Just, you know, 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? Because the number one support message we received was, can I pay to reveal who sent me polls? Those are the 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 we, we started rebuilding it. It was a new team. It was one of the engineers from a company called Paparazzi. His name's Zay Turner. And he started building it in my house. And we, we had tested it to see would this thing. Would this. With this. This new version of TBH actually resonate with. With kids this five 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 five years later? And so we dropped it into the school just the same way I've always done it.

Was it the Georgia school again?

Yes, actually. We launched at the exact same school that we launched TBH on the exact same day, five years later.

Fun fact.

And people sent a lot of messages. Uh, but it wasn't growing. So let me, let me pedal back here a bit. Um, 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 tap 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 had changed a lot over those five years. You really can't send texts from a server anymore. It has to be sent from the device, the user's device. And just a point of clarification is like a lot of people clone 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 texts when people don't even know that that's what's happening. But anyway, we couldn't send texts over Twilio anymore. And that led to people not sending as many invites. When we recreated gas or we create gas because they had to pop the compose window and hit send. You're going to just tap invite on five names. So we actually had to reinvent all the growth systems. And it took about, I think, like nine launches, including renaming the app, including, like, features that just never existed on tv. 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 of 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 the point you're making here is not only was like, the infrastructure completely different, the team was different. You had to rethink the entire flywheel of how it worked and how it grew.

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 Always do things by the book, like when it comes to, like, operating, you know, like legally within the compliance framework. And that's something I, when I meet founders and they tell me some growth thing that they're doing and I'm like, you can't do that. That's 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 are 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, 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 this 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 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 operate above board with how you design your growth systems. And with gas, we had to do things the right way and we had to figure out at each particular kind of moment of how or problem that we solve. Like, will it spread within schools? Will it hop schools? Will people pay for it? All of the, all of these things we had to. Was a whole reinvent, 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 shut you down.

The point you bring up here about wanting to build a positive thing, there's this, like, there's some people, sometimes I get criticism. It's not actually that often, but they Say, oh, you're building an app that makes teens feel insecure or anything. But with gas, I think we received a message every single day about from a user telling us that they reconsidered suicide or other forms of self harm. The app sent you positive messages and affirmations. Like it made teens feel really good. And I think a lot that that is lost on a lot of people. Instagram, you know, 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 me to like, grow this thing was watching how it was impacting 10 million kids for just in such a short period of time.

I really appreciate you adding that. I didn't know all those things about the way you thought about these, these apps. Interestingly, I don't know how much you can go into this, but there's a lot of stuff going on with GAS around human trafficking and all this stuff where people thought people were being kidnapped through gas, which is, yeah, talk about that, whatever you can, because 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 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 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 had happened to them and they said, yeah, we had to shut down because of that.

Wow.

And I was like, is this it? Is this the end of the company? And I remember it hit number one when we started getting A few of these reports, like in our support channels. And I was like, I'm just gonna plant the flag and unpost that. We hit number one in the App Store because this thing's probably gonna shut down soon. So I, I make this announcement on Twitter. I just made the number one app and I thought it would just be dead in a week. And then I, I just had this sudden burst of energy and I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna win. I'm gonna fight this. This is not true. It makes no sense at all. And so we fought it at every vector possible. This completely made up 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 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 because we got review bombed. But the thing that actually was the most impactful was my girlfriend made a video, a TikTok video, explaining that it's not true. And 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 catastrophic. It was a catastrophe for an app. And we got it down to 0.1% through relentless, relentless effort. And it was really just an unusual thing that happens when you grow really fast is this human trafficking hoax that starts and you don't understand how crazy it is until it happens to your company. But it was kind of hilarious to think about. This app was the most harmless, benign thing you could think of.

This was 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. What was that like to try to manage all these things at once?

I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. It was extraordinarily difficult to do it all. Our team was also relentless, though. Like, they would come over to my house 9am, stay until midnight and just do that seven days a week. So, yeah, it was definitely like one of the most physically draining Things ever. But we were just so tactical. I remember investors were asking to meet with us and I said, if you can't get a celebrity to post that this isn't true, then we're not interested. But yeah, 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 even, I remember we had these TikTok videos that were made that were saying it was true and I had like, I, I client, I networked my way, all the way to the CEO of TikTok and I said, can you delete these? And we got them. This miss this information. Deleted. Yeah, so it was, it was really 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 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 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 million or $11 million in sales through the app. 10 million downloads. 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, when I saw the early date, 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, just pure cash flow for the team. No, we had no investors. And, and it was just so interesting though, that, like, the way that I started posting about it on Twitter was it kind of captured the zeitgeist of the Internet. And we didn't intend on selling it. We were just going to let this thing run its course and just be this app that kind of lives in the background of our lives. But once it started capturing, 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 three, three companies that wanted to, to buy it won't be able to say all them, but ultimately we ended up selling to, to Discord and we, 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 a sequence of like, will people use the core flow? Will people spread it within their peer group? Will it hot peer groups? And what I think the most important thing is that I learned is that's actually a really great way to do zero to one product development is execute at 100% for the thing you're trying to validate at that specific stage of the product development cycle. And then the rest can kind of, you can kind of half ass the rest just so you can get 100% signal on that one part. And so we made the polling experience just perfect. The questions were great, you know, push, push 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, which was 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 kind of that mirror effect where you have like 10, like 10 people that screenshotted it, like more like, 40 people. Because it had, like, all the usernames of. So I was looking at this and I'm like, how much visibility? How many people have seen this? And it looked like a viral thing on Snapchat. And then I went to the App Store page and I saw a review that said, this app is for human trafficking. And I went to my team and I said, 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 ten 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 four hours later. And in the next day, it was. Our entire App Store page was just covered with reviews saying that the apps for human trafficking. And we actually had to rebrand the app. We relaunched it once, and we're like, let's just call it something different. Just relaunch it on the other side of the country. We did that, started going viral again. And the craziest thing was it reemerged. And what happened was one user was friends with another person in another state, and they got an invitation, and that user told them, oh, that was in my state. It's actually for human trafficking. And then it just completely started again, and then it was too late at that point to relaunch again. We just realized. We just got it. We got to. We got to fight this thing. And ultimately, I don't think we'll ever know the true origin. But, yeah, it was. It was. It was definitely a living, breathing, like, hoax.

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

Yeah, we went through a bunch. We had, like, one of them was called Crush, one of them was called Melt, and another was. The interesting thing about Crush is we got a great domain. We thought this would be the name. This was between some of the, like, rebrands. We tested it and we saw that invitations dropped significantly under the Crush name. And we were like, what's going on here? 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 were just like let's make the app more masculine and see what happens. We need balance on this. So we made the icon black with a flame called a gas and the invites rate jump. And you think a name doesn't matter but right at the moment of sending an invite, yeah you. So that was one of the interesting insights of on the the naming process man.

There's just endless stories that we could keep getting into but we've also gone very long. So I'm going to try to move on to another topic. So I asked people on Twitter what to ask you. Just that question. Got a thousand likes, just me asking which I asked Nikita. And the most common question, I'm sure you get this a lot is just people wondering do you ever want to build a durable consumer app? Is it possible to build a durable consumer app? Scott 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 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 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 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 to say that it's not impossible. Snapchat 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 would just be printing 1 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 through the night, you build it and you watch it take over the Internet. That is the most thrilling drug I think you could ever experience. And, and just watching it spread all over the country, it's like you drop an app in 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 one week later. That's a really profound feeling. It's crazy to have that sort of impact as a three person team and I live for that. When I joined Facebook, this is like, here's, here's an interesting connection here. So I joined Facebook and I saw that many of my peers were like looking up to VPs and they're like, that's what I, that's what I want to make it to one day. And I want to run a large organization. I want to have lots of reports and, and then I met with VPs and they were actually jealous of me because my quality of life was actually pretty cool. I got to build something high impact that made many teens feel better about themselves, made a decent amount of money. And then I wasn't, you know, 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 run maybe a venture scale business that, but I, I will say that I kind of like the way that I've been doing things so far in terms of quality of life and being fun financially, it's been great. So I think that that part is what motivates me. And yeah, I don't think, you know, running a large corporation is necessarily what I describe as fun.

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

I mean, TBH was venture backed, but I, I just don't like, 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 on the actual proceeds that some of these founders get after an ipo, after seven rounds of dilution, a lot of them are pretty comparable to what we get from our apps for 90 days of work. So, yeah, the trade offs there are pretty favorable, actually.

Just 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, people, 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. I think if the, if I, if I could keep the team lean and, and scale up, I think, you know, there's, there's some actual 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 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 would do it under a very specific set of operating principles versus turning it into a big tech company.

Q. Investors emailing you right now. Sent with term sheets. Okay, Nikita, this has been amazing. There's one last segment I want to spend a little time on, which is just kind of a rapid fire of pieces of advice you've shared that I think is incredibly insightful about how to build a successful consumer app. And so I'm thinking I'll just go through, like, three to five and see what you think and see what you can add to the advice. How does that sound?

Sounds great.

Okay, cool. So the first is just contact permissions in iOS 18 changes the game in how people can grow apps. Basically makes it harder to invite your friends. Thoughts on how people should be thinking about this in their. In their products?

I. When I first saw it, I was, I was really concerned. This is a tweet 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 know, you average about 65% approval rate across all apps. Higher. It's higher for teens, lower for adults. But if you have a 65% consenting to contacts access, then the next step on this new iOS 18 change is you select which contacts you want to allow the app to access. And it's an alphabetical list. And that alphabetical list for me, I have 550 contacts or something. The first 10 contacts are punctuation symbols from whatever, like dirty entry I put when I was driving or something. 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 assuming users are willing to even do that. And then you. Like you. And then the three others never sign up, but maybe three of your friends do. But I never get connected to them because there's. There's no over. So the. My 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, better start thinking about plan B.

So what my takeaway here is just it is now much different and there's an opportunity to think of something really clever that would give you a huge advantage if you can crack it.

Yes. But most likely, I think most apps will not have social graphs going forward and this will entrench incumbents even more. I don't think Apple acknowledged that. I think the person that designed the feature probably has never built an app or done Contact Sync before because the flow is egregiously bad. And 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 helped this product called Dupe succeed. It's doing incredibly well, from what I can see. And I saw you tweet about one of the key things that you helped them through, which is to invert. I'm reading this quote, inverting the time to value so that the user experiences the aha moment in seconds. Talk about that insight and how important that is to building a successful consumer social app.

This kind of concept of getting users to the aha moment is something I recurringly bring up to every company I work with. And you have to understand that in 2024, people's attention spans are like three seconds. It's really sad, but, you know, we are, we're spread thin through so many notifications, products, everything that if you can't demonstrate value in the first three seconds, it's over. And this also leads back to the 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 churn. So this idea of inverting the value. 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 deal hop and it allowed you to just put in a product page and it would find the cheapest version of it online. Something I already do kind of through a bunch of duct taped methods of Google Image search, Google Lens. And I was like that should be a whole company. But how are we going to teach users to do it and how do we expose them to that aha moment as fast as possible in a memorable, iconic way. And I had this product I built a while back where you just type the domain in front of an existing URL. I told them you should try this, it's like very marketable but you need to get a very short domain that matches what you're doing. And so he went out and bought dupe.com for I don't know how much but when he bought that I was pretty excited. I'm like, well if this doesn't work I'm going to feel terrible. But if it does work it's going to be a blowout success, success. And so we he put out a couple videos about it and then you know, it was iconic, went viral. 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 in I think under 60 days of launching and that was a blowout success. And yeah, 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 to 3 seconds time to value. Is that the advice? Yeah, yeah, sounds great. Easy peasy.

Yeah, you really have to craft, you know, onboarding everything to ensure that. And it's, yeah, that's where the design part comes in of being a great product person.

And 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 re, that people use for a certain way today, but you could invert them. Contact Sync is a great example because you sync your contacts and then it finds all the friends and then ranks the people who are not on the app yet but have a bunch of friends on it. So there's a bunch of ways that you can one tap, expose a ton of value to users that I think founders often neglect. And 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 unrealistic thing ever because that means you have to see the username, type it into the app. You have to do that what, 50 times to get a 50 person friend list. So 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 the last question along these lines, when you come to a, a founder, a 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'll probably gonna 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 is the milestone that a user must hit to become activated and what's getting in the way of that. I also take a very deep look at every funnel that users come through and I think A lot of founders separate marketing and product growth like top of funnel growth from, from, from the actual products growth mechanisms. But they're both the same, they're both like, they both should be treated as the same. Like if, if you're targeting a, 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 community 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, or 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 with and how all that works.

Yeah, so I work across the gamut. Most of them are like consumer mobile companies and there certainly are web ones too. But I, I work with companies across stages. Typically I recommend that you don't book me unless you're venture backed. It's because it's a little expensive. But my main goal when, when someone does seek my advice through intro is I, I try to make them like 10 times back their money in the first 30 days and so far I think I've, I've managed to do that with anyone who's, who's met with me and that means like get all the table stakes growth things out of the way at the minimum. Then identify two to three step function changes that could change their growth trajectory. And these are higher scope fundamental changes to the product. So I try to couple both, explain to them which one I, which direction I believe they should go and it's a conversation and we talk about it and, and then once they kind of settle on a direction I, I, I tend to get in the pixels. I go into Figma and we do a live session together and kind of clean things up. I identify oh that that's going to convert at this percent that's going to and then I like just manage all that and then, but yeah, it's generally like post Series A, some, you know, seed, seed stage companies. And it's. It's been really fun. It's kept my, you know, my mind sharp on, like, where the market's headed. I've also kind of, over the years of building all these apps, I've accrued all these growth hacks that still are nobody knows about. And so I share those with when it's relevant for the company. And it's been great. Yeah, Dupe was one of them. I. I was advising Saturn. I rebuilt their friend finder. I think believe they're number one in the productivity section above ChatGPT as of today. I think I. But I think I've generally invested in about maybe 10% of the companies that, that seek out my advice.

Amazing. Well, I know it feels expensive to some people, but if I were a company with cash, it feels like the best deal. I could find someone like you to come in and actually help me think through deeply, like in the pixels, how to make my thing work. So I think you're still undercharging and I hope you keep raising your prices because clearly there's a lot of demand. Nikita, this was incredible. I feel like people see on Twitter and they're like, oh, this guy's such a jerk sometimes. But like, meeting you in person and talking to you, it's very clear you're a really kind dude, really thoughtful. All your advice is based on, like, real things you have done. It's not just you sitting around pontificating. And I think that's incredibly valuable. And I'm excited people are tapping that knowledge and you're sharing it with people in a wider scale.

It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. We covered a lot and there's plenty more. I hope to come back after the next viral hit.

Oh, man. I was going to ask you, is there anything you're working on now or stages? What can you share the next. Stay tuned. Here we go.

Amazing.

I always ask people, how can listeners be useful to you? So let me just ask you that as a final question. How can listeners be useful to you?

Follow me on Twitter and enjoy my shit posts and I hope you have as much fun as me on Twitter.

I do, man. I love your tweets. And Nikita, thank you so much for doing this and for being here.

Yeah, thanks a lot.

Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show@lennyspodcast.com See you in the next episode.