Nikita Bier spent five years building apps that went nowhere, then prepared to shut down his company. The next day he launched TBH, which hit the top of the App Store within weeks and got acquired by Facebook. His advice to struggling founders: keep going.
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Hello, I'm Vicki Howell, associate instructor for the Newton Distinguished Innovator lecture series, and we are thrilled to have as our kickoff speaker this evening Nikita Beer, who is a serial entrepreneur and co founder of, most recently tbh, which was bought by Facebook and now he's currently at Facebook.
I would
be curious to know if you could share a low point for us and what happened afterwards.
That was in August 2nd. I called our lawyer to ask him, how do you liquidate a company? And he sort of gave me the instructions. And I was about to do it the next day after we launched our last product. And that product ended up being TBH and ended up rocketing to the top of the App Store in about a couple weeks. And the rest is history.
So six months ago was your lowest point?
Yeah, it was pretty bad. We had spent five years building apps. None of them really got traction, and then suddenly number 15 was the 1.
And how did you work through that? August. Those first two weeks of August,
it was pretty shocking to see the sudden interest in the product. Most of the team was kind of. They didn't believe it. We spoke to a lot of companies and Facebook had at least communicated a lot of trust. We felt that they were an honest company and that they would treat us well and we would be able to grow the product under them.
Any words of wisdom for people who are going through their own startups and feeling super low and might be on the verge of liquidation?
Just keep going. No one said it was going to be easy, but you might just figure it out if you just keep at it. No promises, though.
Fantastic. Thank you so much. Can't wait to hear from you a little bit more later this evening.
