In this monologue, Nikita Bier recounts his entrepreneurial journey from building a viral policy‑impact tool in college—garnering millions of users and a government contract—to abandoning government software in favor of consumer mobile apps. Over four to five years his team launched roughly fifteen different consumer apps, honing a rapid development process (from a year‑long first app to a two‑week final app) and a reproducible testing methodology he argues is the primary risk reducer for consumer products. When the fifteenth app, TBH, a school‑focused polling platform, launched, it achieved 40% adoption at the seed school within 24 hours and spread quickly, leading to massive server costs (a $120k Amazon bill) and a cash crunch. Bier swiftly organized a funding round, paused other work, and positioned TBH for a competitive acquisition, ultimately selling to Facebook. Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of process, rapid iteration, and data‑driven decision‑making in startup success.
Chapters
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 went super viral. And I think we got like 4 million users on it. We had a bunch of governments reach out to us asking, can you build this for our budget? We raised some money, we won a government contract and we joined techstars, the accelerator. And the government shutdown happened in the middle 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. And so, you know, we went to our investors and, and we said, look, this isn't actually what we're excited about doing anymore. 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 consumer apps. And we launched basically every type of app you can imagine. We launched mapping apps, chat apps, event meetup apps, like basically every kind of consumer app on mobile that you could think of. And we got pretty good 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 most important thing that I often instruct teams to do is to develop a reproducible testing process and, 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. So we were on app number 15 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. We were getting kind of low on money. I was tired and I, I called our lawyer to ask, how do you dissolve a company? So 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. 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. Servers started crashing and I, I, I looked at our numbers and I'm like, we will be number one in the United States and in, like, six days. And then I. 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. I quickly had to put together a funding round, and I told 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.
