Nikita Bier, a Solana advisor and consumer-app builder, shares how to build viral products on Solana. Start with a hyper-focused niche audience, even if it seems embarrassing. Early-stage apps face a crisis every three hours, so move fast. Design matters more than most crypto builders think, and Web2 expertise applied to Solana can unlock real success.
Chapters
Many parts of crypto is winner take all. Solana had started demonstrating that and that was a signal to me that it was the right time for them to start investing and strengthening their consumer product development. I'm Nikita Beer, I'm an advisor to the Solana foundation and I've been building consumer apps for 15 years now and I've been meeting all the Solana companies and it's been a great crash course in crypto. When I meet with founders and I try their products, the first question I ask them is what is the vision that you have? And then from there I ask who is the target audience of this product? And often that means identifying a pretty small community that might even be embarrassing to tell your friends and peers that you're targeting this particular community. They often say that your V1 of your product should be embarrassing because you need this level of relevancy for a subset of people where when they see that product they're like, well, this was made for me, I guess I have to download it. But you have to start hyper focused on a specific community. That's not an intuitive thing for many Solana companies because they are launching on the world stage. Working from a much narrower starting point is a new muscle, new area of their brain they have to rewire. A lot of first time builders and consumer don't realize how volatile building consumer apps is. I like to say there's a crisis every three hours when it's starting to work. To really have a consumer product break out, you essentially need a miracle every single week. And when these crises emerge, you have to be able to make the right decision or make enough of the right decisions for it to surv and be a durable thing that lasts the test of time. The aim of doing a consumer product experiment is to get signal and many founders end up running these experiments where either they didn't get enough people on the app, they didn't get enough users connecting with each other, and then they walk away from these experiments with inconclusive results. A thing that I've really encouraged founders to do is develop a process where you can walk away from a launch an experiment and have conviction whether it's working or not. Most of the products that I've built over the years, I've worked in a small silo in a stealth way until I had resonance with a particular audience and had conviction that I was on the right path. And then I would market on a global stage. It's actually so you have the freedom to make vast changes to your product. Consumer products live and die in the pixels. And the highest ROI you could ever have is being able to map out all the directions you could take this product and seeing what it would look like and picking the best path forward versus just kicking off engineering and adding some shiny aesthetic layer on it. I think investing day one in design is something a lot of founders neglect. Some of the worst product design in the world is in crypto. Having said that, Solana has the best out of the protocols I've seen, and it's attracting a lot of talented, experienced, Web2 developers and designers, and really good consumer product developers. And if they apply it to their development of consumer products, I think they'll have a lot of success.
