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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/748c1288a6e731fb

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. You launched C B H
When viral if 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 Sraha, 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 whole 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. The tip that you're sharing here is
Look for latent demand where people are trying to obtain a particular value and going through a very distortive
process. If you can actually crystallize what their motivation is, you can have this kind of intense adoption. I I didn't know you're actually a product manager, Facebook. The thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little
product management that you do. They're mainly just writing a f 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 you app, everyone's going nuts. I saw a stat that you made eleven million dollars in sales, ten million downloads. The thing that is hard to really understand is
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, 9 a.m., 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.
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 T BH to Facebook for over thirty milyen dollars.
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 as an advisor or investor to companies like Flow, Citizen, Be Real, Locket, and Wealth Simple, 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 slash NikitaBier.
And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Nikita.
Beer.

Nikita, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to to dive in. I'm also I feel uh
Honored to be on a product management podcast.
For a person who doesn't believe
Product management is real.
Already.
Already getting into the hot takes. Uh we're definitely gonna chat about
Oh, and you said not real. Okay. Okay. This is good.
Okay, let's put a pin in that.
I think we think this. I think everyone already feels this. I think this gonna be a very special conversation. I've been looking forward to chatting to 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 here.
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 uh
Very, very tactical work that uh went into it all.
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First, I wanna start with something that I think very few people know about you.
So the first thing that you built, the first product that you built was
uh very different from what you do these days and has a product called Politify, which
Something I actually would really want. It helps you decide who to
vote for.
Based on how it would impact.
Your life.
Can you just share a bit about just that part of your life and why you decided to pivot away from that into consumer apps?
Yeah, so when I was in college, I was really interested in this kind of uh
Thing that
American voters do, which is like they've they vote against their own financial self interest.
Like people in New York and San Francisco, you know, vote for Democrats for higher taxes, people in Kansas, uh
vote for Republicans for low taxes and not no uh and they you know they make less money and so that fewer gut government benefits. And I wanted to build this tool that would help
communicate the financial impacts of
These p policy proposals of presidents.
And I I built it in like my last year of college and
We it was just a web app that we put out and it would it would
calculate their tax proposals, the government benefits that they were proposing.
And you would enter in your
Basic personal information, how many kids you have. Uh
If you uh your age
And then
It would just tell you in dollars.
what the impact would be. And it'd also tell you, uh, we simulated those policies also against uh
the tax returns of every zip code. So you could see how it impacts your community.
We went super viral.
Um like I think
Very few people thought of politics that way and
I think we got like
four million uh users on it uh during that season.
Of the uh they're doing that election.
And like it was just a kind of like a project that we raised some grant money for, but it ended up feeding into this company that we uh spun up.
And that was called Outline.
Um because we had a bunch of governments reach out to us asking
Can you build this for our budget?
So the governor of Massachusetts actually reached out and I I flew out there to meet with them and uh
That was gonna be our first customer.
And so I we uh we raised some money, we got a we won a government contract.
And
Uh we joined Techstars, uh the accelerator.
And we ended up getting uh we we got a contract in the pipeline with the Obama administration.
Uh and then we uh we got this uh contract and we started building it and
The government shutdown happened in the middle of
Like
as we were building it and
We had one of our contracts canceled.
And I realized like I I actually
really don't like
selling software to governments.
And my
core competency all along was making things that go viral on the internet.
Uh like that was that was what we had built, not this
policy simulation tool.
So you know, we we went.
to our investors and we said look
This uh this isn't actually what
uh we're excited about doing anymore. Um, and we we offer to give the money back, uh, and said we're we're gonna be building consumer apps and here's a few ideas that we have.
None of them took the money back. Um
And so then we spent the next uh
Like four or five years.
building a variety of different kind of consumer
uh consumer apps.
So we we had a a few like kind of mild successes during the course of those
Four to five years.
And one of them was a uh an app called Five Labs that ingested your
Facebook posts.
And determine your personality based on the language you use.
Uh, and it used this exact same model that Cambridge Analytica used. And that was super viral. I I think you know, we had
Like
ten tens of millions of profiles in it and uh 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 at five labs. And we we launched, you know, uh
Basically every type of app you can imagine.
We launched mapping apps, чат апс, евент мітап апс.
Any c 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 uh 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
fixed into our our habits of using certain communication products.
And we don't really adopt new things.
And then
The other thing that
We discovered was that adults don't really, you know, invite people to new apps. We found that
As a user got older from age thirteen to eighteen, like the number of people that they invite to an app just declines almost exponentially.
And the finally the and the most important thing is they they see each other every day.
And that is so critical. Like consumer app developers sometimes say smokers are great for uh like targeting an audience'cause they actually like hang out.
You know.
serendipitously a lot, uh outside of, you know, buildings and so
But not not to say like social apps are cigarettes. I I I don't really like that metaphor. Just on the note of you talking about white teens are important, I I have this quote actually from you that I love.
Where
Building on the point you made that for
Every social app I've ever built.
The number of invitations sent per user drops twenty percent for every additional year of age from thirteen to eighteen.
So if you build for adults, expect to acquire every user with ads.
And and I love that you have a very clear heuristic of per year the amount of people they invite to the app is twenty percent lower.
If your users aren't inviting people to your app
Uh you're gonna have to find another way to uh
to acquire them and that
Most likely means ads.
And uh if if a if you're targeting uh older cohorts like adults
You're gonna have to uh raise a huge amount of venture capital to finance that user acquisition pipeline.
And it's gonna be extraordinarily expensive. As a seed stage startup, it's gonna be basically impossible.
to uh to to grow that uh user base.
Especially to get density if you need uh
Uh
actual network effects among users.
Basically you're building.
This uh helped me decide who to vote for
app that turned into a real business with like government contracts coming to you trying to
Help you
pushing you to build something that you end up realizing, I don't want to be doing this. Why am I building this?
app selling government contracts.
And so what you did is you and this is a really interesting lesson to take away is you just realized I don't want to be doing this.
Investors don't
force me to be working on this. I'm gonna stop this.
I'm gonna 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 an 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.
Uh is there anything there that you wanna add?
Along those lines.
It was really hard for us to uh pivot to mobile. I think that was one of the most challenging things for me personally because
It was a completely different paradigm, like
I actually have been building web apps since I was twelve years old. And I I you know, I I I built a uh 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
uh low margin for error.
When it comes to designing them.
Because
I I I s I have this like dogmatic view, uh 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 n their next app.
Very quickly. Uh
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.
Uh and it took a lot of failures. Like we
Yeah, we'll do it.
We uh
four like fourteen of the apps that we launched were um basically duds.
And then we started fixing on teens.
Uh and
and building apps for them.
And
Eventually we figured out an interesting horistic
For identifying
consumer product opportunities.
that ultimately led us to TBH.
You spend 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
Nine weeks after launch, sells for thirty million dollars 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 fifteen different apps.
uh before you got there learning the things that actually work and don't work.
We built like fifteen
apps over that the course of that pivot uh to consumer
And we built apps for like every single app, you know, map apps, uh
chat apps, uh, you know, to do lists. We 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
twenty two years old.
That that was like the cut off.
of when uh
People just s 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.
Um, 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,'cause most people are building for people older than twenty two. That's like a profound insight you had there.
Uh
Uh 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 gonna need to raise money and spend a lot of money in paydocks.
Yeah, and most likely you'll never get network effects.
There's actually an interesting study like many years ago that uh like some academics in Spain did, uh I think it was in Spain, uh, and they looked at how many people you text
you know, per year of your life.
And
It goes up like very quickly from fourteen to eighteen. It
It peaks around twenty one.
So it's growing the number of people you text is growing up until about twenty one.
And then it just falls, it collapses.
Uh and then it comes back up in uh at end of life.
And there's a few reasons all this happens, but
Uh, basically, you know, once you exit college, you kind of
Well
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 uh and you're
your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent, you start texting again more, and 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 it
If you really want to actually innovate at the edges of communication products.
You you you really have to target that cohort that
has the highest urgency to communicate.
And and that's teens.
I love that you found these things out not through just like research and not through just thinking. It
was through actual trying things.
over and over and over and trying different audiences, trying different experiences.
Like a lot of people see your advice and 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 on empirical evidence.
Yeah, so we we we got pretty good at um
at uh 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 that's what actually
reduces the risk more than anything.
And so
We figured out ways to seed apps into uh into schools. We also like during the course of that company, we figured out how to seed it into affinity groups.
You know.
hobbyists th things like that.
So
We were on app number fifteen, uh, you know, where uh a lot of failures.
Um during during the course of this uh
company and
I remember a lot of our
Team members were like
I I kind of want to leave. Uh I I think this is it for me.
And uh one one of our key team members uh actually put in their two weeks' notice uh
The day before we launch our our final app.
We were also running you know
We were getting kinda low on money.
I was tired.
Um
And
I uh I called our lawyer uh to ask how do you dissolve a company.
I messaged a few mentors saying like
Uh
I uh one people that have been through it and I said, you know, what what are the steps to to do this? Um
And then I I I had a conversation on the way out with that
that team member that wanted to leave and
I said, you know, I understand uh
Well but what if the app actually starts charting on the app store?
And I he just said, What are the chances of that?
Uh, you know, it's it's
Well you know, you know that's not gonna happen.
And I said, Sure, okay.
Um so
Uh
We
We launched this.
this app and it was, you know, a polling app, TBH.
And
It immediately uh took off in the school that we seeded it into, uh in in uh Georgia.
We picked the one school that had the earliest start date in the United States.
because we needed to launch as soon as possible, given this s state of the company.
Um and it just I think it's spread to, you know.
Forty percent of the school downloaded it in the first twenty four hours.
And it rapidly spread to the neighboring schools.
And s suddenly I was like, Oh we might have something here. Um
And uh
servers started crashing and
watching it climb the charts I I think within
I I I I looked at our numbers and I'm like, w we will be number one in the United States in
Like six days.
Mm.
And then I I looked at our Amazon bill and it was like a hundred twenty thousand. I looked at our bank account.
It said a hundred fifty thousand.
I'm like, okay, these two numbers don't really uh Um So I I quickly had to put together a f funding round.
And I told our my team Can you guys just
pause for like two months and just like really focus on this. I think I could probably sell this thing.
And so it turned into a uh
Pretty uh competitive bidding process actually. Um
There w there was a uh
Really, really great moment. Uh
Where uh
There was one of the acquires uh
the or one of the bidders was based in LA had told me to fly down.
Um
And
They told me to fly down that day. Uh 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 roll out strategy where every state was geofenced.
And
We hadn't launched California until that morning.
And
I arrived uh
Uh
This
Uh the
company in uh this founder's in LA's house, um
And
He said uh
You know, sh show me the metrics. You guys are like what, number four or something?
And since we just launched California, it's a big state, uh
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 author is Eric Hazard, uh is a pu published author in mapping.
Ah, and so he cr he created an amazing dashboard that could show
real time installs on a map.
And it was around four PM and school had just gotten out.
Uh, so I zoomed in on the block that we were having that meeting.
And the entire block was lit up with installs.
All around us.
And so then that sort got the kind of uh the ball rolling on a uh
Yeah, it's a it was a really uh
Really s like cinematic moment.
of uh
You know, sh what showing something that you created.
That
literally just took over the entire neighborhood around you. That's insane.
I w that's gonna be in the movie of Nikki De Beer in the future.
Okay, so a couple of questions here. So one, you predicted the chart it would hit number one.
How do you what does it take to hit number one? Like what is the number you're looking at? Is it some
Number downloads to number one in the Ap Stor.
Uh, it fluctuates. It used to be like like a hundred thousand eighty to a hundred thousand installs, uh, 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, Timu, and all these other apps that are uh kind of uh spending on acquisition and all that.
Yeah, it some days it's up to like three hundred thousand.
And that's per day.
Yeah.
Oh man. Amazing. At the peak of TBH, uh we were getting
Three hundred sixty thousand per day.
Okay.
The other two things I wanna do
Spend a little time on here before we move on to the next app is
Uh what was the insight that helped you come up with this is a big idea that we should try?
And then what was the
insight into how to spread this so virally. And I
I know that one is really
Clever.
After building all these apps, we had these kind of like uh lingering users that stuck around and would share feedback with us uh on our next app.
And so there were a couple uh like there's
the senior in high school that I would send screenshots of our products.
And um
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 I would say
uh like I like you, you're smart, uh 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 kinda weird. Uh you post this on your story and then people send you feedback.
And I'm like
So teens are looking for this uh this like
Ving like this vehicle for disclosure.
Uh essentially.
And I'm like, that that's kinda cool. I wonder if you could make that into an app
We like had sketched some things out.
And
Uh
As we were kind of sketching things out, I looked on the app store and the number one app
In the United States was an app called Sraha.
And it was for sending anonymous messages uh by adding a link to your Snapchat story.
But
The thing that was
Most interesting was the entire app was in Arabic.
The number one app in the United States was in Arabic.
And that was
One of the most uh
Like the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something.
And so when I meet with founders, I often tell them like the way you should be searching for product ideas.
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
Uh when we saw what people were doing with Suraha.
I I also looked at some of the
tweets and comments on it. A lot of people are receiving negative messages.
And so
I what I saw with a game that kids were playing on Snapchat TBH and then Saraha, I realized just
People want to know
Good things about themselves.
And they they don't want
Like these bullying messages.
that they're getting on uh these anonymous apps.
And I was like, Well, what if instead of actually typing what you wanted to say about somebody
You uh just
Answer polls.
And
We author 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 I'll never build anything like that.
Um
But
Uh, when we came up with this new mechanic where you can only say positive things through polls, you know, who has the best smile.
What
most likely to be president.
And then you receive it.
Uh
And it's it's anonymous, but your name is selected.
What we discovered a couple of things is it made users feel a lot better. It actually solved what they were trying to do.
And they also sent a much higher volume of messages.
And so it was
It was literally explosive adoption.
Like one school I was looking at
They sent four hundred fifty thousand messages in the first seven days.
Of adopting it.
And when you look at
day one like volume of messages sent on a messaging app. Uh
Uh you're lucky if people send like three or four or something.
But we were sending like sixty.
And
We we couldn't even handle it. So we had to like we had to geofence the app because it w we need to scale our servers, which was actually a pretty controversial decision inside of our company because
Like w why would you turn off something that's working? But
I my at my core I knew like
If it's working at this many
You know s in individual schools
We could just relaunch it any time and it'll just it'll it'll go viral. So uh
We uh let's let's let's regroup and figure out what's happening here and then and relaunch.
So you keep talking about how it went viral, went crazy, grew like crazy.
I know that there's like a little trick that you came up with to help it spread. Can you just briefly talk about what you did there and to help it spread so quickly within a school?
I I think you're referring to uh there's like a BuzzFeed memo that uh was or a memo that was leaked to uh BuzzFeed while I was at at uh Facebook.
Uh and
The the main thing we found was like
To to be convinced to download an app, you need to see it.
You need to see the like the marketing message, like
Three times or so.
Uh so
You basically need to saturate an area with
every kind of marketing you can
You know, so we ran ads, uh
uh targeted at this uh a particular school to to to when we were seeding and testing these apps.
And we also followed people
creating a dedicated Instagram account that went to that school.
Um because we I we learned that uh
high schoolers I identify their school in their bio. So it says RHS on their bio.
And so
That was how we tried to get uh the entire school to adopt synchronously. We would f we'd follow them and then accept the followbacks.
A big misunderstanding though, and I I get this DM a lot and people are like, I'm trying to replicate your strategy. We've just done it at fifteen schools and it's it's not working anymore.
This is not the way we grew the app.
This is how we test it apps.
And that there's
It's really it's it's a little bit nuanced there. That's an important nuance because you need to get uh enough intensity of adoption and density.
For a social network.
So start to get the flywheel.
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 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 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've we figured out a way to just get a bunch of people to adopt at once.
I mean that's one thing I
encourage a lot of founders to do
is figure out a way to eliminate all those potentially confounding variables
Uh so you can know immediately whether something's working or not. You never want to walk away from a uh an experiment or test.
And say, Well, uh maybe the
The uh execution was bad.
Yeah,'cause it it it takes a lot of energy to mobilize a team to test something.
And you really want to make sure your tests actually
Um
Provide signal.
So your advice here is when you're testing something, test the best possible version of what that can be.
whether it takes manual work or something that is never gonna scale, like test the ideal
Because that'll tell you even if this could be the best possible version.
Uh, do people actually care?
Yeah, we would try to get the like uh an entire school to adopt just to know like
Uh
If if
everyone had ten friends would would th would they actually derive value from this app?
We also did other things like you know, w and I recommend all companies do this as uh
put live chat customer support.
In your app.
Like
Like twenty four hours a day.
And it sounds insane. It's like
That the whole point of tech is you d you're you don't need to do that. That's the whole point of a of a software.
But
Mm.
Then users get this white glove experience.
And that eliminates another confounding variable. Like did they think they were their problems were solved or they're they 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.
uh vehicle.
For getting feedback.
and do use doing user research.
'Cause users will literally tell you what the problem they're having.
Um so we
We had uh our
person that was running this, uh is the same as Michael Gutierrez. He's he's done it for all my companies, actually. He's the the
the uh community and customer support rep.
He would uh paste any interesting feedback into Slack and then we would
Oh that this this this
uh user has a great idea. We we should consider turning that into a feature.
Um so you really want your finger on the pulse.
As you roll these things out.
And uh so you can get a sense for
Uh what's working, what isn't.
And also make users feel great and make sure
at the end, uh they they promote your app positively to their peers.
I love that piece of advice.
Okay, so
To close out the TBH chapter.
Is there anything else that you think is important for people to know, or any other lasting lessons from that part of your journey that you bring with you to new apps that you're building today?
I think the the thing that is hard to really understand
For first time founders that hit
Break out success.
With a consumer product.
is how how draining
And how
S uh spread thin you get.
Because
Everything breaks.
Everything that you built.
Needs to be substituted.
Uh
Almost every three days.
And I I can just like ex give you 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.
Um
It is absolute it like chaos to keep the thing online, uh as as it scales up.
And so
You have to be
ruthless with prioritization as something scales up.
uh and put out
the largest fires first.
Because uh
I I that was something that I I didn't really uh
full fully understand is how uh
how how how uh many things go wrong and
If we didn't geofence the app.
It would w there w there would be no way we would have been able to keep the keep that thing online.
Because that's gave us some slack.
to
uh control growth.
This is a good example of when people ask like hey, does my app have product market fit?
I think this is a 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 like well what what are the metrics for uh well what's the bet benchmark for product market fit?
And I
This uh fo this founder that I'm uh friends with, uh his name's Roger Dickey.
Uh he had a
He told me about one time, um
If your product's working
You'll know.
Uh
And
Th there if there's any uncertainty, it's not working.
And
It it really is a binary when it comes
to uh consumer products um
People are gonna be fighting to get into it and
You'll f you'll find new measures that you've never heard of, like
Our our metric was
hourly active per day.
Not daily active users, hourly active users.
So you you'll you'll s you'll start seeing that and it it'll be abundantly obvious what product market fit is what
Y y uh 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 at Facebook?
Selling your company is one of the most draining processes you could ever go through as a founder.
When when we met with Facebook, they told me they have uh eighty people assigned to this deal.
Um
And uh I'm like
I have I have one one person. That's just me. Uh and they were like the SWAT team of MA.
Uh
And
The funniest part was, you know, they w they wanted to meet the team as well.
And so they they came out to our office in Oakland.
She's a dinghy old office.
Like that I got for eighteen hundred dollars a month. That was our rent for the office. And they arrive and uh
They they walk in, there's uh
Two engineers and one designer and me.
And they're just like
This is this is the whole company. This is the number one app in the United States.
Like, yeah, this is it. And when w when we went there
When we arrive.
We saw we joined a youth team, which was about like I don't know, like a hundred fifty people.
Uh just for this one d division of of Facebook. Uh
And it was like it was my first
job that uh I effectively that I've ever had. When they told me my title, uh they said I would be a product manager. Um
Like I I I was like, okay, I I I don't I don't know exactly what that is, but uh I I I yeah, I guess that's what I do. And uh
I I arrive and then I get access to a workplace system.
uh where you know people post all the things they're working on.
And I I realized it's like kind of like this almost uh academic environment.
Yeah.
social networks like social network development.
It's like the Harvard of social networks, like kind like of
the the the the uh I was reading all these studies that people were doing on like, oh if we change that, this is the impact to retention in DAU. And I was just uh I I was so impressed. Like I I the there's a whole science here.
And uh
A lot of the stuff that we did was learnt.
Learned from first principles.
But then we saw it
Actually turn into systems and processes here.
But the
The the thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a in a
Large tech company.
Is
There is very little product management that you do.
You're you're actually not
S as involved in the product as I had assumed.
Like I I thought, Oh, you you're the you're the person who uh
uh gets in the pixels and uh designs the flows and no absolutely not. Like you're actually more more you're detach completely detached from the design process. There's a
Design vertical of
Org that does all that.
And uh they don't really want you working on that stuff. And so that was very difficult for me.
Because actually when people ask me like well what do you think you're good at? Like at the core, I'm a designer.
Um
I I don't consider myself
Product manager.

you know, great at growing things, looking at mixed panel, and then designing the things that make it grow.
Uh but there's a v there's a rift between those two things inside of a large tech company. And so
I loved the academic approach to growing, but I I I it was really hard for me personally.
As I uh
became disconnected from the design process.
And I think that
A lot of my skills atrophied over those
Those four years, um
But um
I I did stick around. I went
through um multiple orgs. Favor one at the end was uh new product experimentation.
Where
Worked with other founders, uh
kind of a bunch of legends in Silicon Valley.
Building zero to one products.
Standalone apps.
I mean I was building standalone apps my entire time it
Facebook.
And
Uh
I I think I built probably eight apps while I was at Facebook.
Um wow. But it is it is much, much more difficult to build apps at a large company. Um a lot of the insights
That
You have
Are not things that you can necessarily present.
Or put in writing.
Into in a VP meeting.
Like
We're building an app for teens to flirt. Like that probably is not what you would present to a bunch of McKinse consultants at in uh so

I think
That makes it really difficult to be completely intellectually honest.
about what you're building.
Um
And
When the team isn't honest about it, then it's it's really hard to iterate toward the right thing in that context.
Having said that
There's a lot of things you don't have to deal with as a
Product man, you I don't have to deal 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 I
had zero exposure to as a uh
as as a founder of a small company, um
Yeah.
An insight you're sharing there potentially is
Like the reason a company like Facebook
Isn't amazing at launching completely new
Product zero to one stuff.
is they 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?
Uh, it's hard to really uh verbalize some of the
re like the uh the things that motivate us as people.
And
I uh I had like a pretty
There's a
tweet I put out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of like how I how I view why people download apps.
And it's like it's very simple. It's like
People download apps to
uh make or save money.
Examples of that might be like
you know, WhatsApp where, you know, free texting.
And then the other reason.
is to find a mate.
So maybe like Tinder or Snapchat find love.
And the third is to unplug from reality.
Uh, maybe like Netflix or Fortnite.
There's a bunch of other kind of subcategories that are very utilitarian, like movement, you know, Uber or Airbnb, like
you know, shelter.
And so I think putting that in a framing document.
And the particular nuanced reason.
Uh why people are gonna adopt
It is is difficult. Um as
when you're presenting that to
Uh, you know, people uh
That are you know for
seasoned professionals and uh
Uh care about how something might reflect on them personally.
And so
That's
Really difficult. Um
inside of a large company.
You'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 uh
Th that that part I think is
Probably solvable for a startup.
Uh if you just want to pay for ads or
Like getting your app into a dense
Friend graph.
Is
Is overall
Trivial. Like you you
As a founder, you should be able to pull it off after enough tries. So that advantage that a big big company brings.
I mean it's it makes it easier, but uh it's not not something that I think uh
As
Something that a founder can't solve for themselves.
So an interesting takeaway, it sounds like, is many people feel like I'm gonna build a social app.
They probably often hear it.
Facebook's gonna do that, Instagram's gonna copy you, Snap's gonna do that.
And what I'm hearing here is it's not as easy as maybe people think, and that it might be actually a lot harder for them to try something.
It's not only harder for them to uh identify these opportunities and to verbalize it internally.
uh and align the company around it.
It's it's also hard
To respond to signals in the market.
A lot of people think like uh these incumbents are gonna steal your ideas.
And for the most part, it takes a pretty long time for them to respond to even
The number one app or uh
charting in the'cause
It'll start charting in the app store.
You know, a PM will make a post about it.
And then
Uh the m the markets strategy or market research team might do a study.
To follow up on it.
Uh, and it'll kinda float around for a few months.
They they might uh put together a framing deck saying, Hey, we should go after this opportunity.
Let's put together this team. It'll go through VP reviews.
And then uh
It'll start development. Development might take six to twelve
months. Realistically, I think most companies
uh large companies
Take like twelve to twenty four months to respond to
competitive threats in the market.
Mm.
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.
'Cause you don't want to present something that you have a hunch about being a a a good idea.
Because if there's not market
signals already.
than
It's hard to defend.
And
People in companies are focused on getting their, you know
yearly bonus or their uh you know
Uh they're they're focused on their performance reviews.
And uh
It's hard to show up into a a framing meeting.
saying like
And a framing meeting is like a f meeting where you
you know, you position you're you're you're p positioning the opportunity and everything, here's what we should go after.
It's hard to s like just say okay.
Uh my first principles, this is a good idea, and here's some like
Very vague market signals.
In reality, you need to walk in and say
Here is the number one app in the United States and we don't we don't own it.
And
If you present something like that
That's pretty defensible on a
If you fail.
Uh because
There was market evident. But if you fail about something that's more based on
kind of vague abstract. So f you you have to
Generally
Like the only path is to
kind of copy existing companies, uh existing products.
if if you want to really get momentum.
uh inside inside of a large organization.
And for new completely new concepts, it's I think very difficult to present a lot of those ideas, uh, either to verbalize them in into a document or
to even get rally uh the organization around it.
That's a really interesting insight.
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Before we move on to the next chapter.
Uh, I wanna come back to the very first thing you said where product management is not real.
Uh is there anything else?
that you can say about your
Insight there, or is it basically what you described where PMs aren't actually involved in design in a company like Facebook in your experience?
The the functional organization structure of big tech
Has kind of separated
product managers from the
product development process in many ways.
They're not looking at data'cause data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they get back.
They're mainly just writing a f documents and then
kind of being the team secretary
And running around getting approvals.
For uh from each
cr uh cross functional team legal privacy everything like that
And yeah, it it's it you're act you're actually v very much separated from the the product itself. And and so
I I think
Like what Snapchat has done
And I think Apple to s uh the same extent is
That
Designers run the show.
And
I I think that's led to some very novel
products coming out from both of those companies.
But I mean, that that has its own host of problems because actually rolling out a product inside of a large organization.
It it requires a sheer force of
Well because it's a lot of work.
I mean there's a lot of
The regulatory scrutiny, you know the
Scaling it up like there's
You do need someone to
To project manage.
And so
I I don't know if it's the silver bullet as to give
designers the reign to to control to run the show. But I also don't think the the current the the traditional like Google Facebook style
Bien.
Team secretaries is also
The best solution.
To defend product managers, uh I think many product managers
Spend a lot of time with design, spend a lot of time a lot of time with data science.
I think probably what you saw is like the extreme big big big tech
version of product management. I know even PMs at Facebook.
can if they want to spend time with design. I think it's just obviously very different from
a startup world where you're just that's all you're doing.
Yeah, it's certainly an exaggerated view.
But it's particularly relevant, I think, for all the zero to one initiatives, uh, because
Like
If you're a if you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large like
You should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flow, everything.
Like and then yeah, it should be cleaned up prototype by a
A technical designer.
But
That's your idea and
Products live and die in the pixels.
Like consumer products. So
That that's on that's on you. Uh, and that's that's where I think
For maybe larger growth initiatives, yes, you can have uh you can 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.
Uh physically where your team was put. Is that is there something there?
Yeah, so our our our team was actually uh
When we joined the New Product Experimentation Group, uh, we were actually seated, I think like
At the s basically the same desk as uh Mark Zuckerberg.
Uh and
That that was pretty cool, uh to see, you know, how the how the machine
Runs uh like from the
Uh
From Z Zach's view.
But we
Uh we had a few artifacts that we had
kept with us from our old office uh when we were running uh TBH.
Uh, and one of them was this uh
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 f at Facebook just'cause it was a funny painting.
Uh and I I kind of got it because like
It it was kind of symbolic of who actually controls our destiny.
is uh is Apple. Um
And uh so when we relocated to uh
the area where Zuck was sitting, I I put up the painting on the wall
And it was basically a giant painting of Tim Cook was overlooking Zuck. And eventually one of the uh uh EAs uh there said.
Um, actually, do you think you could take that?
Home uh and
It kinda made sense because uh
The uh you can't really have a painting of a of another
Big tech.
executive overlooking us. What does it look like? Do you happen to have it? Yeah, I I actually I actually do. Let me let me let me go grab it. Um
Amazing.
Oh wow, that's that's artistic.
That's Tim Co.
What is the idea there that he's peeking through this darkness, staring at you?
Yeah, yeah, he's uh he's the real boss of all of us. Uh I could see I could see my sick.
Would not want that staring at all.
That's amazing. And I like that you still have that with you.
Yeah, one one of the artifacts of uh of that of that chapter of life.
So good.
Okay, so so that was your Facebook journey, those 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 U app, everyone's going nuts, what's he working on?
And at this point I I think you probably in your mind thought, am this one hit one drive and shown that I can do this again and again.
And so I think you probably have this motivation, maybe talk about that just like this drive, like, hey, I want to do this again.
Is that where your mind was at?
When that
Uh meme started.
My intent was to start a venture backed company.
And
Build something, you know.
Uh that would scale to be a big team and
Yeah.
This durable thing that la you know
Lasted many years and everything.
As far as like uh
I just made, you know, post that I was leaving Facebook and uh looking for uh
You know, some teammates.
And um
I shared uh a couple of ideas with uh some people privately.
And
It was there were some really crazy ideas that I shared. I I I'm not gonna get into them, but uh
Uh 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 meming it.
And
It became this massive like
meme like where they're like oh I just I just tried Nikita's app and save my marriage
I j oh I just quit drinking. Uh my k my kids returned home uh after all these like and it just it turned into this massive meme and like
And
At the time I I didn't even have an app or anything. I wasn't even planning to launch it at it wasn't even an app that the thing that I was
some of the ideas I was looking at and
Uh so it just turned into this viral
uh moments um
I I wasn't really even that
Fixated on building uh another like I wasn't even
committed to starting another company at that point. I just this was an ex exploration process.
But
What happened was uh
The market
Had crashed shortly thereafter.
There was uh kind of the end of the Zerp era.
The Fed started hiking rates.
I think my portfolio was down like thirty percent or something, and I was like, Damn, this sucks.
Uh
Maybe I should think about how to like make money today.
Uh um, just you know, that that's that's the reason we're in startups is to
To make money. Uh and so
There was always in the back of my head this question uh that I had, which was what if we had monetized TBH?
Cause the number one support message we received.
Was can I pay to reveal
Who sent me
Pulls.
Um
Those are the like number one question.
And
I
It was like would it have made even more than the acquisition if we just
monetized it. Uh and so
I was and I'm like, we could probably build this pretty fast.
Like probably in a month, month or two. Ended up being a lot longer, but um
We uh we started rebuilding it. It was a new team. Uh it was uh
the uh one of the uh
engineers from a company called Paparazzi, his name's uh z uh Zay Zay Turner.
And he started building into my house and uh
We uh we had
Tested it.
Um to see would this thing uh would this
With this
Th this new version of TBH actually resonate with with
Kids uh
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 uh
This the school, uh just you know, the same way we we I I've always done it in Is it the Georgia school again?
Yes, actually. Um
We launched at the exact same school.
Uh
That we uh we launched TBH.
On the exact same day.
Five years later. In fact.
And uh
People sent a lot of messages.
Mm.
But
It wasn't growing.
So
Let me let me p pedal back here a bit.
Um so
TBH grew through
variety of things, people sharing their messages to Snapchat and
uh text invites.
And that was twenty seventeen.
Uh, and the way you invited your friends on TBH was
that you tap their name
uh your contact name and there was a button that said invite.
And then we use 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 text from a server anymore. It has to be sent from the device, the user's device.
And just a point of clarification is
Like a lot of people clone TBH over the years.
And they think that when you voted on people in the polls that sent them a text.
We never did that. That that's like egregiously illegal to do and also unethical at a u user experience level to send texts when people don't even know that.
That's what's happening. But anyway, we couldn't send text over
Over uh
Twilio anymore.
And that led to people not sending as many invites when we recreated gas. Uh and
Uh where we create gas.'Cause they they had to pop they had to pop the compose window.
and hit send every but you're gonna 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 uh T V so
It was actually a uh just a in many ways like
Yeah, the concept on the surface was the same.
But it was a
very much a uh zero to one development cycle.
Uh
figuring out how to grow this thing, uh
Again in this in this climate.
I know that point is really important to you. I think a lot of people are like, Nikita just
Sold the same app twice.
What a what a guy.
And point you're making here is it was
Not only was like the infrastructure completely different, the team was different.
You had to rethink the entire
Liewel 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 s it'll spread uh
Or pe 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.
Well, it's hop schools.
Each of those was a very, very challenging problem.
uh in light of the new climate that we were operating in.
And uh I always do things by the book.
Like when it comes to like operating
You know.
like legally within the the compliance framework, uh and
That's something I when I meet founders and they tell me some growth thing that they're doing and I'm like
You you can't do that. That
You what that's gonna cause way more trouble down the line.
It's gonna burn users.
Two.
And so we always wanted to make it abundantly clear how
our growth system like how you're inviting friends and all that.

The thing that I see a lot of founders do is they in the background uh
use user data in ways
That it shouldn't be used.
Uh like they invite
They invite uh 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 art article called the Gaia hypothesis.
She's about biology.
And it it's basically like
Uh, the earth is kind of living and breathing and can respond to threats.
Okay.
And
When like you enter the rainforest too deep.
Ebola virus will be released.
Okay.
So
I think the Internet operates on a similar
paradigm here where if you
Are if you do the wrong thing by users.
The internet will come back.
And and get even.
And defend itself.
And so we've always whenever I design products, I try to do right by users.
Because it'll always come back much worse.
And I think you should always, you know, operate above board with how you design your growth systems.
And with with with gas, we had to, you know, do things the right way.
And
We had to figure out at each uh 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 uh
uh was a whole reinvent reinvention of the original product.
I love that you shared that because mm 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 gonna be good.
long term the internet's not gonna come and try to
Shut you down.
The point you bring up here, uh
About
wanting to build a positive thing.
There is this like
Some people sometimes they get criticism. It's not actually that often, but they say, Oh, you're building an app that makes teams feel in insecure or anything.
But
With gas, I think we received a message every single day about
From a user.
Telling us that they reconsidered suicide or other forms of self harm.
The the app sent you positive messages and affirmations. Uh 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 th like a lot of other social networks kind of are a mixed bag in terms of impact.
But we were s like entirely focused on making teams 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 uh if you weren't being voted on recently. So like we wanted to like
Spread the love in every way possible and and that's what
really motivated uh
Me to like
grow this thing was watching how it was impacting
Ten million kids for just
in in such a short period of time.
I really appreciate you adding that. I didn't know all those things about the way you thought about these
These apps.
Interestingly, I don't know how much you can go into this, but
There is a lot of
uh stuff going on with gas around uh human trafficking and
All the stuff where people thought people were being kidnapped through gas.
Which is yeah, talk about that whatever you can,'cause that's pretty crazy.
We had this hoax started.
We're
Uh 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
Uh, 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
Uh
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 as a teenager if you say, Oh, this app is dangerous and then you get a bunch of followers.
And we who doesn't love followers?
Uh so
It's actually a really
like viral piece of content if you put it out.
And so
We had this hoax started, uh, and we were like
This could kill the company. And I talked to a bunch of founders that it happened to them.
And they said, Yeah, we had to shut down because of that.
Wow. And uh
And I I was like
Is is this it? Is like is this the
you know, the end of uh the company and uh
I remember it.
Hit number one when
Uh 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 s and on post 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
Mm.
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. Uh this is not true. It makes no sense at all.
And so
We fought it at every vector possible.
Um this completely made up hoax.
We uh
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 have 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.
Uh,'cause we got review bombed.
But the thing that actually was the most impactful was
Uh my girlfriend made a video.
A tick tock video explaining that it's not true.
And we uh any time someone deleted their account, they could watch this video explaining it's not true.
And at the peak
We had three percent of users deleting their accounts per day.
Yeah, so it was like
Really catastroph like it was a uh catastrophe for for uh an app.
Um and we got it down to point one percent uh through relentless, relentless effort.
And
It's it it was really just uh
An unusual thing that happens when you grow really fast is uh is this this
Uh these these h this human trafficking hoax that starts.
And
You y you you you don't understand how crazy it is until it happens to your company. Um
But it was it was it was it was kinda hilarious to think about. Like this this map was the most harmless, benign thing you could think of.
This is insane. I did not know this full story.
And you were doing all this while you were trying to scale the app.
And try to keep the servers up and try to grow it, right? How what was that like to try to
Manage all these things at once.
I was sleeping three hours a day for three months.
It was
Extraordinarily difficult, uh to to do it all.
Uh our team was also relentless though. Like they would
Come over to my house.
Nine AM, stay until midnight.
And just do that seven days a week.
Um so
Yeah, it was uh it it was definitely like one of the most physically
Draining things ever.
But we were just so
tactical
I remember investors
We're asking to meet with us.
And I said, if you can't get a celebrity to post that this isn't true.
then uh
We were not interested.
But yeah, we we we went after it on every vector.
And uh it ended up being okay.
I love how this like you took your brain to this other completely different problem and thought about all the levers you could use to
Change the conversation around the app.
Yeah, we we even uh I remember
We had these TikTok videos that were made that were saying it was true.
And I had
S like I I clim I network my way all the way to
The CEO of TikTok.
And I said, Can you delete these? And we got them this mis this information deleted. Yeah. So it was uh it was
Really uh uh
A a whole new test of
uh our our team's capacities was
Uh fighting
The the key thing that you have to know though when you have a hoax spreading about your app is
Uh, you really have to make sure the hoax is less viral than your app.
Uh and it
Some at a few points the hoax was more viral than our app and we had to uh
We had to take this uh the K factor of the hooks.
That's absurd.
Okay, so
Broadly, you built this app.
Again, a big success.
I saw stat that you made ten million dollar or eleven million dollars in sales through the app, ten million downloads, uh right?
Yeah, was a uh blowout success in terms of like
on on uh it it grew bigger than TBH, uh we monetized it.
You know, we ran almost entirely on start up credits.
Um, so it was basically, you know, like cloud credits.
Like AWS credits. AWS credits, mixed panel.
I I I remember I I was like
Uh, 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
Vender.
And I got credits everywhere. And it so I I we really were tactical with that. Um and so we ended up being, you know, uh all all just just pure cash flow.
For the team, no we had no investors.
And
Uh
And it was just so interesting though that like the way that I started posting about it.
On Twitter.
was it kind of captured the zeitgeist
Of of the internet.
And uh we didn't intend on selling it. We were just gonna let this thing run its course and just be this app that kinda lives in the background of our lives.
Um but
Uh
Um
Once it started capturing like the Zeitgeist of
Twitter I was like Wait a minute, we should probably sell this thing.
And uh and that's when we start engaging with uh
You know, some of these we we ended up getting uh yeah, three three companies that wanted to to buy it. Won't be able to sale uh them, but ultimately we ended up selling to uh to to Discord. Um and we uh
We we we joined Discord.
Awesome.
So
Before we move on to the next part of the journey and some of the other insights that
Uh I want to get into the
Is there any lasting lessons they took away from gas as a product that you take with you to
advising startups in terms of building the product because I know there's many
But I need that.
stand out most that you think are really
Interesting to share.
I think I kind of touched on this before, which was trying to validate things
in in a sequence of like
Will people use the core flow? Will people spread it within their peer group? Will it hop peer groups? And what I think the most important thing is.
That I learned is that's actually a a really great way to do 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 kinda half ask the rest.
Just so you can get one hundred percent signal.
On that one
Sure.
And so we've 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 car 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 gonna get signaled.
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 lay 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.
Mm uh for the thing to work.
This comes back to your advice of the thing you need to get good at is testing.
and learning and making it really quick.
Yeah.
Okay, maybe one last thing along this thread. I'm just really curious how this hoax came to be, like who's behind it, how does this happen?
We got a original support message.
Which uh
Which was a s uh screenshot.
of a story on Snapchat.
Okay, and it said do not download the gas app, it's for human trafficking.
Okay.
And
It was a screenshot.
that had like uh kind of that mirror effect where you have like uh ten like ten people had screenshotted it.
Like more, like forty people. Cause it had like all the usernames of uh
So I was looking at this and I'm like
How much visible how like how how many people have seen this?
Uh
And
It looked like a viral thing on Snapchat.
And then I went to the app store page and I saw a review.
that uh
That said this app is for human trafficking.
And I went to my team
And I said
You know, we
W this this might this will probably kill the company. This will kill the product.
Um
I
I've sinn this before.
With consumer apps.
And it's evident to me this is gonna be ten times bigger tomorrow.
And
They were like no, it's just one one message. What what do you mean? I'm like, No, no, it's been screenshotted forty times and now it's on the app store page.
Like
And we got another message four hours later.
And
Uh
And the next day it was
our entire app store page was just covered with reviews n uh saying that the apps for human trafficking.
And uh we actually had to rebrand the app.
We uh we relaunched it once, uh
And uh we're like
We let's just call it something different.
Just relaunch it on the other side of the country.
We did that.
Started going viral again.
And uh
The c the craziest thing was
It's
re emerged.
And what happened was one
user was friends with another person in another state.
And they got an invitation.
And that user told them
Oh, that was in my state. It's actually for human trafficking. And then it just completely started again.
And uh
And then I it was too late at that point to relaunch again.
Uh it was I we just realized we just gotta we gotta we gotta fight this thing and and uh
Mm-hmm.
Ultimately I I don't think we'll ever know the true origin.
But uh
Yeah, it was uh
It was it was definitely a uh living, breathing uh uh
Like
Oaks.
That is insane. Uh the story just gets more and more interesting.
What are the what were some of the previous names, by the way? Is that something that you can share? Yeah, we went through a bunch. We had like
Uh one of them was called Crush. One of them was called
Melt and another was uh we
The w interesting thing about Crush is we got a great domain. We thought this would this would be the name.
Uh this was between the p some of the like re 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
Mm.
Regardless of the app, you you generally
M 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
T this was true of T B H too, which was the app indexed about six sixty to sixty five percent women.
So we're just like
Let's make the app more masculine and see what happens. We need balance on this. So
Wait.
We made the icon black with a flame called a gas.
And the invice rate
Jump.
And uh
You think a name doesn't matter, but right at the moment of sending an invite, yeah, you uh
So that that was one of the interesting insights of on uh the
the the naming process.
Man.
There's just endless stories that we could keep getting into, but uh we've also gone very long. So I'm gonna try to move on to another topic. So I asked people on
Twitter what to ask you.
Uh, 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 Belski asked this.
uh Robert at Figmas this and
Scott actually had a really nice way of describing it.
About why are so many
Quick sensation cum rap consumer apps proving to be more akin to summer songs.
than enduring standalone products and businesses. So there's kinda 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
Yeah.
tools for communicating with our friends.
Either you know
Messaging
Uh
Or
posting broadcasting one to many, like on stories or po you know you know, those
The incumbents have kind of
Uh built pretty large motes in terms of network effects.
And
to provide true like uh
I
An order of magnitude better experience
is non trivial because they've been actually improving these products so much over the years.
And
There's actually not
There's not that many entry points. Not not to say that it's not impossible. Snapchat was
showed that
There was a
style of messaging that people wanted
that the incumbents st 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
S like communication or social product.
That's a black swan event.
You
Like
Retention.
for consumer social is like
There there's a
Tremendous amount of randomness.
There's like one every decade. If it was simple.
I I would just be
Printing one trillion dollar companies. Uh, I've been printing Facebook's uh every time I sat down. But I think it's actually uh 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
Yeah.
Through the night.
You build it.
And you watch it take over the internet.
That is the mo most thrilling drug, I think.
You can you could
you could ever e experience and
And just watching it spread all over the country.
It's like
We you dr you drop an app in, you know, the uh
The deep south in Georgia.
And then you look on your analytics dashboard and
Forty percent of the high school down your street in Los Angeles has downloaded it.
one week later. Like that's a really profound feeling and it's
It's just it's crazy to have that sort of impact as a three person team. And I I live for that.
When I joined Facebook.
Uh this is um
Like the here's here's an interesting connection. So I joined Facebook

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 wanna run a large organization. I wanna have lots of reports
And
And then I met with V Ps
And they were actually jealous of me.
Because
Mm my quality of life was actually pretty cool. I I I got
Two
Build something high impact.
That
Uh made many teens feel better about themselves.
Made decent decent amount of money.
And then I
Wasn't
Yeah.
uh in charge of this becoming a people manager that has to run this large organization for for many years. And so
I think one day I will.
uh run maybe a venture scale business that uh
But
I uh
I I I w I w will say that.
I kind of like the way that I've been doing things so far.
Uh, in terms of quality of life.
And
Being fun.
Financially it's been great. So
I think uh that that part is what
motivates me and
Yeah, I'm I'm I I don't think uh
Yeah.
T running a large corporation is necessarily what I describe as fun.
That's amazing, man. I really I'm really happy we went here. Uh so much of this resonates with
The way I think.
And uh
Obviously a big part of this is also just it's very hard, as you said, to build a door build a consumer app that grows, first of all. Second, that actually
Last.
But that is interesting. That you do hope to one day
build a
uh venture funded
business.
I mean TBH was venture backed.
But uh
I I just don't
Like I I I think I'm gonna have to like do I wanna sign up for ten years?
And if you actually look at some of the numbers uh on
Like the
the actual proceeds that some that some of these founders get after an IPO after
Seven rounds of dilution.
A lot of them are pretty comparable.
to what we get.
From our apps.
For ninety days of work.
So um
Yeah.
Yeah, they uh the trade offs there are pretty uh
Pr pretty favorable, I think.
Actually just on that on that note, so what would make you actually decide to go venture funded? You talked about how if you're going more mainstream, non teens p folks after twenty two years old, is that
Why you would
Go that route.
I I don't think that like it's necessarily that part. It's more uh
I think if uh the
If I if if I could keep the team lean
And and scale up. I I think you know, there's
There's some actual uh
Founders that actually operate very lean teams.
And have
reached very large scale in terms of the valuations of the company. Like actually the the most
Uh iconic example is Elon Musk. His teams are actually pretty thin overall, and he's he's in the weeds.
doing product development.
And so
I I think
Yeah, if if I was to ever do it.
I do it under very specific
set of uh
Operating principles.
Uh versus
Turning it into a big tech company.
Q investors emailing you right now with send uh with term sheets.
Okay.
Nikita, this has been amazing. Uh there's one last
segment I wanna spend a little time on which is just
Kind of a rapid fire of pieces of advice you've shared.
that uh I think is incredibly insightful about how to build a successful consumer app.
And so 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 the device. That's uh how does that sound?
Sounds great.
Okay, cool. So
So the first is just uh contact permissions in IOS eighteen.
changes the game and how people can grow apps basically makes it harder to invite
Your friends.
Thoughts on how people should be thinking about this in their
And their products.
I uh when I first saw it, I was
I was really concerned. Uh this is tweet about it.
Like that's the end.
Game over.

Just let me let me frame things up for you.
The contact permission screen
You know, you're you average about sixty five percent approval rate.
Across all apps.
Higher it's higher for teens, uh, lower for adults and
But
If you have a sixty five percent consenting to contact access,
Then the next step on this new iOS eighteen 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've
Five hundred fifty contacts or something.
The first ten contacts are punctuation symbols.
From
Whatever
Like dirty
entry I put when I was driving or something.
So you have to z 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 s assuming users are willing to even do that.
And then you
Like
You and then the three others never sign up, but maybe three of your friends do. But I never get connected to them because
Uh there's there's no over here.
Yeah.
The my ex expectation is
The
It's gonna be very difficult to find friends on apps.
going forward to invite friends on apps going forward.
And that
Found to rethink how they do it.
And
Of the c of the c companies I'm working with on
On intro.
We are f looking at ways to reinvent what contact sync is.
or what it what what purpose it served.
It's not promising.
But we have we have some good leads.
And I think we'll have a whole
New set of
apps emerging as a consequence. But if you're betting on contact sync as a company right now.
Yeah, you you better uh
Better start uh thinking about plan B.
So the but 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 I don't think Apple uh acknowledged that. I think the person that designed the feature
probably have has never
built an app or done contact sync before because the flow
Is egregiously bad.
And it
It doesn't actually even, I think, benefit the user's privacy because it just completely eliminates
the feature altogether.
Okay.
Next topic.
Mm-hmm. So you uh helped uh 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 into how important that is to building a successful consumer social app.
The this kind of concept of getting users to the aha moment is something I recurringly bring up to every company I work with.
And
You have to understand that in twenty twenty four.
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
And this also leads back to the contact syn question that you talked about was
You have to sign up and then the first night you have to see all of your friends on the app and experience it.
Otherwise
You'll you'll churn.
So
This idea of like inverting the value
Uh when I was working with Dupe, they had this kind of shopping app that had a bunch of different features.
And there was one feature that I saw that was interesting called Deal Hop.
And it allowed you to just
You know, put in a product page and it would find uh the cheapest version of it online.
Um something I already do.
kind of
through a bunch of duct taped methods of Google image search, Google Lens.
And uh I was like that should be a fee that should be a whole company.
But how are we gonna
Teach users to do it and
How do we expose them to that aha moment as fast as possible in a memorable, iconic way?
And
I had this product I I built a while back where you just type the domain in front of an existing URL. So I should I sh told them.
Uh, you should try this. Uh it's like very marketable and
But you need to get a very short domain.
that matches the what you're doing. And so he went out and bought dupe.com for I don't know how much
But it was when he bought that I was pretty uh pretty excited. I'm like
Well
I I if this doesn't work, I'm gonna feel terrible, but if it does work, it's gonna be a blowout success. And so
We he put out a couple of videos about it and then, you know, it was iconic, went viral, uh the videos
Users remember to do it, to type dupe.com in front of a URL.
And now I think they're, you know
making millions
In A R.
In a matter like in a and I think not under
Sixty days of launching.
And
That that was a success and uh yeah.
Of the companies I work with, like uh you know
that rarely like I would say it happens about fifty percent of the time we hit that much success, but the
Uh we hit success.
I think fifty sometimes outright failure because
Consumer is so random.
And so what I'm hearing is a
Big insight is just
Ideally get the three seconds time to value. Yeah. Is that the advice?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Sounds great. Easy peasy.

Yeah.
Uh y you really have to craft, you know, onboarding everything to
To ensure that. Um and it's yeah, it's
It's uh
Yeah.
That's where
des the design part comes in of being a great product person.
Mm.
I imagine a big part of this is just cutting things you think, like killing your darlings, cutting things you think.
People need.
And just being really ruthless with that.
Really ruthless, but also being extraordinarily creative.
With
How you use
the tools available.
to uh 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 uh people adopted very quickly.
I have like a whole laundry list of uh IOS mechanisms that could be re that people use for a certain way today.
but you could invert them. Uh contact sync is a great example because you, you know, you sync your contacts and then it finds all the friends and then ranks the people.
who are not on the app yet, but have a bunch of friends on so there's
Zo bunch of uh
Ways that you can
One tap.
expose a ton of value to users.
that uh
That I think founders often neglect.
And
The
Yeah, a lot a lot of founders will go and say, Oh, they can just exchange usernames.
And that's how they can add each other.
That is the most like unrealistic thing ever because that means you have to see the username, type it into the app.
You have to do that what?
uh fifty times to get a fifty fr person friend list.
So we're think we're looking at
Uh like ten thousand taps.
versus
One.
So
That's that's what I mean by trying to get people to to the activation moment, the aha moment, uh, and get them uh
Get get get them to value.
I love that advice.
So maybe as a just a last question along these lines, when you come to a
A founder, a relationship that you're
A 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 gonna help you?
Talked about this aha moment stuff.
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 it.
around thirty five, thirty six companies, um, and
All of them are at kind of different stages of uh challenges they're facing.
Um, 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 I ask them to
Show me the analytics.
We look at
how people are distributing the app today.
What's the what is the uh milestone that a user must hit to become activated?
And what's getting in the way.
Uh of that.
I also take a very deep look at uh every funnel that users come through.
And
I think uh
A lot of founders separate marketing
And
Product growth.
Uh like top of funnel growth from m
from from the actual product growth mechanisms.
But Mar they're they're both the same.
They're b like they both should be treated as the same.
Like
If uh
If you're targeting a
a community and you want them to all adopt and get saturation.
You need to uh
Builds.
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 the and when you invite people to the from that app
That community needs to be mentioned. So
There you need to actually cover ever the mark like everything from the ads
to the in app experience to the sh all of that needs to be aligned.
for a user acquisition and flywheel to spin.
Uh, 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
Uh 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 wanna 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, um so I I work across the gamut. Most of them are
like consumer mobile companies.
And
I there certainly are web ones too, but I
Uh I work with companies across stages. Typically I recommend
That you you don't book me unless you're venture backed.
It's good.
It's a little expensive.
But my main goal when uh when someone does
Seek my advice through intro.
Is I tr I try to make them
Like
ten times back their money in the first thirty days. And so far I think I've
I've managed to do that with anyone who's
It's not with me.
And that means like
Get all the table stakes growth things out of the way.
Uh 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 tried a couple both.
Explain to them.
Which one I which direction I believe they should go.
Yeah, it's a conversation and we talk about it and
And then once they kind of settle on a direction
I uh 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 gonna convert at this percent. That's gonna and then I like just manage all that. And then but yeah, it's generally like post
uh series A, some you know, seed seed stage companies, uh and
It's it's been really fun.
It it's kept my you know my mind sharp on uh
Like where the market's headed.
I've also kind of
Over the years of building all these apps, they've accrued all these growth hacks that still are nobody knows about. And so
I share those with the with when the when it's relevant for the company.
And it's it's been great. Uh
Yeah, Dupe was one of them. I I I was advising Saturn. I rebuilt their friend finder, their
I think believe they're number one in
uh the productivity section above chat GPT uh as of today.
I think I've but I think I've generally invested uh in about
maybe ten percent of the companies, uh
That that seek out my advice.
Amazing. Well
I know it s 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'cause 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 sharing it with people in a in a wider scale.
It's it's been a pleasure. Uh th thanks for having me. Um we covered a lot and uh
Th there's there's there's plenty more. I have to come back uh after the uh next viral hit.
Oh man. So I was gonna ask you, is there anything you're working on now or stages, what can you share about?
Yeah.
The next yeah.
Stay tuned.
Oh here we go.
Amazing. Uh I 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?
Uh follow me on Twitter uh and enjoy my shit posts. Uh
And I hope you're you have as much fun with me, uh as me, uh on uh on Twitter.
I do, man. I love your tweets. And uh Nikita, thank you so much for doing this and for being here.
Yeah.
Thanks a lot.
Bye everyone.
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