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Nikita Bier

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105
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2024-08-25
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2024-08-25
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  1. “It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. We covered a lot, and there's plenty more. I hope to come back after the next viral hit.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Believe they're number one in the productivity section above ChatGPT as of today. I think I've generally invested in about maybe 10% of the companies that seek out my advice.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Explain to them which direction I believe they should go. It's a conversation and we talk about it. And then once they kind of settle on a direction, 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's going to convert at this percent. And then I like just manage all that. But yeah, it's generally like post series A, some seed stage companies. And it's been really fun. It's kept my mind sharp on where the market's headed. I've also kind of over the years of building all these apps, I've accrued all these growth hacks that still nobody knows about. And so I share those with when it's relevant for the company. And it's been great. Yeah, Dupe was one of them. I was advising Saturn. I rebuilt their friend finder.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, so I work across the gamut. Most of them are like consumer mobile companies. And there's certainly our web ones too. But I work with companies across stages. Typically, I recommend that you don't book me unless you're venture-backed because it's a little expensive. But my main goal when someone does seek my advice through intro is I try to make them like 10 times back their money in the first 30 days. And so far, I think I've managed to do that with anyone who's met with me. And that means like get all the table stakes growth things out of the way at the minimum. Then identify two to three step function changes that could change their growth trajectory. And these are higher scope fundamental changes to the product. So I tried a couple both.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And product growth, like top of funnel growth from the actual products growth mechanisms. But they're both the same. They both should be treated as the same. If you're targeting a community and you want them to all adopt and get saturation, you need to build marketing that shows imagery of that community or whatever. And then when you get in the app, you have to be able to join that community. And when you invite people from that app, that community needs to be mentioned. You need to actually cover the mark, like everything from the ads to the in-app experience to the all of that needs to be aligned for a user acquisition and flywheel to spin. A lot of people really screw that up. That's kind of kind of my initial kind of rough approximation of what I do when I come in.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Right now, I think I advise around 35, 36 companies. And all of them are at kind of different stages of challenges they're facing. Some of them are pure at the product concept stage. Some of them are venture-backed billion dollar companies. And each of them faces different problems. And I think the first thing I often do is I ask them to show me the analytics. We look at how people are distributing the app today. What's the milestone that a user must hit to become activated and what's getting in the way of that? I also take a very deep look at every funnel that users come through. And I think a lot of founders separate markets.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That I think founders often neglect. And a lot of founders will go and say, oh, they can just exchange usernames. And that's how they can add each other. That is the most like unrealistic thing ever because that means you have to see the username, type it into the app. You have to do that, what 50 times to get a 50 person friend list. So we're looking at like 10,000 taps versus one. So that's what I mean by trying to get people to the activation moment, the aha moment, and get them to value.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Really ruthless, but also being extraordinarily creative with how you use the tools available to activate a user. And I think extraordinary product people are deeply aware of every possible API in how it can be used in non-traditional ways. Like this URL trick was something that I think was non-traditional that people adopted very quickly. I have like a whole laundry list of iOS mechanisms that could be that people use for a certain way today, but you could invert them. Contact sync is a great example because you sync your contacts and then it finds all the friends and then ranks the people who are not on the app yet, but have a bunch of friends on it. So there's a bunch of ways that you can one tap expose a ton of value to users.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “About it, and then you know it was iconic, went viral. The videos users remembered to do it, to type dupe.com in front of a URL. And now I think they're making millions in ARR in a matter, like, and I think under 60 days of launching. And that was a blowout success. And yeah, of the companies I work with, I would say it happens about 50% of the time we hit that much success, but we hit success. I think 50% of the time it's outright failure because consumers are so random.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The cheapest version of it online. Something I already do kind of through a bunch of duct taped methods of Google, image search, Google Ends. And I was like, that should be a whole company. But how are we going to teach users to do it? And how do we expose them to that aha moment as fast as possible in a memorable, iconic way? And I had this product I built a while back where you just type the domain in front of an existing URL. I told them, you should try this. It's like very marketable. But you need to get a very short domain that matches what you're doing. And so he went out and bought dupe.com for, I don't know how much, but when he bought that, I was pretty excited. I'm like, well, if this doesn't work, I'm going to feel terrible. But if it does work, it's going to be a blowout success. And so he put out a couple videos.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “This kind of concept of getting users to the aha moment is something I recurringly bring up to every company I work with. And you have to understand that in 2024, people's attention spans are like three seconds. It's really sad, but we're spread thin through so many notifications, products, everything that if you can't demonstrate value in the first three seconds, it's over. And this also leads back to the contact scene question that you talked about was you have to sign up and then the first night you have to see all of your friends on the app and experience it. Otherwise, you'll churn. So this idea of like inverting the value, when I was working with Dupe, they had this kind of shopping app that had a bunch of different features. And there was one feature that I saw that was interesting called DealHop. And it allowed you to just put it in a product page and it would find.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yes, but most likely, I think most apps will not have social graphs going forward, and this will entrench incumbents even more. I don't think Apple acknowledged that. I think the person that designed the feature probably has never built an app or done context sync before because the flow is egregiously bad. It doesn't actually even, I think, benefit the user's privacy because it just completely eliminates the feature altogether.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You and then the three others never sign up, but maybe three of your friends do. But I never get connected to them because there's no over. So my expectation is very difficult to find friends on apps going forward to invite friends on apps going forward and that founders will need to rethink how they do it. Of the companies I'm working with on intro, we are looking at ways to reinvent what contact sync is or what purpose it served. It's not promising, but 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 better start thinking about Plan B.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “When I first saw it, I was really concerned. Just let me frame things up for you. The contact permission screen, you average about 65% approval rate across all apps. It's higher for teens, lower for adults. But if you have a 65% consenting to contacts access, then the next step on this new iOS 18 change is you select which contacts you want to allow the app to access. And it's an alphabetical list and that alphabetical list for me, I have 550 contacts or something. The first 10 contacts are punctuation symbols from whatever dirty entry I put when I was driving or something. So you have to scroll down and find that name. So I have to find Lenny. I have to add you. And what if you're not an app user? So I've just added you and or three others. Like assuming users are willing to even do that. And then you like.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I don't think that it's necessarily that part. It's more, I think if I could keep the team lean and scale up. Founders that actually operate very lean teams and have reached very large scale in terms of the valuations of the company. Actually, the most iconic example is Elon Musk. His teams are actually pretty thin overall. And he's in the weeds doing product development. And so I think, yeah, if I was to ever do it, I would do it under very specific set of operating principles versus turning it into a big tech company.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, TBH was venture-backed, but I just don't think I'm going to have to do I want to sign up for 10 years. And if you actually look at some of the numbers on the actual proceeds that some of these founders get after an IPO, after seven rounds of dilution, a lot of them are pretty comparable to what we get from our apps for 90 days of work. Yeah, the trade-offs there are pretty favorable.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It to one day, and I want to run a large organization. I want to have lots of reports. And then I met with VPs and they were actually jealous of me because my quality of life was actually pretty cool. I got to build something high impact that made many teens feel better about themselves, made a decent amount of money. And then I wasn't in charge of this becoming a people manager that has to run this large organization for many years. And so I think one day I will run maybe a venture scale business that, but I will say that I kind of like the way that I've been doing things so far in terms of quality of life and being fun financially. It's been great. So I think that part is what motivates me. And yeah, I don't think. Running a large corporation is necessarily what I describe as fun.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “My favorite part about product development is you make this thing through the night, you build it, and you watch it take over the internet. That is the most thrilling drug. I think you could ever experience. And just watching it spread all over the country. It's like you drop an app in the deep south and Georgia and then you look on your analytics dashboard and 40% of the high school down your street in Los Angeles has downloaded it one week later. That's a really profound feeling. It's just, it's crazy to have that sort of impact as a three-person team. And I live for that. When I joined Facebook, this is like here's an interesting connection. So I joined Facebook and I saw that many of my peers were looking up to VPs and they're like, that's what I want to make.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Durable necessarily. And I think finding durability for a communication or social product, that's a black swan event. Like retention for consumer social is like there's a tremendous amount of randomness. There's like one every decade. If it was simple, I would just be printing one trillion dollar companies. I'd be printing Facebook's every time I sat down. But I think it's actually, a lot of it is pure randomness. On the other hand, growing a product can be a science with certainty if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral. Now, why haven't I tried to take the viral part and build something that has been durable or long-lasting? I'll tell you a little bit about my motivations.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Lot of the fundamental tools for communicating with our friends either messaging or posting broadcasting one to many, like on stories or those, the incumbents have kind of built pretty large moats in terms of network effects and to provide true an order of magnitude better experience is non-trivial because they haven't actually improving these products so much over the years. And there's actually not, there's not that many entry points. I'm not saying that it's not impossible. Snapchat showed that there was a style of messaging that people wanted that the incumbents weren't serving. But I think there's these kind of edges that you can go after with a much higher probability of success. And they might not actually be something that's”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Need balance on this so we made the icon black with a flame called it gas and the invites rate jumped. And you think a name doesn't matter, but right at the moment of sending an invite, yeah, so that was one of the interesting insights on the naming process.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, we went through a bunch. We had one of them was called Crush. One of them was called Melt. And another was the interesting thing about Crush is we got a great domain. We thought this would be the name. This was between some of the rebrands. We tested it and we saw that invitations dropped significantly under the crush name. And we were like, what's going on here? And we found that actually when you invite someone to an app, regardless of the app, you generally met boys invite boys, girls invite girls to apps. And boys didn't want to invite their friends to an app called Crush, a pink with a pink icon. And then we looked at the data and the app, I mean, this was true of TBH too, which was the app indexed about 60 to 65% women. So we were just like, let's make the app more masculine and see what happens.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Let's just call it something different, just relaunch it on the other side of the country. We did that, started going viral again. And the craziest thing was it 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 then it was too late at that point to relaunch again. We just realized we just got it. It was definitely a living breathing hoax.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “This will probably kill the company. This will kill the product. I've seen this before with consumer apps, and it's evident to me this is going to be 10 times bigger tomorrow. And they were like, no, it's just one message. What do you mean? I'm like, no, no, it's been screenshotted 40 times, and now it's on the App Store page. And we got another message four hours later. In the next day, it was our entire App Store page was just covered with reviews saying that the apps for human trafficking. And we actually had to rebrand the app. We relaunched it once and we're like,”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “We got an original support message, which was a screenshot of a story on Snapchat. Okay. And it said, do not download the Gas app. It's for human trafficking. And it was a screenshot that had like kind of that mirror effect where you have 10 people had screenshotted it, like more, like 40 people, because it had like all the usernames. So I was looking at this and I'm like, how much visibility have seen this? And it looked like a viral thing on Snapchat. And then I went to the App Store page and I saw a review that said this app is for human trafficking. And I went to my team and I said, you know, we.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “The more layers you have, the higher risk your product is. So you should try to condense it to about like four things that must be true. For the thing to work.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And what I think the most important thing is that I learned that's actually a really great way to do zero-to-one product development is execute at 100% for the thing you're trying to validate at that specific stage of the product development cycle. And then the rest can kind of, you can kind of half-ass the rest just so you can get 100% signal on that one part. And so we made the polling experience just perfect. The questions were great, you know, push notification, everything worked. And then the next stage was like getting sharing and virality working. And so compartmentalizing those things because ultimately you'll have too much scope creep if you try to solve everything at once and validate. And also you're not going to get 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 layers of conditional statements and”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I think I kind of touched on this before, which was trying to validate things in a sequence of like, will people use the core flow? Will people spread it within their peer group? Will it hot peer groups?”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Start engaging with some of these, we ended up getting three companies that wanted to buy it. Won't be able to say all of them, but ultimately we ended up selling to Discord. And we joined Discord”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “AWS credits, mixed panel. I remember I was like, when I saw the early date, I'm like, okay, now it's time for me to negotiate every bill down to the last cent of margin for every vendor. And I got credits everywhere. So we really were tactical with that. And so we ended up being all just pure cash flow for the team. We had no investors. And it was just so interesting though that like the way that I started posting about it on Twitter was it kind of captured the zeitgeist of the internet. And we didn't intend on selling it. We were just going to let this thing run its course and just be this app that kind of lives in the background of our lives. But once it started capturing like the zeitgeist of Twitter, I was like, wait a minute, we could probably sell this thing. And that's when we.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, it was a blowout success in terms of, it grew bigger than TBH. We monetized it. We ran almost entirely on startup credits. So it was basically credit.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yeah, we even, I remember we had these TikTok videos that were made that were saying it was true. And I had, like, I networked my way all the way to the CEO of TikTok. And I said, can you delete these? And we got this information deleted. Yeah. So it was really a whole new test of our team's capacities was fighting. The key thing that you have to know though, when you have a hoax spreading about your app is. You really have to make sure the hoax is less viral than your app. And at a few points, the hoax was more viral than our app, and we had to take this.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. It was extraordinarily difficult to do it all. 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. So yeah, it was definitely like one of the most physically draining things ever, but we were just so tactical. I remember investors were asking to meet with us and I said, if you can't get a celebrity to post that this isn't true, then we're not interested. But yeah, we went after it on every vector and it ended up being okay.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And we audit down to 0.1% through relentless, relentless effort. And it was really just an unusual thing that happens when you grow really fast is this human trafficking hoax that starts. And you don't understand how crazy it is until it happens to your company. But it was kind of hilarious to think about. This app was the most harmless, benign thing you could.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “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 asked Apple to remove them because we got review bombed. But the thing that actually was the most impactful was my girlfriend made a video, a TikTok video explaining that it's not true. And anytime someone deleted their account, they could watch this video explaining it's not true. And at the peak, we had 3% of users deleting their accounts per day. So it was like really a catastrophe for an app.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “That had happened to them. And they said, yeah, we had to shut down because of that. And I was like, is this it? Is this the end of the company? And I remember it hit number one when we started getting a few of these reports in our support channels. And I was like, I'm just going to plant the flag and post that we hit number one in the app store because this thing's probably going to shut down soon. So I make this announcement on Twitter. I just made the number one app and I thought it would just be dead in a week. And then I just had this sudden burst of energy and I was like, I'm going to win. I'm going to fight this. This is not true. It makes no sense at all. And so we fought it at every vector possible. This completely made up hoax. We met with journalists, reporters to make sure that the number one match every time you search GasApp, human trafficking was”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “We had this hoax started where people were saying the app was used for human trafficking. And I was like, this is so strange. This is an anonymous polling app without messaging. And the only thing you could do is send compliments to your friends. And I researched into it and I saw that this is actually plaguing a lot of apps. 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 gets you attention if you say that about an app as a teenager. If you say, oh, this app is dangerous. And then you get a bunch of followers. And who doesn't love followers? So it's actually a really viral piece of content if you put it out. And so we had this hoax started and we were like, this could kill the company. And I talked to a bunch of founders.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Everyone got a vote. And what we did was we put your name in polls at a higher frequency to, if you weren't being voted on recently. So we wanted to spread the love in every way possible. And that's what really motivated me to like grow this thing was watching how it was impacting 10 million kids for just in such a short period of time.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Point you bring up here about wanting to build a positive thing, there's this, some people, sometimes I get criticism. It's not actually that often, but they say, oh, you're building an app that makes teams feel insecure or anything. But with gas, I think we received a message every single day about from a user telling us that they reconsidered suicide or other forms of self-harm. The app sent you positive messages and affirmations. It made teens feel really good. And I think a lot that is lost on a lot of people. Instagram, you know, can make you feel jealousy and like a lot of other social networks kind of are a mixed bag in terms of impact. But we were entirely focused on making teens feel better. And some people might say, oh, what if someone doesn't get voted for something? We actually built a system to ensure”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And I think you should always operate above board with how you design your growth systems. And with gas, we had to do things the right way. And we had to figure out at each particular kind of moment of problem that we solve, like will it spread within schools? Will it hop schools? Will people pay for it? All of these things we had to, was a whole reinvention of the original product.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Use user data in ways that it shouldn't be used. Like they invite people on your behalf and all that. And I have this kind of crazy view that the internet is this like living and breathing thing. There's this Wikipedia article called the Gaia Hypothesis, which is about biology. And it's basically like the Earth is kind of living and breathing and can respond to threats. Okay. 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 do the wrong thing by users, the internet will come back and get even and defend itself. And so we've always, whenever I design products, I try to do right by users because it'll always come back much worse.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, and there were so many layers of like we validated one thing and then the next thing we weren't able, like we got stuck on. Like, okay, people will, it'll spread, or people send a lot of messages. Cool, great. The next thing was, will it spread within a school? That took us a while to get right. Will it hop schools? Each of those was a very, very challenging.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Twilio anymore, and that led to people not sending as many invites when we recreated gas and or we create gas because they had to pop, they had to pop the compose window and hit send every you're going to just tap invite on five names. So we actually had to reinvent all the growth systems. And it took about, I think like nine launches, including renaming the app, including like features that just never existed on TV. So it was actually just a, in many ways like, yeah, the concept on the surface was the same, but it was a very much a zero-to-one development cycle of figuring out how to grow this thing again in this climate.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “TBH grew through a variety of things, people sharing their messages to Snapchat and text invites. And that was 2017. And the way you invited your friends on TBH was that you tapped their name, your contact name in there was a button that said invite. And then we used Twilio to send them a text message. And the regulatory environment actually had changed a lot over those five years. You really can't send 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, it sent them a text. We never did that. That's like egregiously illegal to do. And also unethical at a user experience level to send texts when people don't even know that what's happening. But anyway, we couldn't send text over.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yes, actually, we launched at the exact same school That we launched TBH on the exact same day. Five years later And people sent a lot of messages, but it wasn't growing. So let me pedal back here a bit.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Like probably in a month, month or two ended up being a lot longer. But we started rebuilding it. It was a new team. It was one of the engineers from a company called Paparazzi. His name's Turner. And he started building into my house. And we had tested it to see what this thing this new version of TBH actually resonate with kids this five years later. That was actually the thing I wanted to know most of all was like, would pulling, anonymous polling app actually still be relevant five years later? And so we dropped it into the school just the same way I've always done it.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “The market had crashed shortly thereafter. There was kind of the end of the ZERP era. The Fed started hiking rates. I think my portfolio was down like 30% or something. And I was like, damn, this sucks. Maybe I should think about how to make money today. Just, you know, that's the reason we're in startups is to make money. There was always in the back of my head this question that I had, which was, what if we had monetized TBH? Because the number one support message we received was, can I pay to reveal who sent me polls? Number one question. And it was like, would it have made even more than the acquisition if we just monetized it? And so I was, and I'm like, we could probably build this pretty fast.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “My marriage. I just quit drinking. My kids returned home after all these. And it just turned into this massive meme. And at the time, I didn't even have an app or anything. I wasn't even planning to launch it. It wasn't even an app that the thing that I was some of the ideas I was looking at. And so it just turned into this viral moment. I wasn't really even that fixated on building another like I wasn't even committed to starting another company at that point. I just, this was an exploration process. But what happened was”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “When that meme started, my intent was to start a venture-backed company and build something that would scale to be a big team and this durable thing that lasted many years and everything. And so I was like, I just made a post that I was leaving Facebook and looking for some teammates. I shared a couple of ideas with some people privately. And there were some really crazy ideas that I shared. I'm not going to get into them. But then people started posting, oh my God, I just saw Nikita's app. It's crazy. And what happened was others saw that and then they started memeing it. And it became this massive like meme, like where they're like, oh, I just tried Nikita's app. It's saved.”

    2024-08-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source