YouSaid · the spoken record

Nikita Bier

lines on the record: 105
first: 2024-08-25
most recent: 2024-08-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so our team was actually, when we joined the new product experimentation group, we were actually seated, I think like basically the same desk as Mark Zuckerberg. And that was pretty cool to see how the machine runs from Zuck's view. We had a few artifacts that we had kept with us from our old office when we were running TBH. And one of them was 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 Facebook just because it was a funny painting. And I kind of got it because it was kind of symbolic of who actually controls our destiny is Apple. And so when we relocated to the area where Zuck was sitting, I put up the painting on the wall and it was basically”
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
“Yeah, it's certainly an exaggerated view, but it's particularly relevant, I think, for all the zero to one initiatives because if you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large, like you should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. And then, yeah, it should be cleaned up, prototyped by a technical designer. But that's your idea. products live and die in the pixels like consumer products so that's 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 be a more detached from the pixels”
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
“Of problems because actually rolling out a product inside of a large organization, it requires a sheer force of will because it's a lot of work. I mean, there's a lot of regulatory scrutiny, you know, scaling it up. You do need someone to project manage. And so I don't know if it's the silver bullet as to give designers the rein to run the show. But I also don't think the current, the traditional Google Facebook style of being team secretaries is also the best solution.”
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
“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 because data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they get back. They're mainly just writing documents and then kind of being the team secretary and running around getting approvals from each cross-functional team, legal, privacy, everything like that. And yeah, you're actually very much separated from the product itself. And so I think like what Snapchat has done, and I think Apple to the same extent is that designers run the show. And I think that's led to some very novel products coming out from both of those companies. But I mean, that has its own home.”
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
“Of copy existing companies, existing products, if you want to really get momentum inside of a large organization. And for new, completely new concepts, it's, I think, very difficult to present a lot of those ideas, either to verbalize them into a document or to even get rally the organization around 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
“And people in companies are focused on getting their yearly bonus or they're focused on their performance reviews. And it's hard to show up into a framing meeting saying like in a framing meeting is like a meeting where you're positioning the opportunity and everything. Here's what we should go after. It's hard to say, okay, 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 own it. And if you present something like that, that's pretty defensible if you fail because there was market evidence. But if you fail about something that's more based on kind of vague abstract, so you have to generally, like the only path is to”
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
“The incentives within large companies make this very difficult because you don't want to present something that you have a hunch about being a good idea. Because if there's not market signals already, then it's hard to defend.”
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
“And it'll kind of float around for a few months. They might 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 it'll start development. Development might take six to 12 months. Realistically, I think most companies, large companies take like 12 to 24 months to respond to competitive threats in the market.”
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
“It's not only harder for them to identify these opportunities and to verbalize it internally and align the company around it. It's also hard to respond to signals in the market. A lot of people think like these incumbents are going to 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 charting in the app because it'll start charting in the app store. You know, a PM will make a post about it. And then the”
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
“Nuanced reason why people are going to adopt is difficult as when you're presenting that to people that are seasoned professionals and care about how something might reflect on them personally. And so that's really difficult 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. That part, I think, is probably solvable for a startup if you just want to pay for ads. is overall trivial. As a founder, you should be able to pull it off after enough tries. So that advantage that a big company brings, I mean, it makes it easier, but it's not something that I think is something that a founder can't solve for themselves.”
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
“It's hard to really verbalize some of the things that motivate us as people. And I had a pretty, there's a tweet I put out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of like how I view why people download apps. And it's like it's very simple. It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be like WhatsApp where 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, 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”
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
“Abstracted away. But there is regulatory stuff that you have to deal with that I had zero exposure to as a founder of a small 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
“But it is much more difficult to build apps at a large company. A lot of the insights that you have are not things that you can necessarily present or put in writing 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 McKinsey consultants. I think that makes it really difficult to be completely intellectually honest about what you're building. And when the team isn't honest about it, then 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. I don't have to deal with, think about money. I don't have to think about paying legal bills or doing finance and accounting. So all that.”
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
“At the end was new product experimentation where worked with other founders, 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 at Facebook. And I think I built probably eight apps while I was at Facebook.”
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
“Absolutely not. Like you're actually completely detached from the design process. There's a design vertical org that does all that. And 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, what do you think you're good at? At the core, I'm a designer. I don't consider myself a product manager. you know, great at growing things looking at mixed panel and then designing the things that make it grow. But there's a rift between those two things inside of a large tech company. And so I loved the academic approach to growing, but it was really hard for me personally as I became disconnected from the design process. And I think that a lot of my skills atrophied over those four years. But I did stick around. I went through a multiple orgs, favor one.”
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
“Social networks, like social network development. It's like the Harvard of social networks. 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 so impressed. There's a whole science here. A lot of the stuff that we did was learn from first principles, but then we saw it actually turn into systems and processes here. But 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. You're actually not as involved in the product as I had assumed. I thought, oh, you're the person who gets in the pixels and designs the flows.”
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
“Two engineers and one designer and me, and they're just like this is the whole company. This is the number one app in the United States. Like, yeah, this is it. And when we went there, when we arrived, we joined the youth team, which was about like, I don't know, like 150 people just for this one division of Facebook. And it was my first job that effectively that I've ever had when they told me my title, they said I would be a product manager. Like I was like, okay, I don't know exactly what that is, but yeah, I guess that's what I do. And I arrive and then I get access to a workplace system where people post all the things they're working on. And I realized it's like kind of like this almost academic environment for”
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
“Selling your company is one of the most draining processes you could ever go through as a founder. When we met with Facebook, they told me they have 80 people assigned to this deal. And I'm like, I have one person. That's just me. And they were like the SWAT team of M&A. And the funniest part was, you know, they wanted to meet the team as well. And so they came out to our office in Oakland. which is a dinghy old office that I got for $1,800 a month. That was our rent for the office. And they arrive.”
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
“A lot of people ask me, what are the metrics for what's the benchmark for product market fit? This founder that I'm friends with, his name is Roger Dickey, he told me one time, if your product's working, you'll know. And if there's any uncertainty, it's not working. And it really is a binary when it comes to consumer products. People are going to be fighting to get into it. And you'll find new measures that you've never heard of, like our metric was hourly actives per day, not daily active users, hourly active users. So you'll start seeing that. And it'll be abundantly obvious what product market fit is. You'll know it when you see it as the bottom line.”
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
“Almost every three days. And I can just give you an example. 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, it is absolute chaos to keep the thing online as it scales up. And so you have to be ruthless with prioritization as something scales up and put out the largest fires first. Because that was something that I didn't really understand is how many things go wrong. If we didn't geofense the app would be no way we would have been able to keep that thing online because that gave us some slack to control growth.”
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
“I think the thing that is hard to really understand for first time founders that hit breakout success with a consumer product is how draining and how spread thin you get because everything breaks. Everything that you built needs to be substituted.”
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
“They're having. So we had our person that was running this, the same was Michael Gutierrez. He's done it for all my companies, actually. The community and customer support rep. He would paste any interesting feedback into Slack. And then we would be like, oh, this user has a great idea. We should consider turning that into a feature. So you really want your finger on the pulse as you roll these things out. And so you can get a sense for what's working, what isn't, and also make users feel great and make sure at the end they promote your app positively to their peers.”
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
“Yeah, we would try to get an entire school to adopt just to know if everyone had 10 friends, they actually derive value from this app. We also did other things like, you know, and I recommend all companies do this as put live chat customer support in your app, like 24 hours a day. And it sounds insane. It's like the whole point of tech is you don't need to do that. That's the whole point of a software. Then users get this white glove experience and that eliminates another confounding variable. Like, did they think they were their problems or solved or 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 vehicle for getting feedback and doing user research because users will literally tell you the problem.”
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
“That whether the app had legs and we wouldn't have this kind of uncertainty like, oh, did they add enough friends? Did we get enough people on it? Did they reach the aha moment because you need friends to get on? So we wanted to eliminate that confounding variable. And so we figured out a way to just get a bunch of people to adopt at once. And that's one thing I encourage a lot of founders to do is figure out a way to eliminate all those potentially confounding variables so you can know immediately whether something's working or not. You never want to walk away from an experiment or test and say, well, maybe the execution was bad because it takes a lot of energy to mobilize a team to test something. And you really want to make sure your tests actually provide signal.”
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
“I think you're referring to there's like a buzzfeed memo or a memo that was leaked to BuzzFeed while I was at Facebook. And the main thing we found was like to be convinced to download an app, you need to see it. You need to see the marketing message three times or so. You basically need to saturate an area with every kind of marketing you can. So we ran ads targeted at a particular school to when we were seeding and testing these apps. And we also followed people creating a dedicated Instagram account that went to that school because we learned that high schoolers identify their school in their bio. So it says RHS on their bio. And so that was how we tried to get”
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
“Day one volume of messages sent on a messaging app. You're lucky if people send like three or four or something. But we were sending like 60. And we couldn't even handle it. So we had to geofence the app because you need to scale our servers, which was actually a pretty controversial decision inside of our company because like, why would you turn off something that's working? At my core, I knew like If it's working at this many individual schools, we could just relaunch it anytime and it'll just, it'll, it'll go viral. So let's regroup and figure out what's happening here and then relaunch.”
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
“And I mean, in the back of my head, I always knew anonymous apps go viral, but they always lead to like these awful news stories of kids committing suicide, you know, self-harm and all that. And so I was like, I'll never build anything like that. But when we came up with this new mechanic where you could only say positive things through polls, you know, who has the best smile, who's most likely to be president, and then you receive it. And 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 literally explosive adoption. One school I was looking at, they sent 450,000 messages in the first seven days of adopting it. And when you look”
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
“Crystallize what their motivation is and build a product around and clear up what they're trying to actually do, you can have this kind of intense adoption. And when we saw what people were doing with Sarah, I also looked at some of the tweets and comments on it. A lot of people were receiving negative messages. And so what I saw with a game that kids were playing on Snapchat TBH and then Sarah, I realized just people want to know good things about themselves and they don't want these bullying messages that they're getting on these anonymous apps. And I was like, well, what if instead of actually typing what you wanted to say about somebody, you just answered polls and we authored those polls so that we ensured everything would always be positive.”
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
“Things out. And 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 Surah. And it was for sending anonymous messages 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 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 is 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”
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
“After building all these apps, we had these kind of lingering users that stuck around and would share feedback with us on our next app. And so there were a couple like there's the senior in high school that I would send screenshots of our products. And 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 it would say like I like you. You're smart. 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 kind of weird. You post this on your story and then people send you feedback. And I'm like, so teens are looking for this vehicle for disclosure, essentially. And I'm like, that's kind of cool. I wonder if you could make that into an app. We had sketched some.”
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
“It fluctuates. It used to be like 80 to 100,000 installs, but now you have these companies that are just spending extraordinary amounts on ads or injecting it into one of their other apps. So between threads, TMU and all these other apps that are kind of spending on acquisition and all that, some days it's up to like 300,000. And that's pretty cool.”
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
“Show me the metrics. You guys are like what number four or something? And since we just launched California, it's a big state. I said, no, no, no, we're actually number one. We're the number one aven in the United States. And I said, yeah, show me the metrics. And our CTO was a published Eric Hazard, a published author in mapping. And so he created an amazing dashboard that could show real-time installs on a map. And it was around 4 p.m. and school had just gotten out. 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's what got the kind of the ball rolling on a, you know, it was a really, really cinematic moment of showing something that you created that literally just took over the entire neighborhood around you.”
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
“Had told me to fly down. And they told me to fly down that day. 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 rollout strategy where every state was geofenced. And we hadn't launched California until that morning. I arrived at 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
“And servers started crashing and watching it climb the charts. I think within, I looked at our numbers and I'm like, we will be number one in the United States in like six days. And then I looked at our Amazon bill and it was like $120,000. I looked at our bank account. It said $150,000. And I'm like, okay, these two numbers don't really. So I quickly had to put together a funding round and I told my team, can you guys just pause for like two months and just really focus on this? I think I could probably sell this thing. And so it turned into a pretty competitive bidding process, actually. There was a really, really great moment where there was one of the acquires or one of the bidders was based in LA.”
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
“I understand, but what if the app actually starts charting on the App Store? And he said, what are the chances of that? You know that's not going to happen. And I said, sure, okay. We launched this app and it was a polling app, TBH. And it immediately took off in the school that we seeded it into in 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 state of the company. And it just, I think it spread to, you know, 40% of the school downloaded it in the first 24 hours and it rapidly spread to the neighboring schools. And suddenly I was like, oh, we might have something here.”
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
“So we were on app number 15, a lot of failures during the course of this company. And I remember a lot of our team members were like, I kind of want to leave. I think this is it for me. And one of our key team members actually put in there two weeks notice the day before we launch our final app. We were also running, you know, we were getting kind of low on money. I was tired. And I called our lawyer to ask how do you dissolve a company? I messaged a few mentors saying people that have been through it and I said, you know, what are the steps to do this? And then I had a conversation on the way out with that team member that wanted to leave. And I said, you know,”
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
“Yeah, so we got pretty good at building these apps. I think our first mobile app took us about a year, and then our last one took us about two weeks. We also got very good at testing apps. And the most important thing that I often instruct teams to do is to develop a reproducible testing process. And 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's what actually reduces the risk more than anything. And so we figured out ways to seed apps into schools. We also, like during the course of that company, we figured out how to seed it into affinity groups, you know, hobbyists, things like that.”
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
“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 if you really want to actually innovate at the edges of communication products, you really have to target that cohort that has the highest urgency to communicate, and that's teens.”
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
“Yeah. And most likely, you'll never get network effects. There's actually an interesting study many years ago that some academics in Spain did, I think it was in Spain, and they looked at how many people you text per year of your life. It goes up like very quickly from 14 to 18. It peaks around 21. So it's growing. The number of people you text is growing up until about 21. And then it just falls, it collapses. And then it comes back up at end of life. And there's a few reasons all this happens. But basically, once you exit college, you kind of reduce the number of contacts, your daily contacts. Once you get married, it's even fewer. And then as you get older, and your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent, you start texting again more.”
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
“We built like 15 apps over the course of that pivot to consumer. And we built apps for like every single app, you know, map apps, chat apps, to-do lists. We just built every type of consumer app you could possibly think of. Also, we built for every audience too. We built for college students. We built for post-college. It was always very difficult to get the flywheel spinning for anyone after like 22 years old. That was like the cutoff of when people just have give up on adopting new products. And that was a kind of like, it took us a few years to really internalize that. A lot of failures to realize no one needs another app after that age.”
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
“Very quickly, 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. And it took a lot of failures. 14 of the apps that we launched were basically duds. And then we started fixating on teens and building apps for them. And eventually we figured out an interesting heuristic for identifying consumer product opportunities that ultimately led us to TBH.”
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
“It was really hard for us to 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 12 years old. And I built a full e-commerce business selling pirated games on the web. And I knew everything about like growing a website. But as I pivoted to mobile, I had to like recalibrate my whole brain on how to do that. Mobile apps have such a low margin for error when it comes to designing them because I have this like dogmatic view that every tap on a mobile app is a miracle for you as a product developer because users will turn and bounce to the next 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
“If your users aren't inviting people to your app, you're going to have to find another way to acquire them. And that most likely means ads. And if you're targeting older cohorts like adults, you're going to have to raise a huge amount of venture capital to finance that user acquisition pipeline. And it's going to be extraordinarily expensive. As a seed stage startup, it's going to be basically impossible to grow that user base, especially to get density if you need actual network effects among 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
“Like the number of people that they invite to an app just declines almost exponentially. And finally, and the most important thing is they see each other every day. And that is so critical. Like consumer app developers sometimes say smokers are great for targeting an audience because they actually hang out serendipitously a lot outside of buildings. But not to say like social apps are cigarettes. I don't really like that metaphor.”
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
“Mapping apps, chat apps, event meetup apps, any 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 focusing more on teens. 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 kind of get kind of fixed into 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 13 to 18.”
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
“Like four or five years building a variety of different kind of consumer apps. So we had a few kind of mild successes during the course of those four to five years. And one of them was an app called Five Labs that ingested your Facebook posts and determine your personality based on the language you use. And it used this exact same model that Cambridge Analytica used. And that was super viral. I think we had like tens of millions of profiles in it. And it went viral in like three days. And so we raised some more money based off the success of that. And we started focusing a lot more on mobile after that first at five labs. And we launched basically every type of app you can imagine. We launched”
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
“What the impact would be. And it'll also tell you we simulated those policies also against the tax returns of every zip code. So you could see how it impacts your community. We went super viral. I think very few people thought of politics that way. And I think we got 4 million users on it during that season during that election. And like, it was just kind of like a project that we raised some grant money for, but it ended up.”
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
“Yeah. So when I was in college, I was really interested in this kind of thing that American voters do, which is like they vote against their own financial self-interest. Like people in New York and San Francisco vote for Democrats, for higher taxes, people in Kansas vote for Republicans for low taxes and they make less money so that fewer government benefits. And I wanted to build this tool that would help communicate the financial impacts of these policy proposals of presidents. And I built it in my last year of college. And it was just a web app that we put out and 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, your age. And then it would just tell you in dollars.”
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
“Thanks for having me. I'm excited to dive in. I'm also, I feel honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.”
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
“With certainty if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral. Over the years of building all these apps, I've accrued all these growth hacks that still nobody knows about.”
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