honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real we're already already getting into the hot takes you launched TBH went viral 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 saraha 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 a tip that you're sharing here is look for lat and 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 at Facebook the thing I didn't
real realiz 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 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 was going nuts I saw stat that you made $11 million in sales 10 million downloads the thing that is hard to really understand
is it is absolute chaos to keep the thing online I was sleeping 3 hours a day for 3 months our team was also Relentless though they would come over to my house 9:00 a.m. stay until midnight and just do that 7 days a week is there anything else that's just like this is something that is probably going to help you with your app 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 accured all these growth hacks that still nobody
knows about [Music] 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 TBH to Facebook for over $30 million 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 adviser or investor to companies like flow citizen be real locket and wealth simple and many more today he
spends his time advising companies on file 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 more if you want to
work with Nikita on your app you can actually book his time at intro. c/ Nikita beer 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 we're ready ready getting into the hot takes uh we're definitely going to chat about wait and you said not real okay I thought you were gonna say not uh not useful 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 it's gonna be a very special conversation I've been looking forward to chatting 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 convers ation 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 hear 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 this episode
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join thousands of global companies that use Vana to automate evidence collection unify risk management and streamline in Security reviews get $1,000 off vanta when you go to v.com Lenny that's VA n.com Lenny First I want to 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 it was a product called potify 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 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 uh and they you know they make less money and so that
fewer government benefits and I wanted build this tool that would help communicate the financial impacts of these 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 uh your age and then it would just tell tell you in dollars what the impact would be and it 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 it 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 during that election and like it was just a kind of like a project that we raised some grant money for 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 going to be our first customer and so I we uh we raised some money we got a we w a government contract and uh we joined techstars uh the accelerator and we ended up getting uh 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 cancel 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 and 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 offered to
give the money back uh and said we're going to be building consumer apps and here's a few ideas that we have none of them took the money back 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 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 think you know we had like tens of millions of profiles in it and 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 app five labs and we we launched you know uh basically every type of app you can imagine we launched mapping apps chat apps event meet up 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 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 13 to 18 like the number of people that they invite to an app just declines almost exponentially and finally the 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 uh like targeting an audience because they actually like hang out you know serendipitously a lot
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 but 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 20% for every additional year of age from 13 to 18 so if you build for adults expect to acquire every user with ads and I love that
you have a very clear euristic of per year the amount of people they invite to the app is 20% lower if your users aren't inviting people to your app uh you're going to have to find another way to uh to acquire them and that most likely means ads and uh if if if you're targeting uh older cohorts like adults you're going to have to uh 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
uh to to grow that uh user base especially to get density if you need uh uh actual Network effects among users so basically you're building this uh help 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 aways you just realize I
don't want to be doing this investors don't force me to be working on this I'm going to stop this I'm going to 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 Studio where you're just trying a bunch of apps 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 want to 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 12 years old and I I you know I I I built a uh full eCommerce 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 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 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 you know we we uh for like 14 of the apps that we launched were basically Duds and then we started fixating on teens uh and and building apps for them and eventually we figured out an interesting horis for identifying consumer product opportunities that
ultimately led us to TBH you spent four or five years trying a bunch different ideas I think people see this headline and we'll get into TB of just like n weeks after launch sells for $30 million 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 15 different apps uh before you got there learning the things that actually work and don't work we built like 15 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 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 22 years old that that was like the cut off of when uh people just 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 because most people are building for people older than 22 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 going to need to raise money and spend a lot of money and PID outs 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 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 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 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 your your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent you start texting again more or 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 UPS 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 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 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 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 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 things like that so we were on app number 15 uh you know we're 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 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 kind of low on money I was tired um and I uh I called our lawyer uh to ask how do you dissolve a company I met messaged a few mentors
saying like uh I one people that have been through it and I said you know 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 what but what if the app actually starts charting on the App Store and I he said what are the chances of that uh you know it's it's you know you know that's not going to 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 seated 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 state of the company um 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 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 we will be number one in the United States in like six days uh and then I I looked at our Amazon bill and it was like 12,000 I looked at our bank account it said 150,000 and I'm like okay these two numbers don't really add up um so I I quickly had to put together a 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 a pretty uh competitive bidding process actually um there there was a uh really really great moment uh where uh there was one of the acquirers uh or one of the biders 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 byst state rollout strategy where every state was Geo fenced and we hadn't launched California until that morning and I arrived uh at this uh this company in uh this founder in LA's house um and he said uh you know 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 Eric Hazard uh he a published author in mapping uh and so he he created an amazing dashboard that could show realtime installs on a map and it was around 400m 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's what got the kind of uh the ball rolling on a uh you know was it was a really uh really like cinematic moment of uh you know
what showing something that you created that literally just took over the entire neighborhood around you that's insane I that's goingon to be in the movie of Nikita beer in the future okay so a couple 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 get the number one in the App Store uh it fluctuates it used to be like like a 100 th 80 to 100,000 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 teu and all these other apps that are kind of spending on acquisition and all that uh some days it's up to like 300,000 and that's per day yeah oh man amazing okay at the peak of TBH uh we were getting 360,000 per day okay the other two things I want to 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 was the insight into how to spread this so virally and 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 this 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 post an image of a bunch of emojis and it 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 kind of 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 venue like this vehicle for disclosure uh essentially and I'm like that that's kind of 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 saraha 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 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 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 uh intense adoption and uh when we saw what people were doing with saraha I I also looked at some
of the tweets and comments on it a lot of people were receiving negative messages and so I what I saw with the game that kids were playing on Snapchat tbh and then Saha I realized just people want to know good about themselves and they don't want like 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 uh just answered polls and we authored 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'll never build anything like that um but uh 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 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 450,000 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 you're lucky if people send like three or four or something but we were sending like 60 and we we couldn't even handle it so we had
to like we had to geofence the app because it we we needed to scale our servers which is actually a pretty controversial decision inside of our company because it like why would you turn off something that's working but I at my core I knew like if it's working at this many you know in individual schools we could just relaunch it any time and it'll just it'll it'll go viral so uh 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 one viral and 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 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 a memo that was leaked to 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 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 at targeted at this uh a particular school to to to when we were seating 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 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
we'd follow them and then accept the followback a big misunderstanding though and I I get this DM a lot of people like I'm trying to replicate your strategy we've just done it at 15 schools and it's it's not working anymore this is not the way we grew the app this is how we tested 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 a a enough intensity of adoption and density for a social network to start to get the Flywheel spinning 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 conv ition 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 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 uh so you can know immediately whether something's working or not you never want to walk away from a an experiment or test and say well uh maybe the the E 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 are provide signal so your advice here is when you're testing something test the best possible version of what that could be whether it takes manual work or something that is never going to 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 10 friends would would would they actually derive value from this out we also did other things like you know and I recommend all companies do this is uh put live chat customer support in your app like like 24 hours a day and it sounds insane it's like that the whole point of tech is you you don't need to do that that's the whole point of a of a software but uh 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're 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 doing user research because user will literally tell you the problem they're having um so we we had uh our person that was running this uh same as Michael gueras he's he's done it for all my companies actually he's the the the community and customer support rep he would uh paste any interesting feedback into slack and then we would be like
oh this this this uh user has a great idea 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 TB 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 really understand for firsttime Founders that hit breakout success with a consumer product is how how draining and how 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 give you example like we were just talking about this customer support system that we had the first system broke after 3 days the
next one broke s 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 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 fully understand is how uh how how how uh many things go wrong and if we didn't
geofence the app it would there there would be no way we would have been able to keep keep that thing online because that gave us some slack to uh control growth this is a good example of when people ask like hey this my app have product Market fit I think this is an example of this is what it looks like when things are breaking every 3 days when you have to geofence it to keep it from crashing a lot of people ask me like what are the metrics for uh what's the Benchmark for product Market
fit and this this founder that I'm friends with name is Roger Dicky uh he had he he told me aot one time um if your products working you'll know uh and there if there's any uncertainty it's not working and it really is a binary when it comes to uh consumer products um people are going to be fighting to get into it and you you'll find new measures that you've never heard of like are our metric was hourly actives per day not daily active users hourly active users so you'll you'll you'll start seeing that and it'll
be abundantly obvious what product Market fit is what you you you'll know when you see it is 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 your LinkedIn so yeah what was it like selling what was it like working in 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 80 people assigned to this deal um and uh I'm like I have I have one one person it's just me no uh and they were like the SWAT team of m&a uh and the funniest part was you know they they wanted to meet the team as well and so they they came out to our office in Oakland which is a dingy old office like that I got for $1,800 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 when we went there when we arrived we saw we joined the youth team which was about like I don't know like 150 people uh just for this one 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 was like okay I I I don't I don't know exactly what that is but uh 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 for social networks like social network development it's like the Harvard of social networks like like of
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 da and I was just uh I was so impressed like there's a whole science here and uh a lot of the stuff that we did was learn 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 as involved in the product as I had assumed like I I thought oh 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 DET completely detached from the design process there's a design vertical of or org that does all that and uh they don't really want you working on that and so that was very difficult for me because actually when people ask me like what do you think you're good at like at the core I'm a
designer um I I don't consider myself a product manager I'm you know great at growing things looking at mix panel and then designing the things that make it grow uh but there's a 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 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 multiple orgs favorite 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 at 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 McKenzie 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 reason like the uh the things that motivate us as people and I uh I had like a pretty there there's a tweet I put out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of like how 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 to 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 going to adopt is is difficult um as when you're presenting that to uh you know people uh that are you know 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 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 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 company brings I mean it's it makes it easier but uh it's not not something that I think uh is 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 going to do that Instagram's going to copy you snap's going to do that and what I'm hearing here is it's not as easy as many people think 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 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 uh charting in the because it'll start charting in the App Store you know a PM will make a post about it and then uh the the markets strategy or
market research team might do a study to follow up on it uh and it'll kind of 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 12 months realistically I think most companies uh large compan take like 12 to 24 months to respond to competitive threats in the market 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 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 and people in companies are focused on getting their you know yearly bonus or their uh you know uh 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 meeting where you you know you position you're you're positioning the opportunity and everything here's what we should go after it's hard to like just say okay uh by 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
evidence but if you fail about something that's more based on kind of vague abstract so you you have to generally like the only path is to kind of copy existing companies uh existing products if you want to really get momentum uh ins 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 into a document or to even get rally uh the organization around it that's a really interesting Insight this episode is brought to you by explo a game
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is there anything else that you can say about your Insight there or is it basically what you describe where PMs aren't actually involved in design a company like Facebook and 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 because data scientists are doing that they're just parsing some of the reports that they get back they're mainly just writing a documents and then kind of being the team secretary and running around getting approvals for uh from each
uh cross functional team legal privacy everything like that and yeah it's you're act you're actually very much separated from the product itself and and so I I think like what Snapchat has done and I think Apple too 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 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 will because it's a lot
of work I mean there's a lot of regulatory scrutiny you know 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 is 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 of being 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 a lot of time with data
signs I think probably what you saw is like the extreme big big big Tech version of product management I know even ppms 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 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 like and then yeah it should be cleaned up prototype by a technical designer but that's your idea and products Live and Die in the pixels like consumer products so that 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 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 that is there some there yeah so our our team was actually uh when we joined the new product experimentation group uh we were actually seated I think like at the 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 zuck'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 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 at Facebook just because 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 Zu 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 kind of 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 amazing oh wow that's that's artistic so that's Tim Cook
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 I have suck would not want that staring in all day that's amazing and I like that you still have that with you yeah one of the artifacts of uh that of that chapter of life so good okay so so that was your Facebook Journey that was 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 you app everyone was going nuts so whaty working on and at this point I I think you probably in your mind thought he I'm this one hit wonder I haven't shown that I can do this again and again and so I think you probably had this motivation maybe talk about that just like this drive of 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 this durable thing that you know lasted many years and everything and so I was like uh I just made you know a post that I was leaving Facebook and looking for uh you know some teammates and um I shared uh a couple of ideas with uh some people privately and was there were some really crazy ideas that I shared I I I'm not going to 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 Ming it and it became this massive like meme like where they're like oh I I just I just tried Nikita's app it saved my marriage I I just quit drinking uh my my kids returned home 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 like 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 uh
so it just turned into this viral uh moment um I 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 uh the market had crashed shortly thereafter there was uh it's kind of the end of the Zer era uh the FED started hiking rates I think my portfolio was down like 30% 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 because the number one support message we received was can I pay to reveal who sent me polls um that was 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 one of the engineers from a company called Paparazzi his name is z z Turner and he started building it in my house and uh we uh we had tested it um to see would this thing uh with this with this 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 and was it the Georgia school again Yes actually um uh we launched at the exact same school uh that we uh we launched TBH on the exact same day W five years later fun fact um and uh people sent a lot of messages uh but it wasn't growing so let me let me 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 2017 uh and the way you invited your friends on TBH was that you tapped their name uh your contact name 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 that sent them a text we never did that that that's like egregiously illegal to do like and also unethical at a user experience level to send texts when people don't even know that that's what's happening but anyway we couldn't send texts over over uh twio anymore and that led to people not sending as many invites when we recreated gas uh and uh or we create gas because they they had to pop
they had to pop the compose window and hit send every you can 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 uh zero to one development cycle of 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 Nik just sld 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 flywheel 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 it'll spread uh 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 problem uh in light of the new climate that we were operating in and uh I 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 going to cause way more trouble down the line it's going to burn users too and so we always wanted to make it abundantly clear how our growth system like how you inviting friends and all that can kind of go on a whole diet tribe on that because 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 article called the Gia hypothesis which is 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 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 all of these things we had to uh uh was a whole
rein reinvention of the original product I love that you shared that because I think a lot of people see you from the outside and they think you're doing all kinds of these skey 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 going to be good longterm the internet's not going to come and try to shut you
down the point you bring up here uh about wanting to build a positive thing there's this like there's some people sometimes I get criticism it's not actually that often but they say oh you're building an app that makes teens 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 form 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 like a lot of other social networks kind of are a mixed bag in terms of impact but we were like 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 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 10 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's a lot of uh stuff going on with gas around uh human trafficking and all this stuff where people thought people were being kidnapped through gas which is yeah talk
about that whatever you can because that's pretty crazy we had this hoax started where 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 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 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 going to plant the flag and and and post that we hit number one in the app store because this thing's probably going to 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 uh 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 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 superintendent I called those police Chiefs and 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 because we got review bombed but the thing that actually was the most impactful was uh my girlfriend made a video a Tik
Tok video explaining that it's not true and we uh 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 it was like really cat like it was a catastrophe for for an app um and we got it down to 0.1% uh through Relentless Relentless effort and it's it was really just uh an unusual thing that happens when you grow really fast is uh is this this these these this human trafficking hoax that starts and 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 kind of hilarious to think about like this this half 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 trying 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 EXT extraordinarily difficult uh to to do it all uh our team was also Relentless though like they would come over to my house 9:00 a.m. stay until midnight and just do that seven days a week um so yeah it was uh 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 uh we we're 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 even I remember we had these Tik Tok videos that were made that were saying it was true and I had like I I clim I networked my way all the way to the CEO of Tik Tok and I said can you delete these and we got them this miss this information deleted
yeah so it was uh it was really a uh a whole new test of uh 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 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 hoax that's absurd okay so broadly you built this app again a
big success I saw stat that you made $10 million or $1 million in sales through the app 10 million downloads that right yeah it was a blowout success in terms of like on on uh it grew bigger than TBH uh we monetized it you know we ran almost entirely on Startup credits um so it was basically you know CL credits like aw credits AWS credits mix panel I I I remember I I was like when I saw the early data I'm like okay now it's time for me to negotiate every bill down to last cent
of margin for every vendor and I got credits everywhere and so I I we really were tactical with that um and so we ended up being you know all all 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 going to let this thing run its course and just be this app that
kind of lives in the background of Our Lives um but uh once it started capturing like the zist of Twitter I was like wait a minute we could probably sell this thing and uh and that's when we started engaging with uh you know some of these we ended up getting uh yeah three three companies that wanted to to buy it won't be able to say them but ultimately we ended up selling to uh to Discord um and we uh we we join 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 is there any lasting lessons that you took away from gas as a product that you take with you to advising startups in terms of building the product design I know there's many but any 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 hot peer groups
and what I think the most important thing is that I learned is 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 push notific 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 signal too 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 layers 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 uh for the thing to work and 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 which was a a screenshot of a story on Snapchat okay and it saido 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 10 like 10 people had screenshotted it like more like 40 people because it had like all the usernames of uh so I was looking at this and I'm like how much visib 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 this this might this will probably kill the company this will kill the product um I 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 one message what what do you mean I'm like no no it's been screenshotted 40 times and now it's on the app store Page like and we got another message four hours later and uh in the next day it was our entire app store Page was just
covered with reviews 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 the craziest thing was it reemerged 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 it was too late at that point to relaunch again uh was I we just realized we just got it we gotta we got to fight this thing and and uh ultimately I don't think we'll ever know the true origin but uh yeah it was uh it was it was definitely a living breathing uh uh like hoax that is insane that the story just gets more and more interesting what are the what were some of the previous names by the way is that something 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 the interesting thing about crush is we got a great domain we thought this was this would be the name uh this was between the some of the like 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 me Bo 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 6 60 to 65% women so we're just like let's make the app more masculine and see what happens we need balance on this so we we made the icon black with a flame called it gas and the invitees rate jumped and uh you think a name doesn't matter but right
at the moment of sending an invite yeah you uh so that was one of the interesting insights of on uh 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 yeah to another topic so I asked people on Twitter what to ask you uh just that question got a thousand likes just me asking what should ask 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 bsky asked this uh Robert at fig Mass this and Scott actually had a really nice way of describing it about why are so many quick sensation C consumer apps proving to be more akin to Summer songs than enduring Standalone products and businesses there's kind of two questions here one is Do you want to build a do you aim to build a cons durable consumer app and two how possible is it a lot of the fundamental like tools for communicating with our
friends either you know messaging uh or posting broadcasting one to many like on stories or po you know those the incumbents have kind of uh built pretty large Moes in terms of network effects and to provide true like uh like an order of magnitude better experience is non-trivial because they've been actually improved 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 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 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 be printing Facebooks uh 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 my favorite part about product development is you make this thing you know through the night you build it and you watch it take over the Internet that is the mo most thrilling drug I think you you could you could
ever experience and and and just watching it spread all over the country it's like you you drop an app in you know the uh the Deep South in 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 like that's a really profound feeling that'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 like here's here's an interesting connection so I joined Facebook
and I saw that many of my 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 want to run a large organization I want to have lots of reports and and then I met with VPS and they were actually jealous of me because my quality of life was actually pretty cool I I I got to build something high impact that uh made many teens feel better about themselves made decent amount of money and then I wasn't you know 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 I 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 I don't think uh you know 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 dur build a consumer app that grows first of all second actually lasts 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 want to sign
up for 10 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 delution a lot of them are pretty comparable to what we get from our apps for 90 days of work so um yeah they uh the tradeoffs there are pretty uh pretty favorable 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 folks after
22 years old is that why you would go that route 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 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 send with term sheets okay Nikita this has been amazing uh there's one last segment I want to 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 how does that sound sounds great Okay cool so so the first is just uh contact permissions in iOS 18 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 in their products I uh when I first saw it I was I was really concerned uh tweet about it you're like that's the end came over just let me let me frame
things up for you the contact permission screen you know you you average about 65% approval rate across all apps higher it's higher for teens lower for adults and 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 cont or something the first 10 contacts are punctuation symbols from whatever like 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 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 so the my expectation is the it's going to be 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 and of the of the companies I'm working with on on intro we are 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 what 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 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 and 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 2024 people's attention spans are like 3 seconds it's really sad but you know we are we're 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 containg 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 ideaa
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 ends and uh I was like that should be a 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 I built a while back where you just type the domain in front of an existing URL so I should I 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 and bought dp.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 if this doesn't work I'm gonna feel terrible but if it does work it's going to be a blowout success and so we he put out a couple videos about it and then you know it was iconic went viral uh the videos users remembered to do it to type dp.com in front of a URL and now I think they're you know making millions in AR in a matter like I think under 60 days of launching and that that was a blowout success and
uh yeah of the companies I work with like uh you know that R like I would say it happens about 50% of the time we hit that much success but the uh we hit success I think 50% of the time it's outright failure because consumer is so random and so what I'm hearing is a big Insight is just ideally gets a three seconds time to value is that the advice yeah yeah sounds great easy peasy yeah uh you you really have to craft you know on boarding everything to to ensure that um and it's yeah
it's it's uh that's where the design part comes in of being a great product person and 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 h 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 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 there's a 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 50 times to get a 50 friend person friend list so we're think we're looking at uh like 10,000 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 Founder a relationship that you're 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 going to help you you talked about this aha moment step the sharing contact sharing stuff I guess is there anything else that's just like this is something that'll probably
going to help you with your app right now I think I advise around 35 36 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 doll 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 from from the actual products growth mechanisms but they're both the same they're both 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 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 that the and when you invite people to the from that app that Community needs to be mentioned so there you need to cover every the mark like everything from the ads to the inapp experience to the all of that needs to be aligned for a user acquisition and flywheel 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 and try to fix some of the or 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 want to make sure people understand is you help companies through this talk about how you work with companies where they can can find you what kind of companies you're looking to work with and how all that works yeah um so I work across the gamut most of them are like consumer mobile companies and there certainly are web ones too but I
uh I work with companies across stages typically I recommend that you don't book me unless you're venture-backed it's because it's a little expensive but my main goal when uh when someone does seek my advice through intro is is I I try to make them like 10 times back their money in the first 30 days and so far I think I've I've managed to do that with anyone who's who's met 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 try to couple both explain to them which one I which direction I believe they should go 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 going to 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 I've acred all these growth hacks that still are nobody knows about and so I share those with the when when it's relevant for the company and it's it's been great uh yeah dupe was one of them I I was advising Saturn
I rebuilt their FriendFinder they're 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 10% of the companies uh that that seek out my advice amazing well I know it 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 because 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 is 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 you're sharing it with people in
a wider scale it's it's been a pleasure uh thanks for having me um we covered a lot and uh there's there's there's plenty more I hope to come back uh after the next viral hit oh man I was going to ask you is there anything you're working on now or stages what can you share about the next stay tuned here we go amazing H 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 useful to you uh follow me on Twitter
uh and enjoy my ship posts uh and I hope you're you have as much fun with me as me uh on 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 thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find
all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode
