Unlocking Viral Success: Lessons from Product Management with Nikita Beer

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 is brought to you by

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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

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before we move on to the next chapter uh I want to come back to the very first thing you said where product management

is not real uh is there anything else that you can say about your Insight there or is it basically what you

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