How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Lenny Rachitsky
5 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2024
⏱️ 98 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nikita Bier is one of the most in-demand consumer, social, and growth experts in the world. He’s the co-founder of TBH (sold to Meta for more than $30 million) and Gas (sold to Discord for millions more) and has helped more consumer apps that have hit #1 in the app stores than any other person I’ve come across. He currently spends his time advising founders on growth, product, and design and is an investor and advisor to some of the best consumer tech companies, including Flo, Locket, Eight Sleep, Citizen, BeReal, Captions, and more. In our conversation, we discuss:
• The inside story of how TBH and Gas achieved explosive growth
• Strategies for building viral consumer apps
• Why teens are such a great audience
• Fighting the human trafficking hoax at Gas
• The challenge of creating durable social products
• His experience working as a PM at Facebook
• Advice for founders on building consumer apps
• Much more
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Book Nikita for 1:1 consultation/mentoring: https://intro.co/NikitaBier
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Find the transcript and show notes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-consistently-go-viral-nikita-bier
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Where to find Nikita Bier:
• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@nikitabier
• Website: https://intro.co/NikitaBier
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Nikita’s background
(06:08) Nikita’s early ventures: Politify and Outline
(08:42) Transition to consumer apps
(13:45) The birth of TBH
(16:43) Building for teens vs. adults
(20:00) TBH’s viral success
(32:18) Leveraging live chat
(34:08) Lasting lessons from TBH
(37:00) Selling TBH to Facebook
(42:19) Big-tech product management
(48:46) Nikita on why “product management is not real”
(51:49) The Tim Cook painting story
(53:53) Leaving Facebook and starting a new venture
(58:02) Rebuilding TBH and overcoming challenges
(59:46) Addressing criticism
(01:04:24) The human trafficking hoax
(01:09:51) Selling to Discord and lessons learned
(01:11:36) Lasting lessons from Gas
(01:13:14) Building durable consumer apps
(01:22:35) The VC route
(01:23:27) Contact permissions in iOS 18
(01:26:53) The success of Dupe
(01:31:53) Advice for startup founders
(01:34:14) Work with Nikita
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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe |
| 0:04.4 | product management is real. |
| 0:05.8 | Already getting into the hot takes. You launch TBH, when viral, you end up selling it to Facebook. |
| 0:11.5 | What was the insight that helped you come up with? This was a big idea that we should try. |
| 0:15.0 | I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States was an app called Serraha, but the entire app was in Arabic like the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something |
| 0:26.8 | This is insane. I did not know this full story so we launched this app. It immediately took off. |
| 0:33.0 | Servers and started crashing. |
| 0:34.8 | I looked at our numbers and I'm like, |
| 0:36.2 | we will be number one in the United States |
| 0:38.9 | in like six days. |
| 0:40.2 | A tip that you're sharing here is, |
| 0:41.9 | look for latent demand. |
| 0:43.0 | Where people are trying to obtain a particular value |
| 0:47.0 | and going through a very distorative process. |
| 0:50.0 | If you can actually crystallize what their motivation is, you can have this kind of intense adoption. |
| 0:57.0 | I didn't know you're actually a product manager at Facebook. |
| 0:59.0 | The thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product |
| 1:06.1 | management that you do. They're mainly just writing documents and then kind of |
| 1:10.5 | 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 |
| 1:20.9 | At some point you started tweeting like hey I'm I'm working on you app, everyone was going nuts. |
| 1:24.6 | I saw a stat that you made $11 million in sales, 10 million downloads. |
| 1:28.2 | The thing that is hard to really understand is it is absolute chaos to keep the thing online. I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. |
... |
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