How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor)

Small teams go viral by targeting teenagers and testing relentlessly

Nikita Bier argues that viral consumer apps come from a repeatable process rather than luck. Aim at teenagers, who invite far more friends than adults. Seed one tight community, test cleanly and stay close to users. Small teams can move faster than big companies, which take a year or two to answer a new threat. TBH and Gas were built this way.

Takeaways

• Teenagers are the best audience for social apps. Invitations per user fall about 20% for each year of age between 13 and 18, so apps aimed at adults struggle to grow. Without user invites, an app most likely has to buy users through ads.
• A reproducible testing process drives consumer success. Bier says a repeatable testing process affects the odds of success more than anything. He avoids confounding variables in tests and puts round-the-clock live chat support in the app. Roger Dickey's rule is that a working product is obvious.
• Large companies take 12 to 24 months to react. Bier says bonuses, performance reviews and the difficulty of pitching unproven ideas slow big companies. At Facebook he found product managers mostly write documents and seek approvals. Lenny Rachitsky counters that this is an extreme version of big tech product management.
• Growth systems must be rebuilt for each launch. Relaunching TBH as Gas meant rebuilding the invite engine, because Twilio text invites were restricted. The team ran roughly nine launches under several names, including Crush and Melt, before a black icon with a flame raised invite rates.
• Gas paid off without venture funding. Gas made about $11m in sales and 10m downloads on startup credits with no investors, then sold to Discord after offers from three companies. A trafficking hoax pushed daily deletions to 3% before they fell to 0.1%. Bier prefers quality of life to a venture-scale company.
• Reaching the core moment in seconds decides retention. Dupe reached millions in annual recurring revenue in under 60 days after inverting time to value. Bier advises getting users to the core moment within seconds. He expects iOS 18 contact permissions to make friend invites harder and entrench incumbents.

How TBH reached the top of the App Store

1. Seed the app into the Georgia school with the earliest start date in the United States.
2. Roll out state by state, using targeted ads and following students who listed their school in their bios.
3. Watch engagement. Users sent about 60 messages on day one, against three or four on a typical messaging app.
4. Scale through chaos, with servers breaking every few days and installs peaking at 360,000 per day.