Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:00] S0: Honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real. [00:00:05] S1: We're already we're 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? [00:00:15] S0: I looked on the App Store, and the number one app in The United States was an app called Sarahah, but the entire app was in Arabic. Like, the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something. [00:00:27] S1: This is insane. I did not know this full story. [00:00:29] S0: 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. [00:00:40] S1: A tip that you're sharing here is look [00:00:42] S0: for latent 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. [00:00:56] S1: I I didn't know you're actually a product manager at Facebook. The thing [00:00:59] S0: I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. They're mainly just writing 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.
00:00:59 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:59] S0: I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. They're mainly just writing 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. [00:01:21] S1: At some point, you started tweeting like, hey. I'm working on a new app. Everyone was going nuts. I saw a stat that you [00:01:25] S0: made $11,000,000 in sales, 10,000,000 downloads. 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. Our team was also relentless though. They would come over to my house 9AM, stay until midnight, and just do that seven days a week. [00:01:44] S1: Is there anything else that's just like, this is something that'll probably gonna help you with your app? [00:01:48] S0: With certainty, if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral. Over the years of building all these apps, I've accrued all these growth hacks that still nobody knows about.
00:02:02 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:02:02] S1: Today, my guest is Nikita Bier. 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 $30,000,000. 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. Also helped dozens of founders and apps, and is an advisor or investor to companies like Flo, Citizen, BeReal, Locket, and Wealthsimple, and many more. Today, he spends his time advising companies on viral 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. If you wanna work with Nikita on your app, you can actually book his time at intro.co/nikitabier. 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 Bier. Nikita, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
00:03:25 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:03:25] S0: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to to dive in. I'm also... I feel, honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real. [00:03:37] S1: We're already getting into the hot takes. We're definitely gonna chat about... Oh, wait. And you said not real. Okay. Thought you were gonna say not, 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 this can be a very special conversation. I've been looking forward to chatting you for a long time, and there's so much that I wanna ask you. The way that I'm thinking we frame this conversation 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? [00:04:22] S0: Sounds amazing. And a lot of it was luck, but a lot of it was, very, very tactical work that, went into it all.
00:04:31 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:06:35 · Nikita Bier
[00:06:35] S0: Yeah. So when I was in college, I was really interested in this kind of, 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, vote for Republicans for low taxes and not... And they, you know, they make less money and so that fewer got government benefits. And I wanted to 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, if... Your age. And then it would just tell you in dollars what the impact would be. And it'd also tell you, we simulated those policies also against, the tax returns of every ZIP code so you could see how it impacts your community. We went super viral. Like, I think very few people thought of politics that way, and I think we got, like, 4,000,000, users on it, 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, but ended up feeding into this company that we, spun up. And that was called Outline, 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, that was gonna be our first customer. And so I... We, we raised some money. We got a... We won a government contract, and, we joined Techstars, the accelerator. And we ended up getting... We we got a contract in the pipeline with the Obama administration. And then we we got this 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 canceled. 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. Like, that was that was what we had built, not this policy simulation tool.