Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:29:27 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:29:27] S1: So you keep talking about how it went viral, went 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 and to help it spread so quickly within a school?
00:29:37 · Nikita Bier
[00:29:37] S0: I I think you're referring to, there's, like, a BuzzFeed memo that... Or a memo that was leaked to, BuzzFeed while I was at at Facebook. 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. So you basically need to saturate an area with every kind of marketing you can. You know? So we ran ads targeted at this, a particular school to to to when we were seeding and testing these apps. And we also followed people creating a dedicated Instagram account that went to that school. Because we... I... We learned that, high schoolers identify their school in their bio. So it says RHS on their bio. And so that was how we tried to get, the entire school to adopt synchronously. We would... We'd follow them and then accept the follow backs. A big misunderstanding though, and I I get this DM a lot and people are 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 real... It's it's a little bit nuanced there. That's an important nuance because you need to get, 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 would 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 100 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 conviction, 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 moment because 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, so you can know immediately whether something's working or not.
00:32:02 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
You never wanna walk away from an experiment or test and say, well, maybe the the execution was bad. Because it takes a lot of energy to mobilize a team to test something, and you really wanna make sure your tests actually are... Provide signal. [00:32:18] S1: 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 gonna scale, like test the ideal. Because that'll tell you even if this could be the best possible version, do people actually care?
00:32:33 · Nikita Bier
[00:32:33] S0: Yeah. We would try to get the... Like, an entire school to adopt just to know, like, if if everyone had 10 friends, would would would they actually derive value from this app? We also did other things like, you know, I recommend all companies do this is put live chat customer support in your app, like like, twenty four hours a day. And it sounds insane. It's like... 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 then users get this white glove experience, and that eliminates another confounding variable. Like, did they think they were... Their problems are 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, vehicle for getting feedback and do you... Doing user research because users will literally tell you what the problem they're having. So we we had, our person that was running this, is is the same as Michael Gutierrez. He's he's done it for all my companies, actually. He's the the the, community and customer support rep. He would, paste any interesting feedback into Slack, and then we would be like, oh, this this this user has a great idea. We we should consider turning that into a feature. So you really want your finger on the pulse as you roll these things out and so you can get a sense for what's working, what isn't, and also make users feel great and make sure at the end, they they promote your app positively to their peers.
00:34:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:34:08] S1: I love that piece of advice. Okay. So to close out the TBH 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're bringing with you to new apps that you're building today? [00:34:24] S0: I think the the thing that is hard to really understand for first time founders that hit breakout success with a consumer product is how how draining and how, spread thin you get because everything breaks. Everything that you built needs to be substituted, almost every three days. And I I can just, like, ex... Give you an exam... Like, we were just talking about this customer support system that we had. The first system broke after three days. The next one broke seven 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, it is absolute, like, chaos to keep the thing online, as as it scales up. And so you have to be ruthless with prioritization as something scales up, and put out the largest fires first. Because I I... That was something that I I didn't really fully understand is how how how how many things go wrong. And if we didn't geofence the app, it would... There would there would be no way we would have been able to keep keep that thing online because that's gave us some slack to, control growth. This This is a
00:34:24 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:34:24] S0: I think the the thing that is hard to really understand for first time founders that hit breakout success with a consumer product is how how draining and how, spread thin you get because everything breaks. Everything that you built needs to be substituted, almost every three days. And I I can just, like, ex... Give you an exam... Like, we were just talking about this customer support system that we had. The first system broke after three days. The next one broke seven 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, it is absolute, like, chaos to keep the thing online, as as it scales up. And so you have to be ruthless with prioritization as something scales up, and put out the largest fires first. Because I I... That was something that I I didn't really fully understand is how how how how many things go wrong. And if we didn't geofence the app, it would... There would there would be no way we would have been able to keep keep that thing online because that's gave us some slack to, control growth. This This is a [00:35:55] S1: good example of when people ask, like, hey. Does my app have product market fit? I think this is an example of this is what it looks like when things are breaking every three days when you have to geofence it to keep it from crashing.