Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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
[00:04:31] S1: This episode is brought to you by Webflow. We're all friends here, so let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be a static asset. It should be a dynamic part of your strategy that drives conversions. That's business 101. But here's a number for you: 54% of leaders say web updates take too long. That's over half of you listening right now. That's where Webflow comes in. Their visual first platform allows you to build, launch, and optimize web pages fast. That means you can set ambitious business goals, and your site can rise to the challenge. Learn how teams like Dropbox, IDEO, and Orangetheory trust Webflow to achieve their most ambitious goals today at webflow.com. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC two, ISO 27,001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta .ai. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's vanta.com/lenny. First, I wanna 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 very different from what you do these days and has a product called Politify, 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?
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.
00:09:10 · Nikita Bier
And so, you know, we we went to our investors and we said, look, this this isn't actually what we're excited about doing anymore. And we we offered to give the money back and said, we're we're we're gonna be building consumer apps, here's a few ideas that we have. None of them took the money back. And so then we spent the next, like, four or five years building a variety of different kind of consumer, consumer apps. So we we had a a few, like, kind of mild successes during the course of those four to five years. And one of them was a, an app called Five Labs that ingested your Facebook posts and determine your personality based on the language you use. And it used this exact same model that Cambridge Analytica used, And that was super viral. I I think, you know, we had, like, tens of millions of profiles in it, and, this all... It went viral in, 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, basically every type of app you can imagine. We launched mapping apps, chat apps, event meetup 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, 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 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, and the most important thing is they they see each other every day, and that is so critical. Like, consumer app developers sometimes say smokers are great for, like, targeting an audience because they actually, like, hang out, you know, serendipitously a lot, outside of, you know, buildings. So... But not not to say, like, social apps are cigarettes. I I I don't really like that metaphor.
00:11:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:11:50] S1: Just on the note of you talking about why 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 heuristic of per year. The amount of people they invite to the app is 20% lower. [00:12:17] S0: If your users aren't inviting people to your app, you're gonna have to find another way to acquire them, and that most likely means ads. And, if if if you're targeting, older cohorts like adults, you're gonna have to, raise a huge amount of venture capital to finance that user acquisition pipeline. And it's gonna be extraordinarily expensive. As a seed stage startup, it's gonna be basically impossible to, to to grow that, user base, especially to get density if you need, actual network effects among users. Mhmm.