Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:35:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[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. [00:36:06] S0: A lot of people ask me, like, what are the metrics for... What... What's the benchmark for product market fit? And this this founder that I'm friends with, his name is Roger Dickey. He he had a... He's he's told me a lot... One time, if your product's working, you'll know. And the... There... If there's any uncertainty, it's not working. And it really is a binary when it comes to, consumer products. People are gonna be fighting to get into it, and you'll you'll find new measures that you've never heard of, like, our our metric was hourly actives per day, not daily active users, hourly active users. So you'll you'll you'll start seeing that, and it'll be abundantly obvious what product market fit is when... You you... You'll know it when you see it is the bottom line. [00:36:59] S1: Okay. So you launch TBH, goes viral, start getting offers from companies. Nine weeks later after launch, you end up selling it to Facebook. What was it like selling your company? And then what was it like working at Facebook, which you worked at for four years? I was not expecting that when I was looking at your LinkedIn. So, yeah, what was it like selling? What was it like working at Facebook?
00:37:21 · Nikita Bier
[00:37:21] S0: Selling your company is one of the most draining processes you could ever go through as a founder. When when we met with Facebook, they told me they have, 80 people assigned to this deal. And, I'm like, I have I have one one person. That's just me. And were like the SWAT team of M and A. And the funniest part was, you know, they they wanted to meet the team as well. And so they they came out to our office in Oakland, which is a dingy old office, like, that I got for $1,800 a month. That was our rent for the office. And they arrive, and, they they walk in. There's two engineers and one designer and me, and they're just like, this is this is the whole company. This is the number one app in The United States. Like, yeah, this is it. And when when we went there, when we arrived, we saw... We joined the youth team, which was about, like, I don't know, like a 150 people, just for this one division of of Facebook. And it was like... It was my first job that I... Effectively that I've ever had. When they told me my title, they said I would be a product manager. Like, I I I was like, okay. I I I don't I don't know exactly what that is, but, I I I, yeah, I guess that's what I do. And, I I arrive, and then I get access to a workplace system, where, you know, people post all the things they're working on. And I I realized it's like kind of like this almost, academic environment for social networks, like social network development. It's like the Harvard of social networks, like, kind... Like, of the the the... I was reading all these studies that people were doing on, like, oh, if we change that, this is the impact to retention in DAU. And I was just, I I was so impressed. Like, I I... There's a whole science here. And, a lot of the stuff that we did was learn learn from first principles, but then we saw it actually turn into systems and processes here. But the the the thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. You're you're actually not as involved in the product as I had assumed. Like, I I thought, oh, you... You're the you're the person who gets in the pixels and designs the flows and... No. Absolutely not. Like, you're actually more more... You're completely detached from the design process.
00:39:57 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
There's a design vertical of org org that does all that, and, they don't really want you working on that. And so that was very difficult for me because actual... When people ask me, like, what do you think you're good at? Like, at the core, I'm a designer. I I don't consider myself a product manager. I'm, you know, great at growing things, looking at Mixpanel, and then designing the things that make it grow. But there's a there's a rift between those two things inside of a large tech company. And so I loved the academic approach to growing, but I I I... It was really hard for me personally as I, became disconnected from the design process. And I think that a lot of my skills atrophied over those those four years. Stick around. I went through multiple orgs. Favorite one at the end was, new product experimentation where I worked with other founders, kind of a bunch of legends in Silicon Valley, building zero to one products, stand alone apps. I mean, I was building stand alone apps my entire time at Facebook. And, I I think I built probably eight apps while I was at Facebook. [00:41:11] S1: Wow.
00:41:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:41:11] S1: Wow. [00:41:12] S0: But it is it is much, much more difficult to build apps at a large company. A lot of the insights that you have are not things that you can necessarily present or put in writing into... In a VP meeting. Like, we're building an app for teams to flirt. Like, that probably is not what you would present to a bunch of McKinsey consultants at... And, so I think that makes it really difficult to be completely intellectually honest about what you're building. And when the team isn't honest about it, then it's it's really hard to iterate toward the right thing in that context. Having said that, there's a lot of things you don't have to deal with as a product man. You... I don't have to deal about... Think about money. I don't have to think about, you know, paying legal bills or doing finance and accounting. And so all that's abstracted away, But there is, you know, regulatory stuff that you have to deal with that I I had zero exposure to as a, as as a founder of a small company. Yeah. [00:42:20] S1: An insight you're sharing there potentially is... Like, the reason a company like Facebook isn't amazing at launching completely new product zero to one stuff is they may be a little too risk averse, and it's hard to talk about stuff that people actually really, really want deeply. Is that is that kind of the sense there?