Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:42:37 · Nikita Bier
[00:42:37] S0: It's hard to really, verbalize some of the re... Like, the, the things that motivate us as people. And I, I had, like, a pretty there... There's a tweet I put out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of like how how I view why people download apps. And it's like... It's very simple. It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be, like, you know, WhatsApp where, you know, free texting. And then the other reason is to find a mate. So maybe, like, Tinder or Snapchat, find love. And the third is to unplug from reality, maybe, like, Netflix or Fortnite. There's a bunch of other kind of subcategories that are very utilitarian, like movement, you know, Uber or Airbnb, like, you know, shelter. And so I think putting that in a framing document and the particular nuanced reason, why people are gonna adopt is is difficult, as... When you're presenting that to, you know, people that are, you know, seasoned professionals and care about how something might reflect on them personally. And so that's really difficult inside of a large company. You'd certainly have distribution advantages. If you want to just inject your app into one of the parent apps and get density within a community, you could do that. But that that part, I think, is probably solvable for a startup, if you just want to pay for ads or... Like, getting your app into a dense friend graph is is overall trivial. Like, you you... As a founder, you should be able to pull it off after enough tries. So that advantage that a big company brings, I mean, it's... It makes it easier, but, it's not not something that I think, is something that a founder can't solve for themselves.
00:44:37 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:44:37] S1: So an interesting takeaway, it sounds like, is many people feel like, I'm gonna build a social app. They probably often hear it. Facebook's gonna do that. Instagram's gonna copy you. Snap's gonna do that. And what I'm hearing here is it's not as easy as many people think, that it might be actually a lot harder for them to try something. [00:44:53] S0: It's not only harder for them to, identify these opportunities and to verbalize it internally, and align the company around it. It's it's also hard to respond to signals in the market. A lot of people think, like, these incumbents are gonna steal your ideas. And for the most part, it takes a pretty long time for them to respond to even the number one app or, charting in the... Because it'll start charting in the App Store. You know, a PM will make a post about it, and then, the the market's strategy or market research team might do a study to follow-up on it. And it'll kinda float around for a few months. They they might, put together a framing deck saying, hey. We should go after this opportunity. Let's put together this team. It'll go through VP reviews, and then, it'll start development. Development might take six to twelve months. Realistically, I think most companies, large companies take, like, twelve to twenty four months to respond to competitive threats in the market. [00:46:03] S1: Do you think this is solvable? Is there something a company can change to get better at this? Are there companies that are good at this in your experience, or is this just as you grow, this is just what happens?