Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:51:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:51:43] S1: I love that advice. Okay. Before we move on to the next phase of your journey of starting Gas, I heard there's an interesting story around where you were actually put within the Facebook office, physically, where your team was put. Is that is that... Is there something there? [00:51:57] S0: Yeah. So our our our team was actually, when we joined the new product experimentation group, we were actually seated, I think, like, at this... Basically the same desk as, Mark Zuckerberg. Mhmm. And that that was pretty cool, to see, you know, how the how the machine runs, like, from the, from Zuck's view. But we we had a few artifacts that we had kept with us from our old office, when we were running, TBH. And one of them was this, this kind of pop art painting that I bought on the street when I needed to get something on the walls for our office, and it was this giant painting of Tim Cook. We had been carrying it between our orgs at at Facebook just because it was a funny painting. And I I kind of got it because, like, it was kind of symbolic of who actually controls our destiny is, is Apple. And, so when we relocated to, the area where Zuck was sitting, I I put up the painting on the wall, and it was basically a giant painting of Tim Cook was overlooking Zuck. And eventually, one of the, EAs, there said, actually, do you think you could take that home? And it kinda made sense because the, you can't really have a painting of a... Of another big tech executive overlooking us. What does it [00:53:21] S1: look like? Do you happen to have it?
00:53:21 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:53:21] S1: look like? Do you happen to have it? [00:53:22] S0: Yeah. I I actually I actually do. Let me let me let me go grab it. [00:53:25] S1: Amazing. Oh, wow. That's that's artistic. So that's Tim Cook. What is the idea there that he's peeking through this darkness staring at you? [00:53:36] S0: Yeah. Yeah. He's he's the real boss of all of us. [00:53:41] S1: I could see I could see why I suck. Would not want that staring at [00:53:45] S0: you all. That's amazing. [00:53:47] S1: And I like that you still have that with you. [00:53:49] S0: Yeah. One one of the artifacts of, that of that chapter of life. So good. [00:53:54] S1: Okay. So so that was your Facebook journey those four years. That's wild. You left Facebook. At some point, you started... I just... I remember this. You started tweeting like, hey. I'm working on a new app. Everyone was going nuts. So what's he working on? And at this point, I I think you probably in your mind thought, hey. I'm this one hit wonder. I haven't shown that I can do this again and again. And so I think you probably have this motivation. Maybe talk about that just like this drive of, like, hey. I wanna do this again. Is that where your mind was at?
00:54:19 · Nikita Bier
[00:54:19] S0: When that, meme started, my intent was to start a venture backed company and build something, you know, that would scale to be a big team and this durable thing that, you know, lasted many years and everything. And so I was like, I just made, you know, post that I was leaving Facebook and looking for, you know, some teammates. And I shared a couple of ideas with, some people privately, and it was... There were some really crazy ideas that I shared. I I don't... I'm not gonna get into them, but then people started posting, oh my god. I just saw Nikita's app. It's crazy. And what happened was others saw that, and then they started meming it. And it became this massive, like, meme or, like, where they're like, oh, I I just I just tried Nikita's app. It saved my marriage. I I just quit drinking. My my kids returned home, after all these, like... And it just... It turned into this massive meme. And, like... And at the time, I I didn't even have an app or anything. Like, wasn't even planning to launch it. It wasn't even an app that the thing that I was... Some of the ideas I was looking at. And, so it just turned into this viral, moments. I I wasn't really even that fixated on building another... Like, I wasn't even committed to starting another company at that point. I just... This was an ex... Exploration process. But what happened was the market had crashed shortly thereafter. There was, it's kind of the end of the ZERB era. The Fed started hiking rates. I think my portfolio was down, like, 30% or something, and I was like, damn, this sucks. Maybe I should think about how to, like, make money today. Just, you know, that... That's that's the reason we're in start ups is to to make money. And so there was always in the back of my head this question, that I had, which was what if we had monetized TBH? Because the number one support message we received was can I pay to reveal who sent me polls? Those are the, like, number one question. And I... It was like, would it have made even more than the acquisition if we just monetized it? And so I was... And I'm like, we could probably build this pretty fast, like, probably in a month, month or two. Ended up being a lot longer, but we we started rebuilding it. It was a new team. It was one of the engineers from a company called Paparazzi. His name's Zay Turner.
00:57:04 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
And he started building it in my house, and we we had tested it to see would this thing... Would this would this new version of TBH actually resonate with with kids this... Five years later? That was actually the the the thing I wanted to know most of all was, like, would a polling... Anonymous polling app actually still be relevant five years later? And so we dropped it into the school just, you know, the same way we... I've always done it. [00:57:36] S1: Is it the Georgia school again? [00:57:37] S0: Yes, actually. We launched at the exact same school that we launched TBH on the exact same day [00:57:48] S1: Oh, wow.
00:57:48 · Nikita Bier
[00:57:48] S0: Five years later. Fun fact. And people sent a lot of messages, but it wasn't growing. So let me let me pedal back here a bit. So TBH grew through variety of things, people sharing their messages to Snapchat and, text invites. And that was 2017, And the way you invited your friends on TBH was that you tap their name, your contact name, and there was a button that said invite, and then we used Twilio to send them a text message. And the regulatory environment actually had changed a lot over those five years. You really can't send text from a server anymore. It has to be sent from the device, the user's device. And just a point of clarification is, like, a lot of people clone TBH over the years, and they think that when you voted on people in the polls that sent them a text. We never did that. That... That's, like, egregiously illegal to do... And also unethical at a user experience level to send text when people don't even know that that's what's happening. But anyway, we couldn't send texts over over Twilio anymore, and that led to people not sending as many invites when we recreated Gas and... Or we create Gas. Because they they had to pop they had to pop the compose window and hit send every... They're gonna just tap invite on five names. So we actually had to reinvent all the growth systems, and it took about, I think, like, nine launches, including renaming the app, including, like, features that just never existed on TV. So it was actually just a... In many ways, like, yeah, the concept on the surface was the same, but it was a very much a zero to one development cycle of figuring out how to grow this thing again in this in this climate.
00:59:47 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:59:47] S1: I know that point is really important to you. I think a lot of people are like, Nikita, just sell the same app twice. What a what a guy. And point you're making here is is not only was, like, the infrastructure completely different, the team was different, You had to rethink the entire flywheel of how it worked and how it grew.