Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:00:05 · Nikita Bier
[01:00:05] S0: Yeah. And there were so many layers of like, we we we validated one thing and then the next thing we weren't able... Like, we got stuck on. Like, okay. People will... It'll spread... People send a lot of messages. Cool. Great. The next thing was, will it spread within a school? That took us a while to get right. Will it hop schools? Each of those was a very, very challenging problem in light of the new climate that we were operating in. And I I always do things by the book, like, when it comes to, like, operating, you know, like, legally within the the compliance framework. And that's something I... When I meet founders and they tell me some growth thing that they're doing, and I'm like, you you can't do that. That... You... What... That's gonna cause way more trouble down the line. It's gonna burn users too. And so we always wanted to make it abundantly clear how our growth system... Like, how you were inviting friends and all that. We kinda go on a whole diatribe on that because the thing that I see a lot of founders do is they, in the background, use user data in ways that it shouldn't be used. Like, they invite they invite people on your behalf and all that. And I have this kind of crazy view that the Internet is this, like, living and breathing thing. There's this Wikipedia art... Article called the Gaia hypothesis, which is about biology. And it... It's basically, like, the Earth is kind of living and breathing and can respond to threats. Okay? And when like you enter the rainforest too deep, Ebola virus will be released. Okay? So I think the internet operates on a similar paradigm here where if you are... If you do the wrong thing by users, the Internet will come back and and get even and defend itself. And so we've always... Whenever I design products, I try to do right by users because it'll always come back much worse. And I think you should always, you know, operate above board with how you design your growth systems. And with with with Gas, we had to, you know, do things the right way, and we had to figure out at each each particular kind of moment of how... Or problem that we solve, like, will it spread within schools? Will it hop schools? Will people pay for it? All of all of these things we had to, it was a whole reinvention of the original product.
01:02:35 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:02:35] S1: I love that you shared that because I think a lot of people see you from the outside and they think you're doing all kinds of these skeezy growth hacks and making teens do things that aren't really mentally healthy for them. But it's clear that that's the opposite of how you think about it, that you're trying to stay very positive. Like, you only allow positive communication. You do things that you... As you just said, are gonna be good long term. The Internet's not gonna come and try to shut you down.