Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:03:00 · Nikita Bier
[01:03:00] S0: The point you bring up here about wanting to build a positive thing, there is this, like... There's this... People, sometimes I get criticism. It's not actually that often, but they say, oh, you're building an app that makes teams feel insecure or anything. But with Gas, I think we received a message every single day about... From a user telling us that they reconsidered suicide or other forms of self harm. The the app sent you positive messages and affirmations. Like, it made teens feel really good, and I think a lot... That that is lost on a lot of people. Instagram, you know, can make you feel jealousy and they... Like, a lot of other social networks kind of are a mixed bag in terms of impact. But we were, like, entirely focused on making teens feel better. And some people might say, oh, what if someone doesn't get voted for something? We actually built a system to ensure everyone got a vote. And we... What we did was we put your name in polls at a higher frequency to, if you weren't being voted on recently. So, like, we wanted to, like, spread the love in every way possible, and and that's what really motivated me to, like, grow this thing was watching how it was impacting 10,000,000 kids for just... In in such a short period of time.
01:04:20 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:04:20] S1: I really appreciate you adding that. I didn't know all those things about the way you thought about these these apps. Interestingly, I don't know how much you can go into this, but there's a lot of, stuff going on with gas around, human trafficking and all this stuff where people thought people were being kidnapped through gas, which is... Yeah. Talk about that whatever you can because that's pretty crazy.
01:04:41 · Nikita Bier
[01:04:41] S0: We had this hoax started where, people were saying the app was used for human trafficking. And I I was like, this is so strange. This is a anonymous polling app without messaging, and, the only thing you could do is send compliments to your friends. And I researched into it, and I saw that this is actually plaguing a lot of apps. And any app that has gone viral in any way has actually had this hoax started. And part of the reason it happens is it actually... It gets you attention if you say if you say that about an app. As a as a teenager, if you say, oh, this app is dangerous, and then you get a bunch of followers. And who doesn't love followers? So it's actually a really, like, viral piece of content if you put it out. And so we had this hoax started, and we were like, this could kill the company. And I talked to a bunch of founders that it happened to them. And they said, yeah. We had to shut down because of that. Wow. And and I I was like, is is this it? Is, like, is this the, you know, the end of the company? And I remember it hit number one when, we started getting a few of these reports, like, in our support channels. And I was like, I'm just gonna plant the flag in in... On post that we hit number one in the App Store because this thing's probably gonna shut down soon. So I I made this announcement on Twitter. I just made the number one app, and I thought it would just be dead in a week. And then, I I just had this sudden burst of energy, and I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna win. I'm gonna fight this. This is not true. It makes no sense at all. And so we fought it at every vector possible. This completely made up hoax. We, met with journalists, reporters to make sure that the number one match every time you search Gas App, human trafficking was Gas App is not for human trafficking. And so that ended up being the Washington Post headline. We insisted that that be the headline if we do the interview. So that was the first thing that show up on Google anytime someone searched it. There were schools and even a police station that posted that this app is used for human trafficking. I called those superintendents. I called those police chiefs and have got them to publicly retract it. And we had some of the reviews on the App Store. We had... We asked Apple to remove them, because we got review bombed.
01:07:09 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
But the thing that actually was the most impactful was, my girlfriend made a video, a TikTok video explaining that it's not true. And we... Anytime someone deleted their account, they could watch this video explaining it's not true. And at the peak, we had 3% of users deleting their accounts per day. So it was like really... Like it was a catastrophe for for an app. And we got it down to point 1% through relentless, relentless effort. And it's... It it was really just an unusual thing that happens when you grow really fast is, is this this this human trafficking hoax that starts. And you you you don't understand how crazy it is until it happens to your company. But it was it was it was it was kinda hilarious to think about. Like, this this app was the most harmless, benign thing you could think of. [01:08:01] S1: This is insane. I did not know this full story. And you were doing all this while you were trying to scale the app and trying to keep the servers up and try to grow it. Right? How... What was that like to try to manage all these things at once?