Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
01:08:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[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? [01:08:12] S0: I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. It was extraordinarily difficult, to to do it all. Our team was also relentless, though. Like, they would come over to my house 9AM, stay until midnight, and just do that seven days a week. So, yeah, it was, it it it was definitely, like, one of the most physically draining things ever, but we were just so tactical. I remember investors were asking to meet with us, and I said, if you can't get a celebrity to post that this isn't true, then we were not interested. But, yeah, we we we went after it on every vector, and it ended up being okay. [01:08:59] S1: I love how this... Like, you took your brain to this other completely different problem and thought about all the levers you could use to change the conversation around the app. Yeah.
01:08:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[01:08:59] S1: I love how this... Like, you took your brain to this other completely different problem and thought about all the levers you could use to change the conversation around the app. Yeah. [01:09:09] S0: We we even... I remember we had these TikTok videos that were made that were saying it was true, and I had asked... Like, I I client... I networked my way all the way to the CEO of TikTok, and I said, can you delete these? And we got them... This miss... This information deleted. Yeah. So it was it was really a whole new test of our our team's capacities was fighting... The the key thing that you have to know, though, when you have a hoax spreading about your app is you really have to make sure the hoax is less viral than your app. And at some... At a few points, the hoax was more viral than our app, and we had to, we had to take this [01:09:48] S1: The k factor of the hoax. That's absurd. Okay. So broadly, you built this app. Again, a big success. I saw a stat that you made $10,000,000... Or $11,000,000 in sales through the app, 10,000,000 downloads. Is that right? [01:10:03] S0: Yeah. It was a blowout success in terms of, like, on on... It grew bigger than TBH. We monetized it. You know, we ran almost entirely on startup credits. So it was basically, you know [01:10:17] S1: Like cloud credits? Like AWS credits?