Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
01:10:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[01:10:17] S1: Like cloud credits? Like AWS credits? [01:10:19] S0: AWS credits, Mixpanel. I I I remember I I was like, when I saw the early data, I'm like, okay. Now it's time for me to negotiate every bill down to the last cent of margin for every vendor. And I got credits everywhere and it... So I I... We really were tactical with that. And so we ended up being, you know, all all just pure cash flow for the team. No... We had no investors. And and it was just so interesting, that, like, the way that I started posting about it on Twitter was it kind of captured the zeitgeist of of the Internet. And we didn't intend on selling it. We were just gonna let this thing run its course and just be this app that kinda lives in the background of our lives. But once it started capturing, like, the zeitgeist of Twitter, I was like, wait a minute. We could probably sell this thing. And, and that's when we started engaging with, you know, some of these... We ended up getting, yeah, three three companies that wanted to to buy it. Won't be able to sell, them, but ultimately, we ended up selling to, to Discord, and we we we joined Discord. [01:11:29] S1: Awesome. So before we move on to the next part of the journey and some of the other insights that, I wanna get into, is there any lasting lessons that you took away from Gas as a product that you take with you to advising startups in terms of building the product? Because I know there's many, but any that stand out most that you think are really interesting to share?
01:11:49 · Nikita Bier
[01:11:49] S0: I think I kind of touched on this before, which was trying to validate things in in a sequence of, like, will people use the core flow? Will people spread it within their peer group? Will it hop peer groups? And what I think the most important thing is that I learned is that's actually a a really great way to do zero to one product development is execute at 100% for the thing you're trying to validate at that specific stage of the product development cycle. And then the rest can kind of... You can kind of half ass the rest just so you can get 100% signal on that one part. And so we've made the polling experience just perfect. The questions were great. You know, push push notification, everything worked. And then the next stage was, like, getting sharing and virality working. And so compartmentalizing those things because ultimately, you'll have too much scope creep if you try to solve everything at once and validate. And, also, you're not gonna get signaled to... Like, you're trying to test one thing at a time. So the way that now I approach a lot of consumer product development is, like, if this is true, then what next needs to be true for this thing to work out? And these layers of conditional statements. And the more layers you have, the higher risk your product is. So you should try to condense it to about, like, four things that must be true, for the thing to work.
01:13:06 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:06] S1: And this comes back to your advice of the thing you need to get good at is testing and learning and making it really quick. Yeah. Okay. Maybe one last thing along this thread. I'm just really curious how this hoax came to be. Like, who's behind it? How does this happen?
01:13:19 · Nikita Bier
[01:13:19] S0: We got a original support message, which which was a a screenshot of a story on Snapchat. Okay? And it said, do not download the Gas app. It's for human trafficking. Okay? And it was a screenshot that had like kind of that mirror effect where you have like 10 like 10 people had screenshotted it, like more, like 40 people because it had like all the usernames of... So I was looking at this and I'm like, how much visible... How, like, how how many people have seen this? And it looked like a viral thing on Snapchat. And then I went to the App Store page and I saw a review that that said this app is for human trafficking. And I went to my team and I said, you know, we... This this might... This will probably kill the company. This will kill the product. I... I've seen this before with consumer apps, and it's evident to me this is gonna be 10 times bigger tomorrow. And they were like, no. It's just one one message. What what do mean? I'm like, no. No. It's been screenshotted 40 times, and now it's on the App Store page. Like... And we got another message four hours later. And in the next day, it was... Our entire App Store page was just covered with reviews saying that the app's for human trafficking. And we actually had to rebrand the app. We we relaunched it once and we're like, we... Let's just call it something different. Just relaunch it on the other side of the country. We did that, started going viral again. And the the craziest thing was it reemerged. And what happened was one user was friends with another person in another state, and they got an invitation. And that user told them, oh, that was in my state. It's actually for human trafficking. And then it just completely started again, and and then it was too late at that point to relaunch again. Was... And we just realized we just gotta... We gotta we gotta fight this thing. And and, ultimately, I I don't think we'll ever know the true origin, but, yeah, it was it was it was definitely a living, breathing, like, hoax.