Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:15:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[01:15:45] S1: That is insane. The story just gets more and more interesting. What are the... What were some of the previous names, by the way? Is that something that you can share? [01:15:52] S0: Yeah. We went through a bunch. We had, like... One of them was called Crush, one of them was called Melt, and another was... Interesting thing about Crush is we got a great domain. We thought this would this would be the name. This was between the... Some of the, like, rebrands. We tested it and we saw that invitations dropped significantly under the crush name. And we were like, what's going on here? And we found that actually when you invite someone to an app, regardless of the app, you generally met... Boys invite boys, girls invite girls to apps. And boys didn't wanna invite their friends to an app called Crush, a pink... With a pink icon. And then we looked at the data and the app, I mean, this was true of TBH too, which was the app indexed about six... 60 to 65% women. So we're just like, let's make the app more masculine and see what happens. We need balance on this. So we we made the icon black with a flame, called it Gas, and the invites rate jumped. And you think our name doesn't matter, but right at the moment of sending an invite, yeah, you... So that that was one of the interesting insights of... On the the the naming process.
01:17:06 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:17:06] S1: Man, there's just endless stories that we could keep getting into, but, we've also gotten very long. So I'm gonna try to move on Yeah. To another topic. So I asked people on Twitter what to ask you. Just that question got a thousand likes. Just me asking, what should I ask Nikita? And the most common question, I'm sure you get this a lot, is just people wondering, do you ever wanna build a durable consumer app? Is it possible to build a durable consumer app? Scott asked this. Robert at Figma this. And Scott actually had a really nice way of describing it about why are so many quick sensation consumer apps proving to be more akin to summer songs than enduring standalone products and businesses? There's kinda two questions here. One is, do you wanna build a... Do you aim to build a durable consumer app? And two, how possible is it?
01:17:54 · Nikita Bier
[01:17:54] S0: A lot of the fundamental, like, tools for communicating with our friends either, you know, messaging or posting broadcasting one to many, like on stories or, you know, those... The incumbents have kind of built pretty large moats in terms of network effects. And to provide true, like like, an order of magnitude better experience is nontrivial because they've been actually improving these products so much over the years. And there's actually not... There's not that many entry points. Not not to say that it's not impossible. Snapchat was... Showed that there was a style of messaging that people wanted that the incumbents weren't serving. But I think there's these kind of edges that you can go after with a much higher probability of success, and they might not actually be something that's durable necessarily. And I think finding durability for a, like, communication or social product, that's a black swan event. You... Like, retention for consumer social is like... There... There's a tremendous amount of randomness. There's, like, one every decade. If it was simple, I I would just be printing $1,000,000,000,000 companies. I'd be printing Facebooks every time I sat down. But I think it's actually... A lot of it is pure randomness. On the other hand, growing a product can be a science. With certainty, if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral. Now why haven't I tried to take the viral part and build something that has been durable or long lasting? I'll tell you a little bit about my motivations. My favorite part about product development is you make this thing, you know, through the night, you build it, and you watch it take over the Internet. That is the most thrilling drug I think you you could you could ever experience. And and and just watching it spread all over the country, it's like, you you drop an app in, you know, the the Deep South in Georgia, and then you look on your analytics dashboard, and 40% of the high school down your street in Los Angeles has downloaded it one week later. Like, that's a really profound feeling, and it's it's just... It's crazy to have that sort of impact as a three person team, and I I live for that. When I joined Facebook, this is... Like, the... Here's here's an interesting connection here. So I joined Facebook, and I saw that many of my peers were, like, looking up to VPs.
01:20:37 · Nikita Bier, Lenny Rachitsky
And they're like, that's what I that's what I wanna make it to one day. And I wanna run a large organization. I wanna have lots of reports. And and then I met with VPs, and they were actually jealous of me because my quality of life was actually pretty cool. I I I got to build something high impact that, made many teens feel better about themselves, made decent amount of money. And then I wasn't, you know, in charge of this becoming a people manager that has to run this large organization for for many years. And so I think one day I will run maybe a venture scale business that... But I I I I will say that I kind of like the way that I've been doing things so far in terms of quality of life and being fun. Financially, it's been great. So I think that that part is what motivates me. And, yeah, I'm... I I don't think, you know, running a large corporation is necessarily what I describe as fun. [01:21:40] S1: That's amazing, man. I really... I'm really happy we went here. So much of this resonates with the way I think. And, obviously, a big part of this is also just... It's very hard, as you said, to build a door... Build a consumer app that grows, first of all. Second, that actually lasts. But that is interesting that you do hope to one day build a
01:21:40 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[01:21:40] S1: That's amazing, man. I really... I'm really happy we went here. So much of this resonates with the way I think. And, obviously, a big part of this is also just... It's very hard, as you said, to build a door... Build a consumer app that grows, first of all. Second, that actually lasts. But that is interesting that you do hope to one day build a [01:22:00] S0: venture funded business. I mean, TBH was venture backed, but I I just don't... Like, I I I think I'm gonna have to... Like, do I wanna sign up for ten years? And if you actually look at some of the numbers, on, like, the the actual proceeds that some that some of these founders get after an IPO, after seven rounds of dilution, a lot of them are pretty comparable to what we get from our apps for ninety days of work. So, yeah, they, the trade offs there are pretty, pretty pretty favorable, I [01:22:35] S1: think. Actually, just on that on that note, so what would make you actually decide to go venture funded? You talked about how if you're going more mainstream, non teens, folks after 22 years old, is that why you would go that route?
01:22:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[01:22:35] S1: think. Actually, just on that on that note, so what would make you actually decide to go venture funded? You talked about how if you're going more mainstream, non teens, folks after 22 years old, is that why you would go that route? [01:22:47] S0: I I don't think that, like, it's necessarily that part. It's more... I think if the... If I if if I could keep the team lean and and scale up, I I think, you know, there's there's some actual founders that actually operate very lean teams and have reached very large scale in terms of the valuations of the company. Like, actually, the the most, iconic example is Elon Musk. His teams are actually pretty thin overall, and he's he's in the weeds doing product development. And so I I think, yeah, if if I was to ever do it, I would do it under a very specific set of, operating principles, versus turning it into a big tech company. [01:23:33] S1: Cue investors emailing you right now with term sheets. Okay. Nikita, this has been amazing. There's one last segment I wanna spend a little time on, which is just kind of a rapid fire of pieces of advice you've shared that, I think is incredibly insightful about how to build a successful consumer app. And so I'm thinking I'll just go through, like, three to five and see what you think and see what you can add to the the device. That's... How does that sound? [01:23:59] S0: Sounds great.