Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:12:55 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:12:55] S1: So, basically, you're building this, help me decide who to vote for app that turned into a real business with, like, government contracts coming to you, trying to help you... Pushing you to build something that you end up realizing. I don't wanna be doing this. Why am I building this app selling government contracts? And so what you did is you... And this is a really interesting lesson to take away is you just realize, don't wanna be doing this. Investors don't force me to be working on this. I'm gonna stop this. I'm gonna go work on some other stuff that I'm actually excited about that I think has a bigger chance of success. And that's where you transition to this startup studio where you're just trying a bunch of apps. And I think it was called Midnight Labs, you said, something like that. Right? Yeah. Awesome. So, basically, I think that's an really interesting insight of just, like, if you're working on something you don't enjoy, you can change that. You can pivot. You can tell your investors, wanna work on something else. Is there anything there that you wanna add along those lines?
00:13:48 · Nikita Bier
[00:13:48] S0: It was really hard for us to pivot to mobile. I think that was one of the most challenging things for me personally because it was a completely different paradigm. Like, I actually have been building web apps since I was 12 years old, And I I, you know, I I I built a, full ecommerce business selling pirated games on the web, and I knew everything about, like, growing a website. But as I... As we pivoted to mobile, I I had to, like, recalibrate my whole brain on how to how to do that. Mobile apps have such a low margin for error when it comes to designing them because I I I have this, like, dogmatic view, that, like, every tap on a mobile app is a miracle for you as a product developer. Because users will churn and bounce to the... Their next app very quickly. If you actually sit behind someone and watch them use their phone, they actually switch between apps at a pretty high frequency. So every tap that you get, every single one is so scarce that you should be optimizing everything. And so I had to change my whole brain when we started pivoting to mobile and building these mobile apps, and it took a lot of failures. Like, we we, you know, we we we... Four... Like, 14 of the apps that we launched were basically duds. And then we started fixating on teens and and building apps for them. And, eventually, we figured out an interesting heuristic for identifying consumer product opportunities that ultimately led us to TBH.
00:15:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:15:26] S1: You spent four or five years trying a bunch of different ideas. I think people see this headline and will get into TBH of just, like, nine weeks after launch sells for $30,000,000 to Facebook, and everyone's like, oh, okay. That's amazing. I want that for my life. Nobody knows there's this, like, four or five years of trying, you said 15 different apps before you got there, learning the things that actually work and don't work. [00:15:49] S0: We built, like, 15 apps over that... The course of that pivot to consumer. And we built apps for, like, every single app, you know, map apps, chat apps, you know, to do list. We we just built every type of consumer app you could possibly think of. And, also, we built for every audience too. We built for college students. We built for, you know, post college, and it was always very difficult to get the flywheel spinning for anyone after, like, 22 years old. That that was, like, the cutoff of when people just have... Give up on adopting new products. And and that was a... We kinda... Like, it it took us a few years to really internalize that. A lot of failures to realize no one needs another app after that age. [00:16:44] S1: So the thing that you found there, which is really interesting, because most people are building for people older than 22. That's like a profound insight you had there. Like, every consumer app I see is, like, trying to build for adults. And your lesson there is basically if you're trying to do that, you're probably gonna need to raise money and spend a lot of money in pay downs.
00:17:03 · Nikita Bier
[00:17:03] S0: Yeah. And most likely, you'll never get network effects. There's actually an interesting study, like, many years ago that, like, some academics in Spain did, I think it was in Spain, and they looked at how many people you text, you know, per year of your life. And it goes up, like, very quickly from 14 to 18. It peaks around 21. So it's growing. The number of people you text is growing up until about 21, and then it just falls, it collapses. And then it comes back up in, at end of life. And there's a few reasons all this happens, but, basically, you know, once you exit college, you kind of reduce the number of contacts you have, your daily contacts. Once you get married, it's even fewer. And then when... As you get older, you know, you, and your your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent, you start texting again more and... Or you join a retirement home. But if you're building a product with network effects that's a communication tool, you wanna be on that ups... Upward curve of adding connections to your social graph because then the urgency to connect is higher. So if you really wanna actually innovate at the edges of communication products, you you you really have to target that cohort that has the highest urgency to communicate, and and that's teens.
00:18:28 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:28] S1: I love that you found these things out not through just, like, research and not through just thinking. It was through actual trying things over and over and over and trying different audiences, trying different experiences. Like, a lot of people see your advice and are like, how does he know? It's just like you've done all these things yourself. You've seen them. You're, like, sitting there watching teens use these apps, and I think very few people actually do that. And they just come up with these theories that aren't based on empirical evidence.
00:18:53 · Nikita Bier
[00:18:53] S0: Yeah. So we we we got pretty good at at building these apps. I think our first mobile app took us about a year, and then our last one took us about two weeks. We also got very good at testing apps. And the the most important thing that I often instruct teams to do is to develop a reproducible testing process, and that will actually influence the probability of your success more than anything. It's so unpredictable whether a consumer product idea will work. And so if you actually focus more on your process for taking many shots at bat, that's what actually reduces the risk more than anything. And so we figured out ways to seed apps into, into schools. We also, like, during the course of that company, we figured out how to seed it into affinity groups, you know, hobbyists, things like that. So we were on app number 15. You know, there were a lot of failures, during during the course of this company. And I remember a lot of our team members were like, I I kind of wanna leave. I I think this is it for me. And, one one of our key team members, actually put in their two weeks notice, the day before we launch our our final app. We were also running... You know, we were getting kinda low on money. I was tired. And I I called our lawyer, to ask how do you dissolve a company. I messaged a few mentors saying, like, I... One, people that have been through it, and I said, you know, what what are the steps to to do this? And then I I I had a conversation on the way out with that that team member that wanted to leave, and I said, you know, I understand. But but what if the app actually starts charting on the App Store? And I... He just said, what are the chances of that? You know, it's it's... You know you know that's not gonna happen. And I said, sure. Okay. So we we launched this this app, and it was, you know, a polling app, TBH, and it immediately, took off in the school that we seeded it into, in in Georgia. We picked the one school that had the earliest start date in The United States because we needed to launch as soon as possible given the state of the company. And it just... I think it spread to, you know, 40% of the school downloaded it in the first 24, and it rapidly spread to the neighboring schools. And suddenly, was like, oh, we might have something here. And servers started crashing and watching it climb the charts. I I think within...