How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps

... Honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real. We're already getting into the hot takes. You launched tbh, went viral, you end up selling it to Facebook. What was the insight that helped you come up with this is a big idea that we should try? I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States

I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States was an app called Surah, but the entire app was in Arabic, like the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something. This is insane. I did not know this full story. We launched this app, it immediately took off, servers started crashing. I

We launched this app, it immediately took off, servers started crashing. I looked at our numbers and I'm like, "We will be number one in the United States in six days." A tip that you're sharing here is look for latent demand Where people are trying to obtain a particular value and going through a very

distortive process. If you can crystallize what their motivation is, you can have this intense adoption. I didn't know you're a product manager at Facebook. The thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. They're mainly just writing documents and

then being the team secretary and running around getting approvals, but products live and die in the pixels. You should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. That's on you. At some point you started tweeting like, "Hey, I'm working on new app. Everyone was going nuts." I saw a stat that you made $11 million in sales, 10 million downloads.

was going nuts." I saw a stat that you made $11 million in sales, 10 million downloads. The thing that is hard to really understand is it is absolute chaos to keep the thing online. I was sleeping three hours a day for three months. Our team was also relentless though. They would come over to my house, 9:00 AM, stay until midnight and just do that seven days a week.

come over to my house, 9:00 AM, stay until midnight and just do that seven days a week. Is there anything else that's just like this is something that is probably going to help you with your app? With certainty, if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral. Over the years of building all these apps, I've accrued all these growth hacks that still nobody knows about.

Today, my guest is Nikita Bier. Nikita has built, launched and helped get more apps to the top of the app store than any human I've ever come across. He sold his first big hit tbh to Facebook for over $30 million. He sold his second big app Gas to Discord for many millions more. He did this all with a tiny team and very little funding. He's also helped

dozens of founders and apps, and as an advisor or investor to companies like Flow, Citizen, BeReal, LOCKit and Wealthsimple and many more. Today, he spends his time advising companies on viral growth strategies, design feedback, structuring their product development process and a lot more. What I love about Nikita is that he has very strong opinions about how to build successful

What I love about Nikita is that he has very strong opinions about how to build successful products that are rooted in him doing the work over the past decade to see for himself what works and what doesn't. Nikita has been the single most requested guests on this podcast, and you'll soon see why. This episode is packed with tactics and stories and lessons

that I am sure will leave you wanting more. If you want to work with Nikita on your app, you can book his time at intro.co/nikitabier. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that,

the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Nikita Bier. Nikita, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to dive in. I feel honored to be on a

product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real. We're already getting into the hot takes. We're definitely going to chat about... Wait, and you said not real. Okay, I thought you were going to say not useful. This is good. Let's put a pin in that. I think we think this, I think everyone already feels this. I think this is

a pin in that. I think we think this, I think everyone already feels this. I think this is going to be a very special conversation. I've been looking forward to chatting you for a long time and there's so much that I want to ask you. The way that I'm thinking we frame this conversation is we go through the story behind the apps that you've built or helped build that have hit the top

of the app store, and here, the inside story of what it took to build those apps and to make them successful. Then through that, try to extract as many lessons as we can about what it takes to build a successful viral consumer app these days. How does that sound to you? Sounds amazing, and a lot of it was luck, but a lot of it was very,

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reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's vanta.com/lenny. First, I want to start with something that I think very few people know about you. The first thing that you built, the first product that you built was very different from what you do these days,

that you built, the first product that you built was very different from what you do these days, and it's a product called Politify, which something I really want. It helps you decide who to vote for based on how it would impact your life. Can you just share a bit about just that part of your life and why you decided to pivot away from that into consumer apps?

When I was in college, I was really interested in this thing that American voters do, which is they vote against their own financial self-interest, like people in New York and San Francisco vote for Democrats for higher taxes. People in Kansas vote for Republicans for low taxes and they make less money, and so fewer government benefits. I wanted to build this tool

that would help communicate the financial impacts of these policy proposals of presidents. I built it in my last year of college and it was just a web app that we put out and it would calculate their tax proposals, the government benefits that they were proposing, and you would enter in your

basic personal information, how many kids you have, your age. Then it would just tell you in dollars what the impact would be. It'd also tell you, we simulated those policies also against the tax returns of every zip code so you could see how it impacts your community.

We went super viral. I think very few people thought of politics that way and I think we got 4 million users on it during that season, during that election. It was just like a project that we raised some grant money for, but it ended up feeding into this company that we spun up

and that was called Outline. Because we had a bunch of governments reach out to us asking, "Can you build this for our budget?" The governor of Massachusetts reached out and I flew out there to meet with them and that was going to be our first customer. We raised some money,

we won a government contract and we joined Techstars, the accelerator. We got a contract in the pipeline with the Obama administration and then we got this contract and

we started building it and the government shutdown happened in the middle of like, as we were building it and we had one of our contracts canceled. I realized I really don't like selling software to governments and my core competency

all along was making things that go viral on the internet. That was what we had built, not this policy simulation tool. We went to our investors and we said, "Look, this isn't what we're excited about doing anymore." We offered to give the money back and said, "We're going to

be building consumer apps and here's a few ideas that we have." None of them took the money back. Then we spent the next four or five years building a variety of different consumer apps. We had a few mild successes during the course of those four to five years. One of them was an

app called Five Labs that ingested your Facebook posts and determine your personality based on the language you use. It used this exact same model that Cambridge Analytica used, and that was super viral. I think we had tens of millions of profiles in it and it went viral in like three days.

We raised some more money based off the success of that and we started focusing a lot more on mobile after that first app, Five Labs. We launched every type of app you can imagine. We launched mapping apps, chat apps, event meetup apps. , every consumer app on mobile that

you could think of. That helped us build a muscle to understand what people want and how to make things grow and how to test them. Over time, we started focusing more on teens. A lot of people ask why Silicon Valley is so fixated on building apps for teens.

One of the reasons is their habits are pretty malleable. As we get older, we get fixed into our habits of using certain communication products and we don't really adopt new things. Then the other thing that we discovered was that adults don't really invite people to new apps. We found

that as a user got older from age 13 to 18, the number of people that they invite to an app just declines almost exponentially. Finally, and the most important thing is they see each other every day, and that is so critical. Consumer app developers sometimes

say smokers are great for targeting an audience because they hang out serendipitously a lot outside of buildings. Not to say social apps are cigarettes, I don't really like that metaphor. Just on the note of you talking about why teens are important, I have this quote from you

Just on the note of you talking about why teens are important, I have this quote from you that I love where building on the point you made that for every social app I've ever built and the number of invitations sent per user drops 20% for every additional year of age from 13 to 18. If you build for adults, expect to acquire every user with ads, and I love that you have

a very clear heuristic of per year, the amount of people they invite to the app is 20% lower. If your users aren't inviting people to your app, you're going to have to find another way to acquire them, and that most likely means ads. If you're targeting older cohorts like adults, you're going to have to raise a huge amount of

venture capital to finance that user acquisition pipeline and it's going to be extraordinarily expensive. As a seed stage up, it's going to be impossible to grow that user base, especially to get density if you need actual network effects among users.

, you're building this help me decide who to vote for app that turned into a real business with government contracts coming to you trying to help you, pushing you to build something that you end up realizing I don't want to be doing this. Why am I building this app selling government contracts. What you did is you, and this is a really interesting lesson to take away, is you just realized, I don't want

and this is a really interesting lesson to take away, is you just realized, I don't want to be doing this. Investors don't force me to be working on this. I'm going to stop this. I'm going to go work on some other stuff that I'm excited about that I think has a bigger chance of success. 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?

of apps and I think it was called Midnight Labs, you said, something like that, right? Yeah. Awesome. , I think that's a 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 I want to work on something else. Is there anything there that you want to add along those lines?

to work on something else. Is there anything there that you want to add along those lines? 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. I have been building web apps since I was 12 years old. I built a full e-commerce business selling

pirated games on the web, and I knew everything about growing a website. As we pivoted to mobile, I had to recalibrate my whole brain on how to do that. Mobile apps have such a low margin for error when it comes to designing them. Because I have this dogmatic view that every

tap on a mobile app is a miracle for you as a product developer because users will turn and bounce to their next app very quickly. If you sit behind someone and watch them use their phone, they switch between apps at a pretty high frequency. Every tap that you get, every single one is so scarce that you should be optimizing everything. I had to change

you get, every single one is so scarce that you should be optimizing everything. 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. 14 of the apps that we launched were duds, and then

we started fixating on teens and building apps for them. Eventually, we figured out an interesting heuristic for identifying consumer product opportunities that ultimately led us to tbh. You spent four or five years trying a bunch of different ideas. I think people see this

You spent four or five years trying a bunch of different ideas. I think people see this headline and we'll get into tbh of just like nine weeks after launch sells for $30 million to Facebook and everyone's like, " , okay, that's amazing. I want that for my life." Nobody knows there's this four or five years of trying, you said 15 different

apps before you got there, learning the things that work and don't work. We built 15 apps over the course of that pivot to consumer, and we built apps for every single app, map apps, chat apps, to-do lists. We just built every type of consumer app you could

possibly think of. Also, we built for every audience too. We built for college students, we built for post-college. It was always very difficult to get the flywheel spinning for anyone after like 22 years old. That was the cutoff of when people

just give up on adopting new products. It took us a few years to really internalize that, a lot of failures to realize no one needs another app after that age. The thing that you found there, which is really interesting because most people are building for

The thing that you found there, which is really interesting because most people are building for people older than 22, that's a profound insight you had there. Every consumer app I see is trying to build for adults, and your lesson there is if you're trying to do that, you're probably going to need to raise money and spend a lot of money on paid ads.

you're probably going to need to raise money and spend a lot of money on paid ads. Most likely, you'll never get network effects. There's an interesting study many years ago that some academics in Spain did, I think it was in Spain, and they looked at how many people you text per year of your life, and it goes up 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 at end of life. There's a few reasons all this happens, but , once you exit college, you reduce the number of contacts, your daily contacts.

Once you get married, it's even fewer. Then as you get older and your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent, you start texting again more or you join a retirement home. If you're building a product with network effects that's a communication tool, you want to be on that upward curve of adding connections to your social graph because then the urgency to

connect is higher. If you really want to innovate at the edges of communication products, you really have to target that cohort that has the highest urgency to communicate, and that's teens. I love that you found these things out, not through just research and not through just

I love that you found these things out, not through just research and not through just thinking, it was through actual trying things over and over and over and trying different audiences, trying different experiences. A lot of people see your advice and they're like, "How does he know?" It's just you've done all these things yourself. You've seen them, you're sitting there watching teens use these apps. I think very few people do that,

you're sitting there watching teens use these apps. I think very few people do that, and they just come up with these theories that aren't based in empirical evidence. We got pretty good 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. The most

important thing that I often instruct teams to do is to develop a reproducible testing process, and that will influence the probability of your success more than anything. It's so unpredictable whether a consumer product idea will work. If you focus more on your process

for taking many shots at bat, that's what reduces the risk more than anything. We figured out ways to seed apps into schools. We also, during the course of that company, we figured out how to seed it into affinity groups, hobbyists, things like that. We were on app number 15, a lot