"... 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 ..."

"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 actually  crystallize what the..."

"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...."

"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 fo..."

"on your app, you can actually 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 w..."

"Sounds amazing, and a lot of it  was luck, but a lot of it was very,   very tactical work that went into it all. This episode is brought to you by  Webflow. We're all friends here,   so let's be real ..."

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"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,   and i..."

"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 ra..."

"policy simulation tool. We went to our investors  and we said, "Look, this isn't actually what we're   excited about doing anymore." We offered to  give the money back and said, "We're going to   be b..."

"you could think of. That actually helped us  build a muscle to understand what people want   and how to actually make things grow and how  to test them. Over time, we started focusing   more on teens...."

"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 ..."

"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, ..."

"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..."

"how to seed it into affinity groups, hobbyists,  things like that. We were on app number 15, a lot   of failures during the course of this company, and  I remember a lot of our team members were like,..."

"launched this app and it was a polling app, tbh,  and it immediately took off in the school that   we seeded it into, in Georgia. We picked the  one school that had the earliest start date in   the Un..."

"numbers don't really..." I quickly had to put  together a funding round and I told my team,   "Can you guys just pause for two months  and just really focus on this? I think I   could probably sell th..."

"showing something that you created that literally  just took over the entire neighborhood around you. That's insane. That's going to  be in the movie of Nikita Bier   in the future. A couple of questi..."

"... to how to spread this so virally,  and I know that one is really clever. After building all these apps, we had these  kind of lingering users that stuck around   and would share feedback with us o..."

"their motivation is and build a product around  and clear up what they're trying to actually do,   you can have this kind of intense adoption. When we saw what people were doing with Sarahah,   I also..."

"of our company, because why would you turn  off something that's working? But at my core,   I knew if it's working at this many individual  schools, we could just relaunch it any time and   it'll go v..."

"intensity of adoption and density for a social  network to start to get the flywheel spinning,   but the app should grow by itself after that. And  people think we just went from school to school   fo..."

"So your advice here is when  you're testing something,   test the best possible version of what  that could be, whether it takes manual   work or something that is never going to  scale, test the idea..."

"I think the thing that is hard to really  understand for first-time founders that   hit breakout success with a consumer product is  how draining and how spread thin you get, because   everything brea..."

"Okay, so you launch TBH, it goes viral,  start getting offers from companies. Nine   weeks later after launch, you end up selling  it to Facebook. What was it like selling your   company and then what..."

""Yeah, this is it." And when we went there,  when we arrived, we joined the youth team,   which was about, I don't know, 150 people just  for this one division of Facebook. It was my first   job effec..."

"but then we saw it actually turn into systems and  processes here. But the thing I didn't realize as   a product manager in a large tech company is  there is very little product management that   you ..."

"product experimentation where I worked with other  founders, a bunch of legends in Silicon Valley,   building zero to one products, standalone  apps. I mean, I was building standalone apps   my entire..."

"then it's really hard to iterate toward the  right thing in that context. Having said that,   there's a lot of things you don't have to  deal with as a product... I don't have to   deal think about mo..."

"out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of how I view  why people download apps and it's very simple.   It's like people download apps to make or save  money. Examples of that might be like WhatsApp,   w..."

"social app." They probably often hear, "Facebook's  going to do that. Instagram's going to copy you.   Snap's going to do that." And what I'm hearing  here is it's not as easy as many people think,   ..."

"to get better at this? Are there companies  that are good at this in your experience,   or is this just as you grow,  this is just what happens? The incentives within large companies make  this very d..."

"a game changer for customer facing analytics  and data reporting. Are your users craving more   dashboards, reports, and analytics within your  product? Are you tired of trying to build it   yourself?..."

"The functional organization structure of big  tech has kind of separated product managers   from the product development process in many  ways. They're not looking at data because data   scientists ar..."

"To defend product managers, I think many  product managers spend a lot of time in design,   spend a lot of time with data science. I think  probably what you saw is like the extreme big,   big, big te..."

"artifacts that we had kept with us from  our old office when we were running tbh,   and one of them was this kind of pop art  painting that I bought on the street when   I needed to get something on t..."

"build something that would scale to be a big team  and this durable thing that lasted many years and   everything. And so I just made post that I was  leaving Facebook and looking for some teammates. ..."

"at that point. This was an exploration process. But what happened was the market had crashed   shortly thereafter, there was kind of the end  of the Zerb era. The Fed started hiking rates. I   think m..."

"I wanted to know most of all was like would an  anonymous polling app actually still be relevant   five years later? And so we dropped it into the  school just the same way I've always done it in- Was..."

"system, how you are inviting friends and all  that. You can kind of go on a whole diatribe   on that because the thing that I see a lot of  founders do is they in the background use user   data in way..."

"I really appreciate you adding that. I didn't know  all those things about the way you thought about   these apps. Interestingly, I don't know how much  you can go into this, but there is a lot of stu..."

"unusual thing that happens when you grow really  fast is this human trafficking hoax that starts.   And you don't understand how crazy it is until  it happens to your company, but it was kind   of hil..."

"Awesome. So before we move on to the next part of  the journey and some of the other insights that I   want to get into, is there any lasting lessons  that you took away from Gas as a product that   y..."

"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 conden..."

"I don't think we'll ever know the true origin, but  it was definitely a living, breathing like hoax. That is insane. The story just gets more  and more interesting. What were some of   the previous na..."

"Man, there's just endless stories that we could  keep getting into, but we've also gone very long,   so I'm going to try to move on to another  topic. So I ask people on Twitter what to   ask you? Jus..."

"Retention for consumer social is there's a  tremendous amount of randomness. There's one   every decade. If it was simple, I would  just be printing $1 trillion companies.  I be printing Facebook's ev..."

"That's amazing, man. I am 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 consum..."

"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 three to   five ..."

"Okay, cool. So the first is just  contact permissions in iOS 18   changes the game and how people can grow  apps basically makes it harder to invite   your friends. Thoughts on how people should  be t..."

"So what I take away here is just it is now  much different and there's an opportunity   to think of something really clever that would  give you a huge advantage if you can crack it. Yes, but most lik..."

"that that's where the design part comes  in of being a great product person. I imagine a big part of this is just cutting  things you think... Like killing your darlings,   cutting things you think pe..."

"they're both the same. They both should be  treated as the same. If you're targeting a   community and you want them to all adopt  and get saturation, you need to build   marketing that shows imagery ..."

"Then identify two to three step function changes  that could change their growth trajectory. And   these are higher scope fundamental changes  to the product. So I try to couple both,   explain to the..."

"Amazing. Well, I know it feels expensive to  some people, but if I were a company with cash,   it feels like the best deal I could find someone  like you to come in and actually help me think   throug..."

"It's been a pleasure. Thanks  for having me. We covered a lot   and there's plenty more. I hope to  come back after the next viral hit. Oh man. So I was going to ask you,  is there anything you're wor..."