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Teen Habits
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Nikita Bier explains why building apps for teens is more successful because their habits are more malleable.
Teens invite more people to apps, and they see each other daily, which is crucial for social app adoption.
Nikita Bier
And over time, we started focusing more on teens. And a lot of people ask why Silicon Valley is so fixated on building apps for teens. And one of the reasons is their habits are pretty malleable. Like as we get older, we like kind of get kind of fixed into our habits of using certain communication products. And we don’t really adopt new things. And 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. And finally, the most important thing is they see each other every day. And that is so critical. Like consumer app developers sometimes say smokers are great for like targeting an audience because they actually like hang out, you know, serendipitously a lot outside of, you know, Buildings and so but not to say like social apps are cigarettes. I don’t really like that metaphor.
Lenny Rachitsky
Just on the note of you talking about why teens are important, I have this quote actually from you that I love, where building on the point you made that for every social app I’ve ever built, The number of invitations sent per user drops 20% for every additional year of age from 13 to 18.-
Target Teens
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To achieve network effects in communication products, target the demographic with the highest urgency to connect: teens.
Post-college, people reduce their daily contacts, making it harder to build network effects.
Lenny Rachitsky
And your lesson there is basically if you’re trying to do that, you’re probably going to need to raise money and spend a lot of money in paid ads.
Nikita Bier
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 the number of contacts you have, your daily contacts. Once you get married, it’s even fewer. And 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. But 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. So if you really want to actually innovate at the edges of communication products, you really have to target that cohort that has the highest urgency to communicate.-
TBH Inspiration
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Nikita Bier’s lingering users shared feedback that teens were using Snapchat to get feedback via emojis.
Inspired by this trend and Saraha being the top app, he thought that teens were looking for disclosure.
Nikita Bier
Building all these apps, we have these kind of like lingering users that stuck around and would share feedback with us on our next app. And so there were a couple like there’s the senior in high school that I would send screenshots of our products. And he told me about this trend called TBH that kids are playing on Snapchat, where they would post an image of a bunch of emojis and it would say like, I like you, you’re smart, your style Is great, and you would just reply to the story with the emoji of what you felt. And I was like, this is kind of weird. You post this on your story and then people send you feedback. And I’m like, so are looking for this This like then like this vehicle for disclosure Essentially and I’m like that that’s kind of cool. I wonder if you could make that into an app. We like had sketched some things out and As we were kind of sketching things out I I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States was an app called Seraha.-
Latent Demand
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Look for latent demand where people are trying to obtain value through a distorted process.
Crystallize their motivation and build a product around it to achieve intense adoption.
Nikita Bier
And so when I meet with founders, I often tell them like the way you should be searching for product ideas is this concept of latent demand, where people are trying to obtain a particular Value and going through a very distorted process to obtain that value. And if you can actually crystallize what their motivation is and build a product around and clear up what they’re trying to actually do, can have this kind of intense adoption.-
Positive Anonymous Apps
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People want to know good things about themselves and avoid bullying messages.
Anonymous apps can be successful and avoid negative consequences by focusing only on positive polls.
Nikita Bier
Lot of people were receiving negative messages. And so what I saw with a game that kids were playing on Snapchat, TBH, and then Saraha, I realized just people want to know good things about themselves. And they don’t want like these bullying messages that they’re getting on these anonymous apps. And I was like, well, what if instead of actually typing what you wanted to say about somebody, you just answered polls, and we authored those polls so that we ensured everything would Always be positive and I mean in the back of my head, I always knew anonymous apps go viral, but they always lead to like like these awful news stories of kids committing suicide, you know, Self-harm and all that. And so I was like, I’ll never build anything like that. But when we came up with this new mechanic, where you can only say positive things through polls, you know, who has the best smile, who’s most likely to be president, and then you receive It. And it’s anonymous, but your name is selected. What we discovered a couple of things is it made users feel a lot better, it actually solved what they were trying to do. And they also sent a much higher volume of messages. And so it was, it was literally explosive adoption. Like one school I was looking at, they sent 450,000 messages in the first seven days of adopting it. And when you look at day one, like volume of messages sent on a messaging app, uh, you’re lucky if people send like three or four or something, but we were sending like 60 and we, we couldn’t Even handle it. So we had to, like, we had to geofence the app because it w we, you need to scale our servers, which was actually a pretty controversial decision inside of our company because like why Would you turn off something-
Eliminate Confounding Variables
Eliminate confounding variables to determine if your product works. This allows you to know immediately whether something’s working or not.
Nikita Bier
So it says RHS on their bio. And so that was how we tried to get the entire school to adopt synchronously, we would follow them and then accept the followbacks. A big misunderstanding though, and I get this DM a lot of people like I’m trying to replicate your strategy, we’ve just done it at 15 schools, and it’s not working anymore. This is not the way we grew the app. This is how we tested apps. And it’s a little bit nuanced there because that’s an important nuance because you need to get enough intensity of adoption and density for a social network to get the flywheel spinning. But the app should grow by itself after that. And people think we just went from school to school, following every kid on it. That’s totally unrealistic. But for the first hundred users, yes, that’s how we got them. And that allowed us to know whether the product was working or not. We could get enough people on it, and then we could, with conviction, say that whether the app had legs, and we wouldn’t have this kind of uncertainty like, oh, did they add enough friends? Did we get enough people on it? Did they reach the aha moment because you need friends to get on? So we wanted to eliminate that confounding variable. And so we figured out a way to just get a bunch of people to adopt at once. That’s one thing I encourage a lot of founders to do, is figure out a way to eliminate all those potentially confounding variables so-
Nikita’s Facebook Experience
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Nikita found Facebook to be like an academic environment for social networks with a whole science behind growth.
However, he felt disconnected from the design process as a product manager, which was difficult for him since he considered himself a designer at heart.
Nikita Bier
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 do. You’re actually not as involved in the product as I had assumed. Like I thought, oh, you’re the person who gets in the pixels and designs the flows and absolutely not. Like you’re actually more, you’re completely detached from the design process. There’s a design vertical of org, that does all that. And they don’t really want you working on that. And so that was very difficult for me. Because actually when people ask me like, what do you think you’re good at? Like at the core, I’m a designer. I don’t consider myself a product manager. I’m great at growing things, looking at Mixpanel and then designing the things that make it grow. But there’s a rift between those two things inside of a large tech company. And so I loved the academic approach to growing, but it was really hard for me personally as I became disconnected from the design process. And I think that a lot of my skills atrophied over those four years. But I did stick around. I went through multiple orgs favor one at the end was a new product experimentation where worked-
Honesty in Product Vision
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Large companies may struggle with zero-to-one products because they are risk-averse.
It is challenging to be intellectually honest about the core motivation of an app, especially when it targets flirting or other sensitive topics.
Nikita Bier
Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky
An insight you’re sharing there potentially is, like the reason a company like Facebook isn’t amazing at launching completely new product, zero to one stuff, is they might be a little Too risk averse and it’s hard to talk about stuff that people actually really, really want deeply. Is that, is that kind of the sense there?
Nikita Bier
It’s hard to really verbalize some of the reasons, like the things that motivate us as people. And I, I had like a pretty, there’s a tweet I put out that’s kind of dogmatic in terms of like how I view why people download apps. And it’s like,-
Distribution Advantage at Large Companies: Myth?
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Large companies have distribution advantages by injecting apps into parent apps for density within communities.
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Startups can solve distribution by paying for ads or leveraging friend graphs.
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Getting an app into a dense friend graph is trivial for a founder after enough attempts.
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The distribution advantage big companies have makes it easier, but isn’t unsolvable for founders.
It’s harder for large companies to try new things than many people think.
Nikita Bier
You’d certainly have distribution advantages if you want to just inject your app into one of the parent apps and get density within a community, you could do that. But part, I think, is probably solvable for a startup, if you just want to pay for ads. Or getting your app into a dense friend graph is overall trivial. As a founder, you should be able to pull it off after enough tries. So that advantage that a big company brings, I mean, it’s it makes it easier. But it’s not not something that I think is something that a founder can’t solve for themselves. So-
Incentives in Large Companies
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Incentives within large companies hinder innovation because employees avoid presenting ideas without strong market signals.
People prioritize yearly bonuses and performance reviews, making it difficult to advocate for new concepts based on first principles.
Nikita Bier
Incentives within large companies make this very difficult. Because you don’t want to present something that you have a hunch about being a good idea. Because if there’s not market signals already, then it’s hard to defend. And people in companies are focused on getting their yearly bonus or they’re focused on their performance reviews. And it’s hard to show up into a framing meeting saying like, and framing meeting is like a meeting where you, you know, you position your positioning the opportunity and everything. Here’s what we should go after. It’s hard to like to say, okay, my first principles. This is a good idea. And here’s some like very vague market signals. In reality, you need to walk in and say, here’s the number one app in the United States and we don’t own it. And if you present something like that, that’s pretty defensible on a if you fail, because there was market evidence, but if you fail about something that’s more based on kind of vague Abstract. So you have to generally, like the only path is to kind of copy existing companies, existing products, if you want to really get momentum inside of a large organization. And for new, completely new concepts, it’s, I think, very difficult to present a lot of those ideas, either to verbalize them into a document or to even get rally the-
Nikita’s App Meme
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After leaving Facebook, Nikita Bier tweeted about working on a new app, sparking a meme frenzy.
People jokingly posted about how Nikita’s app drastically improved their lives.
Lenny Rachitsky
You left Facebook. At some point you started, I just I remember this, you started tweeting like, Hey, I’m working on your app, everyone’s going nuts. So it’s working on. And at this point, I think you probably in your mind thought, am this one hit wonder I haven’t shown that I can do this again and again. And so I think you probably have this motivation, maybe talk about that just like this driver, like, Hey, I want to do this again. Is that where your mind was at?
Nikita Bier
When that meme started, my intent was to start a venture backed company and build something, you know, uh, that would scale to be a big team and this durable thing that, you know, lasted Many years and everything. And so I was like, uh, I just made, you know, posts that I was leaving Facebook and looking for, uh, you know, some teammates. And, um, I shared, uh, a of ideas with some people privately. And there were some really crazy ideas that I shared. I’m not going to get into them, but then people started posting, oh my God, I just saw Nikita’s app. It’s crazy. And what happened was others saw that and then they started memeing it. And it-
Creative User Activation
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Be ruthless in cutting unnecessary steps for users.
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Be creative with available tools to activate users.
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Deeply understand every available API and how it can be used in non-traditional ways.
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Find iOS mechanisms used in a certain way today and invert them to expose value quickly.
Don’t rely on users exchanging usernames, which requires too many steps.
Nikita Bier
Ruthless, but also being extraordinarily creative with how you use the tools available to activate a user. And I think extraordinary product people are deeply aware of every possible API and how it can be used in non-traditional ways. Like this URL trick was something that I think, you know, was non-traditional that people adopted very quickly. I have like a whole laundry list of iOS mechanisms that could be read that people use for a certain way today, but you could invert them. And then it finds all the friends and then ranks the people who are not on the app yet, but have a bunch of friends on it. So there’s, there’s a bunch of ways that you can one tap, expose a ton of value to users that, that I think founders often neglect. And the, yeah, a lot of founders will go and say, Oh, they can just exchange usernames. And-
Nikita’s Consulting Approach
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Nikita Bier aims to help companies make 10 times their money back in the first 30 days of working with him.
He identifies table stakes growth opportunities and step function changes to change their growth trajectory.
Nikita Bier
I work across the gamut most of them are like consumer mobile companies and There’s certainly our web ones too, but I I work with companies across stages typically I recommend that you Don’t book me unless your venture backed. It’s because it’s a little expensive. But my main goal when someone does seek my advice through intro is I try to make them like 10 times back their money in the first 30 days. And so far, I think I’ve managed to do that with anyone who’s met with me. And that means like, get all the table stakes growth things out of the way at the minimum, 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 tried a couple both, explain to them which one, which direction I believe they should go. And
