How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor)

**Nikita Bier** (0:00)
Honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:06)
We're already getting into the hot takes. You launch TBH, when 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?

**Nikita Bier** (0:15)
I looked on the app store, and the number one app in the United States was an app called Suraha. But the entire app was in Arabic. Like the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:27)
This is insane. I did not know this full story.

**Nikita Bier** (0:29)
So 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 like six days.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:40)
A tip that you're sharing here is look for latent demand.

**Nikita Bier** (0:43)
Where people are trying to obtain a particular value and going through a very distortive process. If you can actually crystallize what their motivation is, you can have this kind of intense adoption.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:57)
I didn't know you're actually a product manager at Facebook.

**Nikita Bier** (0:59)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:21)
At some point, you started tweeting like, hey, I'm working on a new app. Everyone was going nuts. I saw a stat that you made $11 million in sales, 10 million downloads.

**Nikita Bier** (1:28)
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 AM, stay until midnight, and just do that seven days a week.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:44)
Is there anything else that's just like, this is something that's probably going to help you with your app?

**Nikita Bier** (1:47)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:02)
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 in apps and is an advisor or investor to companies like Flo, 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 products that are rooted in him actually doing the work over the past decade to see for himself what works and what doesn't. Nikita has been the single most requested guest 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 actually book his time at intro.co.nikitabier. And 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 future 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.

**Nikita Bier** (3:26)
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to dive in. I'm also, I feel honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:37)
We're already getting into the hot takes. We're definitely going to chat about it. And you said not real. Okay. I thought you were going to say not useful. Okay. This is good. Okay. Let's put a pin in that. I think we think this. I think everyone already feels this. I think it's 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 basically here, the inside story of what it took to build those apps and to make them successful. And 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?