Lenny's Podcast · Aug 25How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Launched as app number 15 the day before the team planned to dissolve, and 40% of its first Georgia school downloaded it within 24 hours. One school sent 450,000 messages in seven days, it peaked at 360,000 installs a day, and it sold to Facebook for over $30 million.
Tips
- Build a reproducible testing process so you can take many shots▶ 19:26TBH, the 15th app, hit number one in the US and sold to Facebook for over $30 million.
- Seed a whole community at once so tests give clean signal▶ 30:30TBH reached 40% of its first school in 24 hours.
- Look for latent demand where people use a distorted process to get value▶ 26:31One school sent 450,000 messages in the first seven days, about 60 messages on day one per user versus the usual three or four.
- Put live customer support chat in your app around the clock▶ 32:46The number one support message on TBH was whether users could pay to reveal who sent polls, which inspired the monetization in Gas.
- Expect everything to break every few days when growth takes off▶ 34:55Their first support system broke after three days and the next after seven.
- Recognize product-market fit as binary and obvious in consumer apps▶ 36:22
- Do not use hidden or non-consensual growth tactics like server-sent invite texts▶ 1:01:48
