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Nikita Bier

32 statements across 1 episodes · 9 bullish · 5 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Aug 25, 2024 by Nikita Bier · said 3 times in 3 episodes since 2024 · across every show →

On the record as a speaker too: Nikita Bier's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.

Mentions by year

brought up most by Tamar Yehoshua (1), Mayur Kamat (1), Lenny Rachitsky (1)

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2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode

every mention, scene by scene, with the transcript →

Everything said about Nikita Bier, oldest first

Aug 25, 2024 neutral
Insight
Bier: Consumer apps should have at most four conditional validation layers
“The more layers you have, the higher risk your product is. So you should try to condense it to about like four things that must be true for the thing to work.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:12:58 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 bullish
Insight
Bier: App growth is a science that can consistently produce virality
“Growing a product can be a science. With certainty, if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:19:23 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Disclosure
Bier: Gas boosted unvoted users into polls more frequently
“We actually built a system to ensure everyone got a vote. And we, what we did was we put your name in polls at a higher frequency to if you weren't being voted on recently.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:03:53 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 negative
Insight
Bier: Consumer App Flywheels Break Down for Users Older Than 22
“It was always very difficult to get the flywheel spinning for anyone after like, 22 years old. That, that was like the cutoff of when People just have, give up on adopting new products.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 16:16 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: Rebranding to 'Gas' with a black flame icon increased invite rates
“The app indexed about six, 60 to 65% women. So we were just like, let's make the app more masculine and see what happens. We need balance on this. So we made the icon black with a flame, called it gas, and the invites rate jumped.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:16:35 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 negative
Opinion
Bier believes product management is not a real discipline
“I'm also, I feel honored to be on a product management podcast for a person who doesn't believe product management is real.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 3:29 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: Facebook assigned 80 people to the TBH acquisition deal
“When we met with Facebook, they told me they have 80 people assigned to this deal.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 37:26 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: iOS contact permission screens average a 65% approval rate
“The contact permission screen, you know, you're, you average about 65% approval rate across all apps. Higher, it's higher for teens, lower for adults”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:24:25 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: Facebook's NPE team was seated at Mark Zuckerberg's desk
“When we joined the new product experimentation group we were actually seated, I think like at the, basically the same desk as Mark Zuckerberg.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 51:58 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 positive
Insight
Bier: A reproducible testing framework dictates consumer startup success more than anything
“The most important thing that I often instruct teams to do is to develop a reproducible testing process, and that will actually influence the probability of your success more than anything. It's so unpredictable Whether a consumer product idea will work. And s…”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 19:05 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Disclosure
Nikita Bier: TBH only manually seeded its first hundred users
“You need to get enough 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 would just went to like from school to school following every kid on it. Like…”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 30:57 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: First mobile app took a year; final app took two weeks
“I think our first mobile app took us about a year, and then our last one took us about two weeks.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 18:59 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: Gas had zero outside investors and generated pure cash flow
“And so we ended up being, you know all, all just pure cashflow for the team. No, we had no investors.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:10:38 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Insight
Bier: People download apps to make money, find love, or unplug
“It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be like, you know, WhatsApp where, you know, free texting. And then the other reason is to find a mate. So maybe like Tinder or Snapchat, find love. And the third is to unplug from re…”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 43:00 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 positive
Insight
Communication products must target teens to leverage expanding social graphs
“If you're building a product with network effects, that's a communication tool. You want to be on that ups 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…”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 18:00 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Assertion Supported
Bier: Politify reached 4 million users during election season
“We went super viral. Like I think very few people thought of politics that way. And I think we got like four million users on it during that season of the, during that election.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 7:40 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: 90-day viral app payouts rival net proceeds of diluted IPO founders
“If you actually look at some of the numbers on like the actual proceeds that some of these founders get after an IPO, after seven rounds of dilution, a lot of them are pretty comparable to what we get from our apps for 90 days of work.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:22:13 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: Gas lost 3% of users daily during trafficking hoax
“And at the peak, we had three percent of users deleting their accounts per day. So it was like really catastrophic, like it was a catastrophe for an app. And we got it down to .1% through relentless, relentless effort.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:07:21 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 positive
Insight
Bier: Focus 100% execution on one test and half-ass the rest
“That's actually a really great way to do zero to one product development is execute at 100% for the thing you're trying to validate at that specific stage of the product development cycle. And then the rest can kind of, you can kind of half-ass the rest just s…”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:12:05 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: TBH's top support request was paying to reveal poll senders
“Cause the number one support message we received was, can I pay to reveal who sent me polls? Those are the like number one question.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 56:17 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Insight
Bier: The internet will retaliate if you use shady growth systems
“If you do the wrong thing by users, the internet will come back and get even and defend itself. And so we've always, whenever I design products, I try to do right by users because it'll always come back much worse. And I think you should always, you know, oper…”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:01:47 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 negative
Insight
Bier: Relying on manual username exchange for friending is unrealistic
“A lot of founders will go and say, oh, they can just exchange usernames. And that's how they can add each other. That is the most, like, unrealistic thing ever, because that means you have to see the username, type it into the app. You have to do that, what 50…”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:31:08 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 neutral
Assertion Partly supported
Bier: Gas launched at the exact same school as TBH five years later
“Yes, actually. We launched at the exact same school that we launched TBH on the exact same day, five years later.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 57:38 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 bearish
Insight
Bier: Durable consumer social retention is a once-a-decade black swan event
“And I think finding durability for a, like, communication or social product That's a black swan event. You, like, retention for consumer social is, like, there, there's a tremendous amount of randomness. There's, like, one every decade.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:18:51 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 positive
Assertion Supported
Bier: Advised Saturn and rebuilt friend finder, ranking above ChatGPT
“I was advising Saturn. I rebuilt their friend finder, their I think believe they're number one in the productivity section above ChatGPT as of today.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:36:12 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Disclosure
Bier almost dissolved his company the day before launching hit app TBH
“One of our key team members actually put in their two weeks notice the day before we launch our final app. We were also running, you know, we were getting kind of low on money. I was tired. And I called our lawyer to ask, how do you dissolve a company?”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 20:08 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 positive
Insight
Bier: In-app live chat is the best user research vehicle
“One of the reasons I actually recommend people put live chat in their app is it's the best vehicle for getting feedback and doing user research, because users will literally tell you the problem they're having.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 33:16 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Insight
Bier: App invites decline exponentially from age 13 to 18
“We found that as a user got older from age, 13 to 18, like the number of people that they invite to an app just declines almost exponentially.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 11:17 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Bier's startup studio launched 14 consecutive failed apps before TBH
“14 of the apps that we launched were basically duds.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 15:07 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: Large tech companies take 12 to 24 months to respond to competitive threats
“Realistically, I think most companies large companies take like 12 to 24 months to respond to Competitive threats in the market.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 45:53 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bier: Gas received daily messages from users reconsidering suicide or self-harm
“But with gas, I think we received a message every single day about from a user telling us that they reconsidered suicide or other forms of self-harm.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:03:17 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
Aug 25, 2024
Insight
Bier: App invites cluster by gender, making masculine branding critical for virality
“When you invite someone to an app, regardless of the app, you generally met boys invite boys, girls invite girls to apps and boys didn't want to invite their friends to an app called crush a pink with a pink icon.”
Nikita Bier Aug 25, 2024 ▶ 1:16:18 How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps
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