How to Make an App Go Viral: Nikita Bier Does it Again
Note: This post contains affiliate links. As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through these links, at no extra cost to you. Complete disclosure statement here.
Get the key ideas from the top books, podcasts and experts in 15 minutes with the Blinkist app. Start your free trial today! Now let’s get into it!
Nikita Bier sold the app TBH to Meta for more than $30 million and five years later did it again, creating the Gas app that made $11 million in revenue and then sold to Discord.
The apps are both polling apps targeted to teens.
The key difference with Gas is that you could pay to see who voted for you.
But success didn’t come right away to Nikita. His first product was Politify which aimed to help people decide who to vote for by showing them the impact of their policies on their life. It was a web app and went viral with 4 million users.
Governments soon reached out to Nikita and asked them to build it for their budgets. He joined the Tech Stars accelerator and even had a contract with the Obama administration. But then the government shutdown happened. One of his contracts was canceled.
He decided he didn’t like selling software to the government.
So he started Midnight Labs in 2010 and started building mobile apps. Everything you could think of. Mapping, chatting, meet up apps, etc. He was getting his reps in.
By app #15 a key member of the team put in their two week notice, money was low and Nikita was tired.
He called a lawyer to see how to dissolve the business.
But Nikita had an insight. Most people build apps for people over 22 years old. But he had seen a study in Spain which tracked how many people you text each year. It grew from age 14-18, peaked at 21 and then collapsed.
Teens were the key to a viral flywheel.
They decided to make an app that would allow people to send positive messages anonymously.
They found the school that was starting the earliest in the U.S. (in Georgia) and seeded the app. By using teenagers Instagram profiles they would find the schools location page and follow all accounts associated with that school’s name. Then they’d send invites to the app.
It worked. 40% of the school downloaded the app the first day.
The next day it spread to three more schools. Servers started crashing. “We may have something here,” Nikita remarked.
Forecasting the growth rate the five person team realized they could have the #1 app in the U.S. six days.
Side note: Apparently it takes between 80-100K downloads to make #1, somedays going up to 300k. TBH peaked at 360k downloads per day.
Their Amazon Web Service bill was $120k. The bank account held $150k. Nikita rushed to put a funding round together.
He told the team he thought he could sell TBH. In the meetings he would open up the dashboard and show the buyers all the real time sign ups in their community. They were impressed.
Nine weeks later they sold to Facebook for more than $30 million. Facebook assigned 80 people to the deal. When they showed up at Midnight Labs $1,800/month office it was two engineers, a designer and Nikita.
Nikita worked at Facebook for four years. He didn’t like it.
He wondered if he could do it again. So he started what would become Gas, a similar app, but people could pay to reveal who voted.
It was a struggle at first. The app was taking off, but a hoax that it was used for human trafficking led to a 3% peak per day delete rate.
He tried launching under a different name on the other side of the U.S. but the hoax came back up. They had to fight back. He slept three hours a night and got to work. Talking to journalists, networking to get the CEO of TikTok to remove the hoax videos.
It worked. A few months later the app was growing and Nikita pounced on the opportunity to sell it to Discord (valuation wasn’t released).
Since then both apps have been shut down. Turns out consumer apps are hard.
Interesting tidbits:
Nikita geofenced TBH so it was only available in one state at a time. Kids speculated when it would reach their state. The FOMO worked.
In one test they realized that one name, Crush, didn’t work as well. Turns out boys invite boys to apps and girls invite girls. Boys didn’t want to invite their friends to a pink icon app called Crush.
Nikita thinks you need to work on the core flow of an app, see how it spreads within a group and then how it hops to another group
He thinks the new ios18 contact permissions is going to be a big issue, if you’re planning on relying on contact sync he recommends you find a plan B
He now advises companies and recently helped Dupe.com reach millions in ARR after getting the site to demonstrate value in the first three seconds of the user experience
Interested in talking with Nikita? You can book a time with him on Intro.co.
Sources:
Business Ideas of the Week
Some really interesting ideas from today’s My First Million Podcast:
Self awareness personality test where other people answer questions about you (fitting given today’s main story).
Embryo selection, start with getting rid of chronic diseases, eventually selecting characteristics. Sam also mentioned that the cord blood freezing businesses are a brilliant biz to be in.
Iris Galerie takes high resolution images of your iris and turns them into art. Growing super fast. Idea was to see if you could do this online somehow. Really amazing pics, check it out here.
Mold clean up service. 70% of U.S. homes have mold. Could also work as a lead gen business.
Dunkirk Day. Less of a biz idea, more of an idea to have a national day for Britain that the country could get behind.
Business Success Stories of the Week
Oneleet (cybersecurity and compliance) hits $6 million in ARR in 19 months.
Mystery vending machine makes $500 in 3 days.
Cheap flight newsletter generates $70k/month.