Nikita Bier 🤝 Consumer Social

Curated by: @pleasepushh

I’ve curated some tweets on building consumer social products by @nikitabier. In past, he’d built tbh, which got acquired by Facebook (now Meta). Now, he’s building Gas, which again is making waves. **

You can tell when someone is building their first social app because it’s an app to meet people who share your interests.

They quickly find out that 99% of people don’t have “interests” and if given free time, they simply scroll through TikTok while their brain is semi-comatose.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1420937025297862660?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g

From the outside, a breakout social app seems like it would just work on the concept alone—without grinding out optimizations. In practice, the difference between exponential decline vs. growth (0.99 vs. 1.01 K-factor) is often an extra invite button or ranking contacts correctly.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1557132295714222080?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g

A common mistake that new social app founders make is innovating too much on design. A blockbuster app does ONE thing totally different & wins because of that.

Everything else—like invites & friendfinding? Copy what the old companies did 10 years ago. Don't reinvent the wheel.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1352749766204002304?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
If you’re building a social app, you should assume by default that your idea is wrong and map out the possible pivots.

Then use this pivot map to create reusable building blocks (such as the friendfinder, invites, and onboarding system).

It will save you months, if not years.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1413392823630680071?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
There are 3 parts to growing a social app:

1—Seeding: Getting an initial cluster from a network to adopt 2—Growth: Getting that cluster to share among friends 3—Network Hopping: Leveraging that network to spread to adjacent networks

All must be in sync for the flywheel to spin.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1597806976250961920?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g

If you're launching a real-friends social app, be cautious about releasing Thurs to Sunday—for 2 critical reasons: 1/ You need several sequential in-person days to get word-of-mouth going 2/ The quietest online days are Fri & Saturday One lost day can severely impair network formation.

Having said that, Sunday nights can be ideal—specifically after dinner time. That is usually the apex of people concurrently online for the week and flows well into Monday morning excitement.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1591555991447175169?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
Social app founders spend months tweaking features, hoping there will be the one decision that makes their app blow up.

In reality, 99% of an app's value is the people on it. Perhaps they should spend that time innovating on marketing, the friendfinder, and the invite system.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1329073279043158022?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
—1st Year Social App Founder—

“We’re going to build a platform for intellectual conversations!” Result: 23 users + 5% retention

—5th Year Social App Founder—

“Let’s just have people vote on who’s the hottest.” Result: 10mil users + 40% retention

While you can certainly evolve your product into something more sophisticated, you better make sure that your Day 1 value proposition is so primal that it makes people leap out of their chairs and grab their phones.

The battle for attention in 2020 is absolutely cutthroat.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1273437328866832384?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
If you’re building a social app and less than 70% of your users are granting access to contacts, your app is dead on arrival until that’s fixed.

Network effects will never form if you expect users—who have a 5-second attention span—to find their friends by typing in usernames.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1403498766737444865?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
Why is the tech industry so fixated on building apps for teens?

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 years old to 18.

So if you build for adults, expect to pay to acquire every user with ads.

Social graph stops growing when you age up.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1573365055802036224?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
My litmus test for evaluating social app ideas:

🚽 Can you use it on the toilet? 🚘 Can you use it while driving?

If the answer is no to either of those questions, you will never get enough engagement to build a habit.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/941142471202947072?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
Marketing a social app to any age cohort except 13-21 is like trying to sell an igloo to an Eskimo.

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1112891774886801408?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
1. If you’re a product manager and you’re about to be fired:
  1. Add screenshot tracking to your app
  2. Find out which screen gets screenshotted the most
  3. Add your app logo & URL there
  Congrats, you just improved your K-factor by more than any PM in your company’s history.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1501243821186637827?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
2. Instead of saying “I have an app idea,” you should probably say:
  
  “I have a unique insight about a human vulnerability—and if network effects were formed in this context, it will produce a perpetual engagement loop.”
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1264583859145850881?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
3. The people and content on an app always trump slick design & novel interactions. So focus more on getting network effects and solving the "cold start."
  
  You should be filtering your product ideas by whether you have a distribution channel and if they can grow.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1481118414160613376?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
4. Excessively long sign-up flows are fine if it leads to higher activation rates. Most people don't bail after installing something.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1481118415154675715?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
5. I frontload invites & network effects because it ensures that the product hits critical mass and that we can make go-no-go decisions with conviction—versus constantly wondering “did people have enough friends? maybe we should launch again.”
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1414872091027980291?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
6. One thing that took me a while to learn: half of the launches fail, regardless of the product’s merits. Always launch again (or more times) before you give up.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1162172042969411595?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
7. Every consumer social founder who has had viral growth has regretted not putting up a geofence to control user acquisition.
  
  However, in the moment, it always feels blasphemous.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1306961751666167808?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
8. Founders tend to focus on simplifying signup flows but users will complete almost anything once they download an app. Instead, you should add steps that accelerate the Aha Moment. No one is going to wait 4 days to reach an optimal friendcount. You have 2 hours—the clock is ticking.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1108519085711585280?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
9. As you design the identity system for your social network, be aware that Real Name social apps index to around 60:40 women to men. The moment you allow pseudonyms, that ratio flips. I don’t know the causality—but my best guess is that it comes down to perceptions of safety.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1603474908331134976?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
10. What people don't understand about social apps—at scale people are deranged.
  
  When building TBH, we knew we couldn't handle the volume of abuse so we didn't allow typing—only voting on polls
  
  So what did users do? Set usernames as the N-word using unicode & their photos as the KKK.
  
  Because when your app gets overrun by trolls and 99% of posts are N-word copy pastes. Everyone leaves and you're left with 10 anime avatars talking to each other and your goal of building a social network is dead.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1515118303420682240?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
11. I’ve spent years of my life building novel sharing flows that assumed users want to post my app’s content into other apps. Almost every time I overintellectualized what people actually want to share and my time would’ve been better spent simply making it easier to invite friends.
  
  If you can, don’t build any sharing flows until (1) you see users hacking it themselves with screenshots or (2) demand to share that way is already demonstrated in an existing in-market app.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1607268583897436161?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
12. From my experience, reluctance to send invites & sync contacts is simply a function of age—and hasn’t changed since the iPhone launched.
  
  If you aren’t at a social inflection point (e.g., entering high school or college), you will have no desire to connect with people on new apps.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1112886629910241280?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
13. Too many founders think products take off because of massive waitlists & exclusivity. Waitlists only extend the funnel and cause interest to decline by the time invites are sent. If you want to limit the user base, do quieter launches and don't prematurely exhaust attention.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1276591194055696384?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
14. The crown jewel of social is getting someone's best friend to sign up. 90% of the messages we send go to that one person. Simply put: if you win them, you win retention. I spent years at Facebook building apps that tried to win that friend, but I wasn't able to crack it.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1488640711771623424?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
15. The only data point in a social app that I've found meaningful is Month 2 retention (and it needs to be >25%). Any retention data before that is mostly just novelty effect and push notification manipulation.
  
  https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1546971806992478208?s=20&t=fC8jwsngRCD-gP6-sIkS4g
16. If your app idea feels like a dud, go through every interaction & consider what would happen if you inverted it.
17. Every time I build a high brow product, it flops harder than I could ever predict.
18. There are only 3 reasons that someone will download a new app
19. A reproducible testing process is more valuable than any one idea. Innovate here first. All things equal, a team with more shots at bat will win against a team with an audacious vision.
20. Most product ideas are Dead On Arrival because the conditions to derive value are impossible to orchestrate. Getting 7 adult friends to install an app on a reproducible basis is non-trivial. If you can figure out how to do that, that's a bigger idea than your original concept