Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, actually. We launched at the exact same school that we launched tbh on the exact same day five years later, in fact. And people sent a lot of messages, but it wasn't growing. So let me pedal back here a bit. So tbh grew through variety of things, people sharing their messages to Snapchat and text invites, and that was 2017. And the way you invited your friends on tbh was that you tap their name, your contact name, and there was a button that said Invite and then we used Twilio to send them a text message. And the regulatory environment actually had changed a lot over those five years. You really can't send texts from a server anymore. It has to be sent from the user's device. And just the point of clarification is a lot of people clone tbh over the years and they think that when you voted on people in the polls, it sent them a text. We never did that. That's egregiously illegal to do and also unethical at a user experience level to send texts when people don't even know what's happening. But anyway, we couldn't send texts over Twilio anymore, and that led to people not sending as many invites when we created Gas because they had to pop the Compose window and hit Send. They're going to just tap Invite on five names. So we actually had to reinvent all the growth systems and it took about I think like nine launches including renaming the app, including features that just never existed on tbh. So it was actually just in many ways like yeah, the concept on the surface was the same, but it was very much a zero to one development cycle of figuring out how to grow this thing again in this climate. I know that point is really important to you. I think a lot of people are like Nikita just sold the same app twice. What a guy. And the point you're making here is not only was the infrastructure completely different, the team was different, you had to rethink the entire flywheel of how it worked and how it grew. Yeah. And there were so many layers of like we validated one thing and then the next thing we got stuck on. Like, okay, people send a lot of messages. Cool, great. The next thing was will it spread within a school? That took us a while to get right. Will it hop schools? Each of those was a very, very challenging problem in light of the new climate that we were operating in. And I always do things by the book when it comes to operating legally within the compliance framework. And that's something when I meet founders and they tell me some growth thing that they're doing, and I'm like, "You can't do that. That's going to cause way more trouble down the line. It's going to burn users too." And so we always wanted to make it abundantly clear how our growth system, how you are inviting friends and all that. You can kind of go on a whole diatribe on that because the thing that I see a lot of founders do is they in the background use user data in ways that it shouldn't be used. They invite people on your behalf and all that. And I have this kind of crazy view that the internet is this living and breathing thing. There's Wikipedia article called the Gaia Hypothesis, which is about biology. And it's basically like the earth is kind of living and breathing and can respond to threats. Okay? And when you enter the rainforest too deep, Ebola virus will be released. Okay? So I think the internet operates on a similar paradigm here where if you do the wrong thing by users, the internet will come back and get even and defend itself. And so 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 operate above board with how you design your growth systems. And with Gas, we had to do things the right way and we had to figure out at each particular moment or problem that we solve, will it spread within schools? Will it hop schools? Will people pay for it? All of these things was a whole reinvention of the original product.…

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