Nikita Bier: evaluation

Transcript context

…Was it the Georgia School again? 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.…

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