Nikita Bier: evaluation

Transcript context

…When I was in college, I was really interested in this kind of thing that American voters do, which is they vote against their own financial self-interest, like people in New York and San Francisco vote for Democrats for higher taxes. People in Kansas vote for Republicans for low taxes and they make less money, and so fewer government benefits. I wanted to build this tool that would help communicate the financial impacts of these policy proposals of presidents. I built it in my last year of college and it was just a web app that we put out and it would calculate their tax proposals, the government benefits that they were proposing, and you would enter in your basic personal information, how many kids you have, your age. Then it would just tell you in dollars what the impact would be. It'd also tell you, we simulated those policies also against the tax returns of every zip code so you could see how it impacts your community. We went super viral. I think very few people thought of politics that way and I think we got 4 million users on it during that season, during that election. It was just like a project that we raised some grant money for, but it ended up feeding into this company that we spun up and that was called Outline. Because we had a bunch of governments reach out to us asking, "Can you build this for our budget?" The governor of Massachusetts actually reached out and I flew out there to meet with them and that was going to be our first customer. We raised some money, we won a government contract and we joined Techstars, the accelerator. We got a contract in the pipeline with the Obama administration and then we got this contract and we started building it and the government shutdown happened in the middle of like, as we were building it and we had one of our contracts canceled. I realized I actually really don't like selling software to governments and my core competency all along was making things that go viral on the internet. That was what we had built, not this policy simulation tool. We went to our investors and we said, "Look, this isn't actually what we're excited about doing anymore." We offered to give the money back and said, "We're going to be building consumer apps and here's a few ideas that we have." None of them took the money back. Then we spent the next four or five years building a variety of different kind of consumer apps. We had a few mild successes during the course of those four to five years. One of them was an app called Five Labs that ingested your Facebook posts and determine your personality based on the language you use. It used this exact same model that Cambridge Analytica used, and that was super viral. I think we had tens of millions of profiles in it and it went viral in like three days. We raised some more money based off the success of that and we started focusing a lot more on mobile after that first app, Five Labs. We launched basically every type of app you can imagine. ree days. We raised some more money based off the success of that and we started focusing a lot more on mobile after that first app, Five Labs. We launched basically every type of app you can imagine. We launched mapping apps, chat apps, event meetup apps. Basically, every consumer app on mobile that you could think of. That actually helped us build a muscle to understand what people want and how to actually make things grow and how to test them. Over time, we started focusing more on teens. A lot of people ask why Silicon Valley is so fixated on building apps for teens. One of the reasons is their habits are pretty malleable. As we get older, we get fixed into our habits of using certain communication products and we don't really adopt new things. Then the other thing that we discovered was that adults don't really invite people to new apps. We found that as a user got older from age 13 to 18, the number of people that they invite to an app just declines almost exponentially. Finally, and the most important thing is they see each other every day, and that is so critical. Consumer app developers sometimes say smokers are great for targeting an audience because they actually hang out serendipitously a lot outside of buildings. Not to say social apps are cigarettes, I don't really like that metaphor. Just on the note of you talking about why teens are important, I have this quote actually from you that I love where building on the point you made that for every social app I've ever built and the number of invitations sent per user drops 20% for every additional year of age from 13 to 18. If you build for adults, expect to acquire every user with ads, and I love that you have a very clear heuristic of per year, the amount of people they invite to the app is 20% lower.…

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