Thread by @lukesophinos

This guy made $50M+ by selling the same app twice.

The wild story of Nikita Bier 👇

Nikita Bier and his team launched the Gas app in August 2022.

By October, Gas overtook TikTok and BeReal as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store.

The Wall Street Journal called it the "Hottest App right now".

And the best part?

The app was available to download in only 12 states!

Nikita made $1M in 10 days with a team of 4 people.

And sold Gas to Discord for low 8 figures.

This sounds like an overnight success.

Believe me, IT'S NOT.

It's a decade long story I'll tell you in 3 mins👇

In 2010, Nikita launched an app studio, Midnight Labs.

They tried to build a bunch of products.

• a personal finance app
• a college chat app
• a personality test

Nothing worked spectacularly.

So, the company kept tinkering.

They continued creating apps but couldn't achieve the traction they were looking for.

In 2017, with just 60 days of cash left, they built something at the intersection of positivity and anonymity - something lacking in popular apps of the time like Yik Yak.

TBH was born.

The app was an extension of the TBH (To Be Honest) trend on Instagram.

It allowed users to provide compliments and positive feedback to their friends anonymously.

It was reverse-engineered to nullify negative comments.

How?

No text.
Only polls.

They shipped tbh to one school in Georgia.

On the first day, 40 percent of the school downloaded it.

The next day, it was in 3 more schools.

And the next day, 300 schools.

What's impressive is that tbh didn't spam users' contacts with invites.

The growth was organic.

Like Facebook, tbh wasn’t launched publicly.

At first it was locked down to just a few states.

Why? tbh only worked if lots of friends are on it.

Limiting the rollout kept demand high.

So when tbh launched somewhere new like New York, it became the talk of classrooms and teens downloaded it in droves.

How did tbh unlock such explosive growth?

They employed "a psychological trick" to acquire teenage users in the masses.

Here's the psychological trick -

TBH noticed that teens often listed their high school in their Instagram bio.

e.g. “Sophomore at RHS”

Using its private Instagram, the team would visit a school’s location page and follow all accounts that included the school’s name.

Their profile featured a mysterious call to action — something like “You’ve been invited to tbh at RHS. Stay tuned.”

Now, they would wait 24 hours to collect all inbound follow requests from the high schoolers.

Teens were curious about tbh's profile so they'd request access.

At 4:00 PM when school gets out, the team added the App Store URL to the profile.

Now, they made their private Instagram profile public.

With this, Instagram would notify students that their requests to follow had been accepted.

Teens would see the notification, visit the profile, and see the download link in the account’s new public bio.

BOOM!

Nikita and team would run this experiment for each high school they wanted to target.

With each experiment, they created a better product.

In 9 weeks, tbh scored 5 million downloads and 2.5 million daily active users.

Investors and buyers took a deep interest in tbh.

Eventually, Nikita sold tbh to Facebook for ~$30M in 2017.

However, due to low daily active users (an important metric for social apps), Facebook shut down tbh in 2018.

As part of the deal, tbh founders became formal Facebook employees.

Nikita had a multi-year deal with Facebook for his shares to vest and non-compete to expire.

Nikita wanted to dispose that he was a 'one-hit wonder' and had a chip on his shoulder to replicate tbh's success.

When the non-compete expired in 2022, he started (basically) the exact same company again.

This time he called it Gas.

The app was based on the following words by Nikita -

"I want to make an app that makes $10M in 90 days."

What is Gas?

It's TBH with a paywall.

Like TBH, it lets kids say nice things about each other.

But, you can pay to see who compliments you.

Their growth strategy was similar to TBH's.

They targeted high schools using the same Instagram account trick.

And became the #1 app on the App store, surpassing BeReal and TikTok.

On Jan 15, someone said no one would acquire Gas.

3 days later, Gas sold to Discord.

Talk about a meme-worthy story for Nikita!

A friend of his made him a cake for it :)

Discord acquired Gas for low 8 figures.

Nikita is no longer a one-hit wonder.

In 2017, he sold his social app to the largest consumer app in the world. Facebook.

This time he sold it to Discord, another massive consumer app.

2 key takeaways from this :

- Acquiring users must be acted upon with the same, if not more, intensity as building product.

- You have to go for it and prove everyone else wrong.

Congrats to Nikita and the Gas App team.

What an incredible journey!

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed.

I'd so appreciate if you'd retweet the first tweet so others can enjoy it too!

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