I am trying to compile all of Nikita Bier’s wisdom on twitter. The problem is he shitposts as lot. I have gone through all of his tweets in 2023 and below is the result. I will hopefully cover 2021/22 also. If you find this useful, please tell me. That will give me the motivation to go through earlier years as well.

Read about Nikita’s story [2]

Mega thread: [4]

Gas app walkthrough: https://x.com/MacBudkowski/status/1811018742190485586

Insights/interesting stuff:

  1. Aim to be #1 on App store quickly
  2. The main thing about going viral is to have people talking and sharing your product for you. A great way to do that is leave out certain information to build up curiosity and speculation [1]
  3. feed into people’s deep desires [1]
  4. 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 [3]
  5. on PMF: Instrumentation is so hard to get right that data will often deceive you, particularly with questions of product-market fit. So, how do you know if you have product-market fit? It will be so abundantly obvious that data will be the last thing that is giving you conviction. [8]
  6. Nikita is relentless: “Do you A/B test? No, I just ship the app—and if it's not ranked in the App Store, I change it until it is.”
  7. On building teams: “If I was putting together a team to make a new viral app, the expectations would be simple: You will work for 10 hours a day for 7 days a week and put all other life plans on hold for 4 months. In exchange, you will own double digit equity, draw no salary, but 3 meals a day will be provided. If it doesn’t start working by the end of 4 months, we disband. If it does work, you will make more in a few months than you have in your whole life.”
    1. Product Architect (layout, flows, hierarchy, marketing, roadmap) Technical Designer (prototypes, animations, visual design) iOS Engineer Backend Engineer User Support
  8. Clientside SMS convert at around 30%. 5 invites x 0.3 = 1.5 K-Factor
  9. Everytime I build a high brow product, it flops harder than I could ever predict. Everytime I build something trashy, it grows beyond all expectation. Never forget that humans are animals.
  10. I’ve set up a new constraint for the products I make: