TBH App's Facebook Exit
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A story about how Nikita Bier created and sold a viral high school polling app called TBH to Facebook.
"Nikita started an app called TBH while at Berkeley. It was a viral high school app where you could answer questions about your peers. It wasn't incredibly significant, but it went viral and got millions of users very quickly after him spending over 2 years trying to create viral apps.
Facebook eventually buys the app for tens of millions of dollars - originally reported as $100M but a recent article said it was actually around $40M. That was a great outcome, but the app got shut down pretty much immediately after acquisition. There wasn't really much retention in it.
The interesting part was how they made it go viral. Nikita wrote a memo inside Facebook about their launch strategy. They would create Instagram accounts like 'crush_archipelago_high' using the high school name. They would make the account private and follow every kid who had 'class of 2022' in their profile. Kids would see the follow and request to follow back, but they wouldn't accept anyone.
Then at 4 PM the day before launch, when everybody gets out of school, they had a guy in a truck watching people leave. As soon as they did, they'd accept everybody's request at once. Everyone gets a notification simultaneously, goes to the bio which says 'download the app to see who likes you.' This strategy made them instantly go viral in each high school they targeted.
The app didn't have staying power, but it showed Nikita knew how to make things go viral. It gave him this persona of being a wunderkind who knows how to make things go viral."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.