TBH

After four to five years of building 15 different consumer apps across various categories and audiences—from mapping apps to chat apps to event apps—Nikita Beer's studio finally identified the winning formula. The breakthrough came from a senior in high school who shared a trend called TBH (To Be Honest) that was happening on Snapchat: users would post an image of emojis and get anonymous feedback from peers. At the same time, Nikita noticed that Sarahah, an entirely Arabic-language anonymous messaging app, had become the #1 app in the United States. "The entire app was in Arabic," he recalled. "That was one of the most...like the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something." The insight was clear: teens wanted a vehicle for anonymous feedback, but the anonymous apps were leading to bullying and self-harm. Nikita's breakthrough idea was to strip away the typing and replace it with pre-authored polls that guaranteed only positive feedback. "People want to know good things about themselves," he realized.

TBH launched in just two weeks—a dramatic improvement from their first mobile app, which took a year to build. The team had learned to move fast through disciplined testing processes. They seeded the app strategically into a high school in Georgia that had the earliest start date in the United States, needing to launch as quickly as possible since the company was running low on money. One team member had even put in their two weeks' notice the day before launch. The founder called his lawyer asking how to dissolve the company.

The app immediately exploded. Within the first 24 hours, 40% of the school had downloaded it. In the first week, users sent 450,000 messages—compared to the typical 3-4 messages on day one for most messaging apps, TBH was hitting 60. The servers started crashing. Watching the app climb the charts, Nikita looked at his metrics and thought: "We will be number one in the United States in like six days." But then he looked at the Amazon bill ($120,000) and the bank account ($150,000) and realized the unit economics didn't work. He had to pause growth, geofence the app by state, and immediately fundraise to keep the infrastructure online.

The explosive adoption revealed what product-market fit actually looks like in consumer products. As Nikita puts it, "If your product's working, you'll know. And there if there's any uncertainty, it's not working." At TBH's peak, the app was hitting 360,000 installs per day. The key mechanics worked: positive-only feedback, anonymity with named recipients, and a frictionless polling interface. The geofencing decision—which seemed counterintuitive—actually gave the team breathing room to maintain stability and prepare for the next wave. Within nine weeks of launch, TBH had become a multi-bidder acquisition target. Nikita demonstrated the app's dominance to potential acquirers with a real-time map dashboard showing installs lighting up entire city blocks in real time.

Nikita Beer sold TBH to Facebook for over $30 million, joining the company as a product manager in its youth division. Though the four-year tenure at Facebook exposed him to the academic rigor of large-scale product development, he ultimately felt constrained by the separation of product management from design and the difficulty of launching truly novel ideas within organizational structures prioritizing defensibility over experimentation. He would go on to sell his second major app, Gas, to Discord, and became an advisor and investor in companies like Wealthsimple, Citizen, and others.