This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on January 22nd, 2023. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
He created the teen app that launched and sold within a hundred days. The former Meta employee has now done what CEO Mark Zuckerberg cannot — for the second time.
There are around 1.8 million apps in Apple’s App Store. Of those, only 37 reached number one on the daily US charts during 2022. Familiar names like HBO Max, YouTube and McDonald’s appear on that list.
But one app stands out above the rest: Gas.
Gas is not even available in Sweden yet, but it has taken American teenagers by storm. With just six employees, the team managed to launch and then sell their app to chat service Discord — in under a hundred days.
The mind behind the app is Nikita Bier, a California-based entrepreneur who has made viral teen apps his speciality. This is, notably, the second time he has done exactly this.
In August 2017, Bier launched his first app, TBH — short for “to be honest.” The app let teenagers send anonymous compliments to each other and exploded in popularity almost instantly. Forty-eight days later, it had been sold to Facebook (now Meta).
Bier worked at Meta for four years, until the terms of the sale expired. On the day his contract ended, he resigned and started working on the idea that would become Gas.
The concept was close at hand, because Gas is essentially identical to TBH. Both are anonymous apps designed to help shy teenagers say nice things to each other. Want to know exactly who said what? That costs money. Two months after launch, it was sold to Discord.
While Bier and his colleagues are clearly talented, their success also reveals something important about the difficulty the largest tech companies have in this category. During the four years Bier worked at Meta, his team tested products like “Messenger for High Schools” and “Instagram Polls.” Neither was ever released to the public. You have almost certainly never heard of them.
There are countless similar examples — product ideas generated at Meta or Google that never shipped. The success of TBH and Gas suggests the problem is not a lack of knowledge or resources. Rather, the big tech companies have become bureaucratic colossi. The speed, lightness and adaptability that define startups disappear quickly as companies scale. Demands for immediate scalability, integration with existing services and thick layers of internal politics make the process of building new products slow and hard. The tech giants are simply too big to be nimble.
Between 2014 and the FTC investigation, Meta made at least 68 acquisitions. That door is now effectively closed. Meta still makes smaller purchases from time to time, mostly for its VR arm Oculus, but regulators allowing them to buy apps like Instagram and WhatsApp again in 2023 is extremely unlikely. The buyer of Gas — Discord — is still small enough that the deal attracted no regulatory concern.
If you cannot buy new products and cannot build them yourself, you end up in a complicated position quickly. This is especially true when it comes to attracting teenagers — one of the most coveted audiences for Meta. The answer to that problem used to be Instagram, but competition from TikTok is fiercer there than ever.
Small challengers keep finding ways through where the giants get stuck. But that a former employee was the one to do it this time must sting more than usual for Mark Zuckerberg.
