Growth has no single solution and requires investigating every possible option. This is especially true on X, where public sentiment can shift rapidly. One moment a person might be seen as a villain, and by the end of the week, they are a hero. This volatility reflects the fast-moving nature of the platform. Elon Musk originally envisioned the service as a financial network where users could manage their banking. Users have already begun seeing money in their accounts as the platform evolves. For those who have built significant audiences on X, its survival is a personal necessity.

I just want to see X survive the test of time. Because if it doesn't survive, I built this audience on the platform. I personally suffer consequences. I lose as a creator.

As the head of product at X and a former founder of apps like GAS and tbh, Nikita is focused on ensuring the platform endures. The transition into a robust financial system is part of a plan to ensure long-term viability. The stakes are high for everyone who has invested their time and reach there.

Growing up in the isolated South Bay area of Los Angeles led Nikita to spend a significant amount of time on the internet. With a Packard Bell computer at age five, he eventually began exploring the digital world in ways that bent the rules. By age 12, he was pirating video games, counterfeiting coupons to learn Photoshop, and experimenting with phishing. These early activities provided a unique primer on how the world works and how to think like an adversary.

I think a lot of that period of my life when I was 12 or 13 taught me how to think like an adversary, which is very critical when you are building consumer internet software. Since everyone is going to be trying to attack you on every front, like spam, they are going to try to manipulate things and hack things in the way they were not intended.

This adversarial mindset translates directly to growth and distribution. Understanding the mechanics of email and spam filters allows a developer to navigate bulk invites more effectively. Nikita views his early attempts at building phishing sites as a masterclass in conversion optimization. To succeed, he had to convince a user to believe a site was legitimate, which is the ultimate challenge in funnel design.

During the era of AOL, IRC, and Usenet, Nikita learned enough PHP and JavaScript to be dangerous. While he does not consider himself a top-tier engineer, these foundational skills allowed him to navigate the furthest depths of the internet and understand its underlying structure. This period of experimentation established the technical and psychological framework needed to build successful consumer products.

Nikita learned design and programming at a young age. He always knew he wanted to build products for the internet. However, he felt distracted by the goals of his peers. In high school and at Berkeley, many people wanted to become lawyers or consultants. Nikita thought he should do the same and studied for law school.

In high school, where everyone else was trying to get into college, become a lawyer, become a consultant, that is where I thought I was going to end up. At Berkeley, I was studying to eventually go to law school. I am glad I didn't do that. That would have been a huge mistake.

Nikita now thinks choosing law would have been a big mistake. The pressure to follow traditional jobs can make people ignore their own interests. His early skills in tech eventually led him back to building apps.

Nikita Bier describes working at X as the hardest job he has ever done. He views the platform as the most important communication tool in history and the world's global town square. Despite its massive influence, the core product engineering team is small, consisting of about 30 people. This lean structure allows the company to operate like a startup with very little communication overhead. However, the role is constant and high-pressure, often requiring Nikita to manage crises or public controversies as soon as he wakes up.

It's the global town square. It's where news breaks. It's where the world's most powerful people convene. And we're a very small team. There's literally like 30 core product engineers.

Nikita joined the company with the goal of restarting growth to ensure the product remains durable for the next generation. At the time, the user base was dominated by aging millennials, and the app's trajectory seemed headed toward irrelevance. By auditing every user funnel and applying various growth hacks, the team moved X from number 78 to number two in the App Store within 30 days. This success doubled downloads and provided a significant morale boost for the engineers.

We audited every possible funnel to get into the app, and we threw every growth hack in the world at it. And within the first 30 days, we jumped from number 78 in the app Store to a peak position of number two.

Nikita spent years building a reputation on X by sharing advice on how to grow consumer products. This visibility led to an invitation from xAI investors to advise the company during its earliest stages. At the time, the team was small and consisted almost entirely of AI engineers. Nikita worked as an interim product lead, even taking 2am calls while traveling in Japan to help integrate Grok into the main X platform.

The speed of the company was unlike anything Nikita had seen before. The engineering team doubled in size between meetings, and the Colossus data center was built in only two months. This momentum eventually led to a direct message from Elon. Nikita was living in New York at the time but immediately flew to Palo Alto to meet with him at 2am.

Elon said, why don't you just get started now. I already had a lot of ideas of what we could be working on, but I think this was effectively the interview. I messaged a designer that I have worked with for ten years. We worked for forty-eight hours straight to build a beautiful prototype of the onboarding flow for the X app.

After working through the weekend, Nikita presented the new onboarding flow to Elon. The prototype was a success, and he was told to move forward immediately. Nikita could handle this pressure because he had spent his career learning every possible way to build social product onboarding.

Nikita explains how years of looking at growth data created a strong intuition for product performance. While demoing a new product to others, including Elon Musk, Nikita could accurately predict conversion rates for specific features before they even launched. This deep familiarity with dashboards and funnels allowed for an immediate impact on growth by identifying exactly what needed to be adjusted.

As I was demoing it to people and demoing it to Elon, I was like, that's going to convert at 45%. That's going to convert at 65%. We do that because of that. I've just seen so many dashboards on these funnels that I just knew exactly what needed to be done.

This level of pattern recognition comes from seeing the results of countless experiments. It enables a leader to make quick, confident decisions without waiting for new data to confirm what their experience already suggests.

Nikita explains that being a power user of X is a major advantage for his role as head of product. Using the platform every day allows him to understand the creator experience deeply. He can identify what needs to be built without long iteration loops. This has led to many successful launches with very few rollbacks over the last six months.

I'm kind of like the mascot in some ways. If I open my phone right now, there's probably 100 mentions of various bugs on the platform. The moment we launch something, within seconds I'm getting tagged. I know exactly how it's being interpreted and what the feedback is.

Nikita uses a strategy called building in public. He shares early ideas and features on the platform to get immediate feedback. This helps him find edge cases and gain community buy-in. It ensures that final launches are precise. This approach is effective because X users are very open with critical feedback.

The role comes with personal and professional risks. Nikita often deals with conspiracy theories and harassment. He has had his home address posted online multiple times. He is also blamed for issues outside his direct control, such as the algorithm managed by the XAI team. Even small changes can trigger backlash from specific groups. Nikita mentions that crypto users once became upset and created memes about him. He takes these reactions in stride and even finds some of the memes funny.

Being customer support for 500 million people is a crazy experience. It was professionally risky. If X doesn't grow or if I build something that doesn't resonate with users, that comes back to me.

Public sentiment on social media shifts rapidly. Nikita recalls a week where he went from being blamed for hurting the crypto industry to being seen as a hero. This turnaround happened after the platform blocked a specific type of bot spam called infofi and launched tools for real-time financial data. This helped users realize that the platform was working in good faith to improve the experience.

I really started understanding X when I went two layers deep on the taxonomy of my interests. I saw tech Twitter and I was like, cool. I guess this is just like TechCrunch but with comments. Then I went one layer deeper to consumer Internet. Then I went to social app builders. When I found that cluster of people, I realized every niche is represented on X.

The magic of a platform like X is its deep taxonomy of interests. While most users start with broad categories, the real value is found in specific niches, like communities of plumbers or experts in Peruvian politics. However, because it is an affinity-based network, helping new users find these groups is a challenge. You cannot simply sync contacts to get a relevant feed.

To solve this, Nikita launched a feature called Starter Packs. This tool uses XAI and Grok to analyze accounts at scale and find the best posters in every niche. The results were significant, with a 100% increase in time spent for new users, particularly in countries where the platform had not previously been dominant.

We have doubled time spent in the app for new users. It is really hard to just boost time spent by a few percentage points. But we have had a 100% increase, especially in places where X historically has not had a huge presence like Italy or France.

X faces a constant challenge with identity and bad actors who manipulate the feed. Since the platform operates as a global town square for free speech, it cannot simply ban everyone who shares misinformation. Instead, the focus is on helping users verify the authenticity of what they read. A country of origin feature was created to show where a user is actually located when they post content.

We had to work within the constraints of being a free speech network. How can we enable users to verify the authenticity and make sure that what they read is truly representative of what people think?

Nikita explains that building this feature required an adversarial mindset to get around people using VPNs. It also needed privacy safeguards so users in dangerous regions could still speak their minds. When the feature launched, it unmasked many grifters. One specific example was an Ivanka Trump fan club with millions of followers that turned out to be based in Nigeria. This approach follows the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Rather than silencing voices, the platform adds context so users can decide what to believe.

We can't suspend them because this is a free speech network. But we can add transparency that shows you if this person is who they say they are.

Transparency on social platforms helps users judge if content is authentic. Features like community notes and country of origin labels provide necessary context for political discussions. Grok has also become a popular tool for verification. Many users now ask the AI to verify posts directly on the platform.

The mission of XAI has been to build the maximally truth seeking AI. And you can only have that when you have a true free speech network. Because ultimately truth is debated, discussed and determined on X every day.

A major challenge for the next few years is verifying human generated content. Large language models make it very easy for people to create spam. It is also difficult to define where the line is between using AI as a tool and replacing human effort. Many people use AI simply to clean up their language or make their posts sound smoother. Nikita explains that solving this problem requires a unique setup.

I don't think we'd have a path out at X unless we were the same company building a frontier AI model and the smartest AI model. You need to align those interests, you need to align the missions to solve this stuff.

Content written by AI is getting harder to detect every day. Integrated companies that own both the social network and the AI model have the best chance to address these challenges.

Social networks have historically discouraged users from posting links. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok limit link usage because they want to keep users inside their apps. On X, opening a link would typically cover the entire screen with a webview, hiding the like and comment buttons. Because users could not interact with the post while reading, the platform received no signals about whether the content was actually good. This lack of engagement meant the algorithm would naturally deprioritize those posts.

Nikita wanted to fix this issue for writers and journalists. He designed a new mechanic where the post and its engagement buttons remain visible right below the webpage. This allows readers to like or repost the content without leaving the article.

I designed this mechanic where the engagement, the caption, the actual post, is right below the page. We prototyped it, made it feel really smooth so that while you're reading something, you can engage, you can like it. And suddenly we saw link impressions go way up.

The results showed that link impressions increased significantly while time spent in the app remained stable. This UI has since become an industry standard. Other platforms like Threads and Reddit have adopted similar designs. Nikita even used Claude to help write some of the production code for the feature. This change proved that the perceived demotion of links was often just a byproduct of poor user interface design rather than an intentional algorithmic penalty.

It wasn't any intentional act of demoting links. It was just a byproduct of the UI. Reflecting on it now, all that we had to change was just some of the core product.

Nikita describes the environment at an Elon Musk company as uniquely flat. Unlike Meta or Discord, there are very few managers and everyone has a high level of agency. Teams can build an idea in a week and release it immediately. At other large social media companies, approvals might take months even after the engineering work is finished.

Elon remains deeply involved in technical details despite his many responsibilities. He conducts weekly reviews with engineers where they present their progress on just one or two slides. Nikita notes that Elon's ability to switch contexts between SpaceX, Tesla, and X is remarkable. Elon consistently chooses the difficult path over easy, short term victories.

Elon always takes the high road. He will always do the hard things. When you're a consumer product builder, you're often looking for short term quick wins. I would present some of these options and he would say no, we are going to do the hard thing. He says we have to do this. This is the most important thing we have to do.

This philosophy of doing the hard thing is what creates long term value for shareholders. This approach often seems impossible to outsiders. However, giving engineers agency and setting tight deadlines leads to incredible results. For example, the team built a data center in two months when the industry standard was two years. This happens because the organization has very little communication overhead.

The scale of physical infrastructure built by Elon Musk can be difficult to grasp from inside a conference room. Visiting Starbase reveals a city in Texas built for the sole purpose of going to Mars. The area features its own restaurants and endless factories surrounded by rockets. This massive infrastructure is a direct result of the decision to tackle difficult problems that others might avoid.

When you are just surrounded by rockets and you see this whole infrastructure, like the city that has developed around, there are restaurants. And then as far as the eye can see, you can see factories. The way that Elon always does the hard things is the reason that all of this infrastructure has been built and all this huge impact to society has happened.

At the Gigafactory in Austin, miles of factories produce Tesla cars and Optimus robots. Cars move off the assembly line autonomously. While it is easy to focus on small digital details, these physical sites demonstrate the massive impact one person can have on the world through persistent effort on hard things.

New features are coming to the X timeline to serve specific niches. One major addition is Smart Cash Tags. These allow users to see real-time financial data and charts directly on their feed. This feature effectively enables trading from the timeline. Because hedge fund managers and the crypto community already use the platform to gauge sentiment, providing direct access to financial tools is a natural step. This is part of a broader vision to turn the platform into a financial network where people can handle banking and other services.

The vision has always been like the everything app. For the last six months, I have been focused on making sure the areas where we have deep product market fit work for everyone.

The goal is to move beyond being just a news source. Nikita wants to help billions of dormant accounts rediscover their interests through a new onboarding flow called starter packs. This inventory of content is essential for the growth of the network. If users can transact directly from their timeline and buy recommended products, the platform becomes a complete ecosystem. Many brands have already built their entire business off the sentiment found here. While there was talk of advertisers leaving, over 90 percent have returned. They recognize that the most influential people in the world are active on the platform.

Nikita started building consumer products during his senior year at Berkeley. His first project, Politify, showed users the financial impact of presidential policies. While it went viral, the difficulty of selling software to the government led him to pivot. He transformed the company into a consumer app studio and developed about 15 different apps before finding success with TBH.

The idea for TBH came from observing how teenagers used Snapchat to send compliments to friends. Nikita wanted to productize that behavior. Unlike previous anonymous apps that often became platforms for bullying, TBH used a poll mechanic where users could only select positive affirmations for their friends.

We came up with this mechanic and it immediately went viral. It went to number one in the app store in a matter of two weeks. We just launched it in one city in Georgia, and it spread through the rest of the country like wildfire.

The app had a significant emotional impact on its young users. Nikita received daily messages from teenagers who felt valued because of the affirmations they received. Within two months of launching, Facebook acquired the company. Nikita views many viral apps as having a shelf life similar to a film. They create a cultural moment and then people move on, but they still provide value while they are relevant.

Nikita explains that the most difficult part of building a social network is achieving enough density for the product to become valuable. To solve this, the team focused on creating a reproducible model to flood specific schools with highly relevant ads. By targeting students on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, they aimed to get an entire social circle to download the app at the exact same time. This strategy allowed them to test new products quickly and get a clear signal within 48 hours.

The launch of tbh happened during a period of high pressure and exhaustion for the team. After five years of building various apps without a major hit, the staff was fatigued. In fact, half of the engineering team had already resigned just before the final product went live.

Two engineers of the four gave their two weeks notice the day before we launched. I said, let's launch this last one. Let's give it our best, see what happens and what if it gets to number one? And then they all just kind of laughed. It caught like wildfire.

The school in Georgia served as a critical validation tool. Nikita knew that if the product truly resonated with one group, it would eventually grow organically. The sudden success of the app felt like a movie, transforming a moment of team burnout into a viral phenomenon.

Working at a large tech organization like Meta offers a different perspective than running a startup. While an entrepreneur wears many hats, a large company introduces significant communication overhead and many stakeholders. Nikita focused on building zero to one social apps and advising teams at Instagram and Messenger during his four years there.

I saw how these large tech organizations are run. It was a lot easier to focus on the things I cared about. But there is huge amounts of communication overhead, a lot of stakeholders. As an entrepreneur, it is a very jarring change, but I am glad I did it.

After leaving Meta, Nikita teamed up with an engineer named Isaiah to build Gas. Although the app felt familiar to his previous project, TBH, the growth systems and mechanics had to be updated for a new landscape. The core strategy involved getting the social graph right so that new users could easily find their friends. They launched the app at the same school in Georgia exactly five years after the original launch. This timing meant the current students had never seen the previous version.

We had all these learnings from the previous app, and it grew way faster. Discord reached out, and I thought, this is a fast growing social app that we could help fuel their growth. It happened in a matter of a couple months.

Gas became a massive financial success very quickly. Unlike the previous attempt, this version included an optional subscription that generated 10 million dollars in just 90 days. The business was exceptionally lean, starting with only 25,000 dollars in self-financing and running on free startup credits. This efficiency allowed the team to sell to Discord without any initial pressure or need for venture capital.

The Redondo Beach Pier serves as a physical reminder of the need to keep changing and growing. While it was a very busy place in the 1990s, it has since become quiet. The pier now offers a nostalgic feeling that represents an era from the past. This decline shows what happens when a location fails to adapt to new times.

This place used to be totally packed up in the 90s. Kind of a lesson of innovator die. But it still kind of gives this nostalgic vibe of an era past.

Nikita spent a lot of time at the pier when he was younger. He often came to the area after school to hang out with his friends. He would visit the local arcade and go fishing on the docks. While the pier was once a main social spot for the community, it is now mostly empty.

After leaving Discord, Nikita spent time consulting for various companies, from small startups to public entities like Coinbase. His transition into advisory work grew naturally from sharing product insights on X over several years. He found that the growth tactics used for social networks often translate well to other categories, including utility apps.

There is no silver bullet to growth. When I start an advisory engagement, I say we are not going to leave a single stone unturned. We are going to juice every surface we can to make sure that if people are having a great time on the app, they can tell their friends about it.

Achieving true virality requires reaching a K-factor of 1.0. For many products, hitting a 0.9 K-factor is a significant win that can be supplemented with paid acquisition to drive growth. Nikita emphasizes the difference between a press bump and organic growth. While a viral video on TikTok might provide a temporary surge, true product led growth comes from the internal mechanics of the app, such as one-to-one invitations or one-to-many sharing.

Effective positioning is another critical component. Nikita once advised a longevity app to change its name from Most Days to Deathclock. This shift made the value proposition immediate and clear, leading to significant press coverage and better conversion rates. Many startups struggle because they do not look at their funnels methodically. Success requires instrumentation to identify where users are dropping off and understanding how current users are already finding the product.

Nikita shares his experience as an angel investor, specifically highlighting his support for a childhood friend named Rahul. Rahul transitioned from a career as a police officer to founding tech startups. While his first venture, a CRM for law enforcement, did not become a major success, his second company, Aerodome, found a significant niche using drones for public safety.

These drones basically eliminated car break-ins in San Francisco. Rates are down 80% now. It is a technology that I was proud to get behind because it actually has an immediate impact on quality of life for people.

The technology is already in use by departments like the Redondo Beach Police Department. This investment stands out because it provides a clear and immediate benefit to the community by reducing crime and assisting first responders like firefighters and police officers.

The role of engineers is changing rapidly. They are effectively becoming conductors rather than just writers of boilerplate code. This shift allows engineers to focus on higher level tasks. It will likely lead to a massive economic boom because technical and non-technical people can build products faster than ever before.

Engineers are effectively conductors at this point. They are spending way less time doing boilerplate code writing. I think we are going to see one of the biggest economic booms because of it.

While the barrier to entry for building apps is lower, Nikita believes engineers still play a critical role. The validation process for new ideas is much faster now. However, professional engineers are still needed to harden production code against security risks. High stakes systems like databases containing sensitive information require more than just AI generated code.

I think engineers are still going to have a critical role in the company, but the validation process is going to be much faster. You don't want to really vibe code a database of social security numbers.

App submissions are skyrocketing because the cost to develop products has decreased significantly. In the past, a production app required an investment of roughly $250,000. This high cost meant only products with a massive total addressable market were viable for development. Now, niche markets can have dedicated products because the financial barrier is much lower. Nikita believes this will lead to a new era of creativity and personalization.

I think it's going to unlock a whole other level of creativity and personalization for products that weren't economically viable because traditionally it would have cost $200,000, $250,000 to get a fully baked production app into the App Store.

The power of social platforms like X is also being proven through the hive mind of its users. Nikita recently shared a personal health issue regarding a throat obstruction. A user on the platform identified a specific disease involving an inflamed esophagus before he even saw a doctor. An endoscopy later confirmed the diagnosis was correct. This moment highlighted how community intelligence can sometimes rival or exceed the utility of AI.

I thought we hit AGI. It was the power of the hive mind. It wasn't even AI, it was just the community. It was honestly one of the greatest marketing moments for X.