tbh doing things that don't scale

In the competitive world of social media apps, capturing the attention of teenagers is both the holy grail and one of the most difficult challenges for founders. In 2017, a small team led by Nikita Bier managed to not only capture that attention but to do so with such effectiveness that Facebook acquired their app, tbh (short for “to be honest”), for a reported $30 million just nine weeks after launch. The story of tbh’s meteoric rise demonstrates the power of doing things that don’t scale—specifically, their methodical, school-by-school Instagram targeting strategy that helped them achieve what many well-funded startups fail to accomplish.

The Brink of Bankruptcy

The story of tbh begins not with immediate success, but with desperation. By August 2017, Nikita Bier and his team—Erik Hazzard, Kyle Zaragoza, and Nicolas Ducdodon—were running out of money. After several failed app attempts, they had funds for only about two more weeks of work. They needed a hit, and they needed it fast.

Their latest creation was tbh, an app that allowed teenagers to anonymously compliment each other through a series of polls. Users could answer questions like “Who has the best smile?” or “Who makes you laugh the hardest?” by selecting from four of their friends. The recipient would receive a notification that they’d been chosen, along with the poll question, but wouldn’t know who had selected them unless the sender chose to reveal their identity.

The concept was simple, but the team faced a fundamental challenge: how do you get teenagers to download yet another social app in an already crowded marketplace? Their solution was a masterclass in unscalable, hands-on growth hacking that targeted the exact demographic they needed.

The “Psychological Trick”

Rather than pursuing traditional launch strategies like press coverage or broad marketing campaigns, the tbh team developed what they later described in an internal Facebook memo as a “psychological trick” to penetrate high school communities. Their approach was methodical, labor-intensive, and brilliantly effective.

The strategy worked like this:

1. School Selection: They began by identifying high schools to target. For their initial launch, they chose a high school in Georgia because the state had the earliest semester start date in the country. This timing was crucial—they wanted to catch students at the beginning of the school year when social dynamics were still forming.
2. Instagram Research: The team discovered that teenagers often listed their high school in their Instagram bios (e.g., “Sophomore at RHS”). Using this information, they would visit a school’s location page on Instagram and identify students from that school.
3. Creating Mystery: For each high school they targeted, they created a dedicated private Instagram account with an intriguing bio like “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app—stay tuned!” The private account status was key to their strategy.
4. Following Students: Using these school-specific accounts, they would follow all the students they had identified from that school. This triggered notifications to the students, creating curiosity about this mysterious account.
5. Building Anticipation: When students requested to follow the private account back (which many did out of curiosity), the tbh team wouldn’t immediately accept. Instead, they would wait 24 hours, collecting all the follow requests.
6. Strategic Timing: At precisely 4:00 PM—what they called “The Golden Launch Hour™” when school let out—they would add the App Store URL to the Instagram profile and simultaneously make the account public.
7. Mass Notification: This final step triggered Instagram to notify all the students at once that their follow requests had been accepted. When students checked the notification and visited the now-public profile, they would see the download link in the bio.

This strategy was remarkably effective because it leveraged several psychological principles: curiosity about the mysterious account, social proof (seeing that the account was specifically for their school), and the fear of missing out (FOMO) when all their classmates were suddenly getting access at the same time.

School by School, State by State

What made tbh’s approach particularly unscalable—and particularly effective—was their commitment to targeting one school at a time. Rather than trying to launch nationwide or even statewide, they focused on building critical mass within individual school communities.

The results were impressive. Within two days of their initial launch at that first Georgia high school, 40% of the students had downloaded the app. More importantly, the app began to spread organically to three more schools in the area as students told their friends at neighboring schools about it.

The team continued this labor-intensive process, creating new Instagram accounts for each school they targeted. They conducted these targeted launches every few weeks, gradually expanding their reach. By August 8, just five days after launch, tbh had spread to 3,000 schools.

But even as they expanded, they maintained control over their growth by only releasing the app one state at a time. This created a sense of exclusivity and anticipation, with teenagers in states where tbh wasn’t yet available eagerly waiting for it to arrive. The restricted access approach amplified demand in a way that an immediate nationwide release never could have.

The Power of Restricted Access

Most app developers make the mistake of launching with an all-access approach, assuming that more users faster is always better. The tbh team understood something more nuanced: social apps need critical mass within specific communities to be valuable.

By restricting access geographically and focusing on building density within individual schools, tbh ensured that when users opened the app, they would immediately find friends to interact with. This created a positive first experience that encouraged continued use and word-of-mouth promotion.

The strategy also allowed the team to manage their growth and server capacity. As a small team with limited resources, they couldn’t have handled a sudden nationwide surge of users. Their controlled rollout gave them time to scale their infrastructure alongside their user base.

Perhaps most importantly, the restricted access created buzz. Teenagers in states where tbh wasn’t yet available would see friends in other states posting about it on social media, creating anticipation and ensuring a ready audience when the app finally launched in their area.

Designing for Virality

Beyond their Instagram targeting strategy, the tbh team built virality into every aspect of the app’s design. Several features encouraged users to bring their friends onto the platform:

1. Address Book Access: Before using the app, users needed to grant access to their address book. This made it easy to find and invite friends.
2. Gem Collection: Users earned “gems” by answering polls or gaining new followers. These gems unlocked additional features, creating an incentive to engage more deeply with the app and bring friends on board.
3. Shareable Profiles: Every tbh profile had a unique link that users could easily share on other platforms, particularly Snapchat, which was popular among teenagers.
4. Limited Polls: The app only allowed users to answer 12 polls per hour, creating a sense of scarcity that kept users coming back regularly rather than binging and burning out.
5. Direct Messaging: Later versions of the app introduced direct messaging, allowing users to message someone who had praised them. The praiser had the option to reveal their identity, adding an element of mystery and social discovery.

These features worked together to create what Nir Eyal calls the “Hook Model”—a four-phase process of trigger, action, variable reward, and investment that forms habits around product usage. For tbh users, the external trigger might be a notification that someone had complimented them, the action was answering more polls, the variable reward was collecting gems and unlocking features, and the investment was inviting more friends to the platform.

Solving the Cyberbullying Problem

One of the most significant challenges for anonymous social apps targeting teenagers is managing negative behavior, particularly cyberbullying. Previous apps in this space, like YikYak and Sarahah, had struggled with this issue, eventually leading to their downfall.

The tbh team addressed this challenge through thoughtful design choices. By limiting interaction to pre-written, positive polls, they eliminated the possibility of direct harassment. Users couldn’t write custom messages; they could only select from innocent questions like “Who has the best smile?” or “Who makes you laugh the hardest?”

This approach allowed them to maintain the appeal of anonymity—which teenagers love—while creating a consistently positive experience. The result was an app that parents didn’t object to, removing a significant barrier to adoption among the teenage demographic.

The Results: 5 Million Downloads in 9 Weeks

The combination of tbh’s strategic high school targeting, controlled geographic rollout, and viral design features produced remarkable results. Within just nine weeks of launch, the app had:

• Reached 5 million downloads
• Acquired 2.5 million daily active users
• Risen to the #1 position in the U.S. App Store
• Spread to thousands of high schools across the country

All of this was accomplished without spending a single dollar on advertising or doing a single press interview. It was pure organic growth, driven by word of mouth and their unscalable Instagram targeting strategy.

The app’s rapid growth caught the attention of Facebook, which was eager to strengthen its position among teenage users—a demographic where it was losing ground to platforms like Snapchat. On October 16, 2017, just nine weeks after tbh’s initial launch, Facebook acquired the app for a reported $30 million.

The Aftermath and Lessons Learned

Despite its promising start, tbh’s story doesn’t have a fairy-tale ending. In July 2018, less than a year after the acquisition, Facebook announced that it was shutting down tbh due to “low usage.” The app had struggled to maintain its initial momentum, a common challenge for viral social apps.

However, the tbh growth story remains a powerful case study in how doing things that don’t scale can lead to extraordinary results. Several key lessons stand out:

1. Target Specific Communities: Rather than trying to appeal to everyone at once, tbh focused on building critical mass within individual high schools. This approach ensured that early users had a positive experience, finding friends already on the platform.
2. Create Mystery and Exclusivity: The private Instagram accounts and state-by-state rollout created curiosity and anticipation, driving demand for the app before it was even available in many areas.
3. Time Your Launch Strategically: The tbh team’s decision to launch at the beginning of the school year and to release their app at 4:00 PM when school let out shows the importance of timing in product launches.
4. Design for Your Specific Audience: The app’s features, language, and overall design were perfectly tailored to its teenage audience. It used terms like “most lit” and “most woke” that resonated with Gen Z users.
5. Build Virality Into Your Product: Every aspect of tbh’s design encouraged users to bring their friends onto the platform, creating a self-perpetuating growth engine.
6. Solve a Real Problem: By creating a positive, anonymous way for teenagers to interact, tbh addressed the cyberbullying issues that had plagued similar apps while still meeting teenagers’ desire for validation and social connection.

For Nikita Bier, the experience with tbh wasn’t the end of his journey with viral social apps. He went on to create another app called Gas, which used a similar positive polling mechanism and targeted the same teenage demographic. Gas also achieved viral success and was eventually acquired by Discord in 2023, demonstrating that the lessons learned from tbh’s growth strategy had lasting value.

The Legacy of tbh’s Growth Strategy

The “psychological trick” that tbh used to target high schools via Instagram has become a case study in growth hacking. While the specific tactics might not work today—Instagram has evolved, and teenagers’ social media habits have changed—the underlying principles remain relevant.

What made tbh’s approach so effective was its focus on doing things that don’t scale. Creating individual Instagram accounts for each high school, researching students’ profiles, and timing releases to coincide with school dismissal times are all labor-intensive activities that couldn’t possibly be maintained as the app grew to millions of users. But they didn’t need to be. These unscalable activities served their purpose: creating the initial critical mass that allowed organic growth to take over.

This approach stands in stark contrast to the typical Silicon Valley mindset that prioritizes scalability from day one. The tbh team understood that sometimes the best way to achieve massive scale is to start with methods that don’t scale at all.

In an internal note shared after Facebook’s acquisition of tbh, the founders explained their philosophy: “The purpose of sharing these tactics is to provide guidance for developing products at Facebook—specifically ones that have not reached product-market fit yet.” They recognized that different strategies are needed at different stages of a product’s lifecycle, and that unscalable, hands-on approaches are often essential in the earliest phases.

For startups today, particularly those targeting specific communities or demographics, tbh’s story offers a powerful reminder: don’t be afraid to do things that don’t scale. The Instagram targeting strategy that helped tbh reach 5 million downloads in nine weeks wasn’t automated, algorithmic, or particularly sophisticated from a technical standpoint. It was simply a clever, labor-intensive approach that perfectly matched their target audience’s behavior patterns.

In a world obsessed with automation and scale, sometimes the most effective growth strategies are the ones that require rolling up your sleeves and doing the manual work of connecting with your users one school, one community, or one person at a time. The tbh team’s willingness to do this work—creating individual Instagram accounts for each high school they targeted—laid the foundation for their extraordinary success and eventual $30 million acquisition.

As Paul Graham of Y Combinator famously advised, “Do things that don’t scale.” The story of tbh shows just how powerful that advice can be when applied with creativity and a deep understanding of your target audience.