I Wanted the Real Growth Hack to Be Knowing Someone

I started by asking who the most renowned growth hackers were. The usual names appeared: Sean Ellis, Andrew Chen, Brian Balfour, Elena Verna, Casey Winters, Alex Schultz. Then I remembered the person who had recently become much more visible at X, Nikita Bier, the founder of tbh and Gas who now runs product there.

I wanted to know what people like this know.

The respectable answer is that they understand retention, network density, notifications, activation, social psychology, distribution loops and the difference between acquiring a user and creating a product that produces the next user. That answer is probably true. It is also slightly unsatisfying because all of those ideas are available in public. There are interviews, essays, podcasts, conference talks and entire courses explaining them.

So I asked a less respectable question.

Do they sometimes just know someone?

I had a very specific version of this suspicion in mind. I had recently watched an AI coding agent complete almost the entire process of building an iOS app and then stop at App Store Connect because Apple's Create New App action existed as a popup rather than a stable page. The agent guessed that appstoreconnect.apple.com/apps/new should exist. Apple loaded the frame of the application around an empty page. The real form appeared only after returning to the Apps screen and clicking a small plus button.

I spent time inspecting the interface, comparing browser states and trying to understand why a task that should have been administrative had become the single point of failure. It was easy to imagine that somebody more connected would not do any of this. They would message a person at Apple. The person would explain the correct path, escalate a problem or quietly move something through the system. The unknown developer would keep submitting forms. The known developer would use a second interface made of people.

The phrase I came up with was the human API.

Platforms present themselves as software. There is a review queue, a policy document, a support form, an advertising dashboard and an algorithm deciding what receives distribution. But large platforms also contain account managers, editorial teams, partner programs, former colleagues, investor relationships and private conversations. The public interface may be the same for everyone while the recovery path is not.

This is not an invented phenomenon. Meta's own Oversight Board examined the company's Cross-Check system, which gave certain prominent or commercially important accounts an additional moderation process that ordinary users did not receive. The board described unequal treatment, unclear criteria and a system structured partly around Meta's business interests. Research on entrepreneurship also repeatedly finds that social capital affects access to finance, information, markets and other resources.

The hidden layer exists.

I wanted Nikita Bier to be a clean example of it.

That would have made the story simpler. He had built two social apps that reached the top of the App Store, sold one to Facebook, sold another to Discord and eventually posted his way into running product at X. Perhaps the growth tactics were merely the visible explanation. Perhaps the real advantage was a person inside Apple, Meta or some distribution channel who could produce the first burst of attention and then let everyone call it organic.

I tried to find that person.

What I found instead was an annoyingly detailed launch strategy.

tbh did not begin with a broad national release. According to accounts from the time, Bier's team launched at one high school in Georgia, where roughly 40 percent of the school downloaded the app on the first day. The product depended on people already knowing one another, so a random collection of users would not work. The team expanded from one dense network to a few nearby schools and eventually hundreds of schools.

The more aggressive part of the strategy involved school-specific Instagram accounts. The team created private accounts for individual high schools, followed students from those schools and left the accounts private long enough for curiosity to accumulate. Around the end of the school day, the account became public and revealed the app. The launch was not waiting for teenagers to discover a new product in the App Store. It constructed a small social event around a group that already had relationships, gossip, status and reasons to care what other people thought of them.

This is a growth hack in the original sense of the term. The distribution mechanism and the product were almost the same thing. The app was valuable only inside a sufficiently dense social graph, so the launch manufactured density before opening the door.

There was also a less glamorous fact. Bier had not simply woken up and made tbh. He had spent years building and shutting down other products. A University of California, Berkeley account of his talk said he had shut down fourteen apps and was considering liquidating the company shortly before tbh worked. The famous success arrived after a pile of failures that disappeared from the simplified story.

Gas later used a closely related positive-polling mechanic and was acquired by Discord. By then Bier was no longer an unknown founder. He had a Facebook acquisition behind him, years inside Meta, a public reputation for consumer social products and a network of founders, investors and platform people. It would be absurd to claim that he launched Gas under the same conditions as someone making their first app from a bedroom in Viljandi.

But different conditions are not evidence of secret unfair treatment.

This was the point where the theory became harder to write responsibly. I could document that Bier had accumulated reputation and access. I could document that platforms create special pathways for some users. I could document that relationships change what information and resources entrepreneurs can reach. I could not document that Apple featured his apps because of a personal connection, that Meta bent a rule for him, or that his original growth came from a hidden favor.

The evidence supported the system-level claim and not the person-level accusation.

This distinction is easy to lose because plausibility feels almost as satisfying as proof. A person who has sold a company to Facebook probably can reach people I cannot. A person followed by product leaders, venture capitalists and technology executives probably receives replies that an unknown developer would not receive. Once Bier began publicly offering Elon Musk product advice and asking to run Twitter's product organization, the request itself reached the person who could eventually give him the job. This is relationship capital operating in public.

Still, it does not follow that the relationship created the ability being rewarded.

Skill and access are not competing explanations. They can form a loop. Someone develops an unusual ability, gets one result, meets people because of the result, receives better opportunities because of those people, produces more visible results and is then remembered as if the entire sequence came from a stable personal quality called genius. The network becomes part of the person's operating environment. Eventually they may stop noticing it because sending a message to someone inside the platform feels like a normal step.

For everyone outside that environment, the step does not exist.

This is probably where the unfairness is real, even when no rule is secretly broken. One developer receives a generic rejection. Another receives context. One founder reads the documentation after a policy changes. Another hears about the change before it is announced. One person tries to identify the right journalist. Another already has a conversation with them. One application enters a queue. Another arrives attached to a trusted introduction.

None of these advantages has to be corrupt to matter.

The public version of a growth story often removes them because they are not very teachable. A case study can tell us to improve the invitation flow, launch community by community and send notifications tied to real social events. It cannot give us six years at Meta, a previous acquisition, investor credibility or the phone number of the person controlling a distribution surface.

At the same time, focusing only on the invisible advantages creates another kind of distortion. It lets me avoid the part that is available to study.

I wanted the real growth hack to be knowing someone because that answer protects me from a more difficult comparison. If tbh succeeded because of a secret contact, I do not need to think seriously about why one school mattered, why four in the afternoon mattered, why a private Instagram account mattered, why anonymous positive polling created an emotional reason to return, or why fourteen previous attempts had failed. The hidden favor would explain the result and excuse me from learning the mechanism.

The documented mechanism is more annoying because it looks replicable only at the level of principle. I can understand that a social product needs density without knowing which community will care. I can understand that curiosity can be staged without knowing when staging becomes spam. I can understand that a notification should reveal a real social event without knowing where the line between relevance and manipulation is. The strategy is visible, but judgment remains scarce.

There is also something emotionally convenient about turning successful people into beneficiaries of a rigged system. Some systems are rigged. Status compounds. Platforms do not treat every account equally. Investors, journalists and executives respond differently to someone with a known name. Pretending otherwise would be naive.

But suspicion can become its own flattering mythology. The successful person becomes less skilled than they appear, while I become someone who would have achieved the same result if only the gatekeepers had answered my messages. That story may contain some truth. It can also prevent contact with the evidence that does not flatter me.

I began with the image of two founders submitting identical apps. One fights an automated interface. The other texts a former colleague and gets featured. This probably happens in some form. I still do not have evidence that it explains Nikita Bier.

What I have is a messier sequence. Years of failed products. A launch compressed into one school. Private Instagram accounts. A reveal timed around the school day. A product designed around existing social relationships. A Facebook acquisition. Insider experience and a larger network. Another app using a related mechanic. Another acquisition. Years of publicly giving product advice to the owner of X. Then the product job.

The connections are in the story. They are just not where I initially wanted them to be.

They appear after the first proof of ability and then begin compounding with it. They change the conditions of every later attempt. They probably make some failures easier to recover from and some opportunities easier to reach. But they do not erase the work that made the network interested in the first place.

Maybe the deeper problem is that we keep asking for one cause. Was it product skill or access? Was the growth organic or engineered? Was the opportunity earned or granted through relationships? In practice, the categories leak into one another. A launch can be carefully engineered and still produce genuine enthusiasm. A relationship can be earned through previous work and still create an unequal advantage. A platform can apply the same written rules while offering radically different levels of human help.

The human API is real. Some people have more permissions.

I just cannot use that general truth to accuse a specific person of calling an endpoint I cannot prove they called.

I wanted to find the person inside Apple. I found one school in Georgia, a private Instagram account, a four o'clock reveal and fourteen dead apps.

The unfair part may not be that somebody secretly opened the first door. It may be that after the first door opens, the building begins to recognize you.

Connected reading

• The Last Obstacle Was a Popup
• The Interface Is a Secret Handshake
• The Problems Companies Admit They Have
• The AI Was Easy. Understanding the Company Was Hard.
• 100 Apps, €0?

AI authorship note

This essay began with Kris Haamer asking whether renowned growth operators sometimes benefit from knowing people inside platforms, then challenging whether that could responsibly be said about Nikita Bier. AI supported source verification, the distinction between system-level evidence and person-specific claims, drafting, editing and the publishing workflow. Kris supplied the App Store Connect experience, the skepticism and the editorial direction.