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Facebook bought TBH last October, only to shut it down, but an internal report revealed that the popular voting APP taught the company how to appeal to high school students.
When Facebook bought TBH last October, it got much more than a popular voting APP that was amassing 2.5 million users a day, mostly teenagers, within months of its launch. The social network has also reaped a growth strategy crafted for high school students.
According to an internal document obtained by Facebook by BuzzFeed News, TBH’s leadership explained a rigorously tested method that the startup used to get teenagers from every high school to download its app. The document illustrates Facebook’s growth-at-any-costs mentality. With its popularity waning among teenagers and its platform about to saturate in the Internet age, Facebook needs to work hard to keep important people engaged.
In a confidential memo, TBH’s founders told the new partners that they were using a “hack technique” to bulk acquire teenage users — a combination of climbing high school Instagram accounts, catering to young people’s preferences and using their free time.
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on the report or to answer questions about whether the company has adopted the growth strategies it learned from TBH.
The APP, which Was acquired by Facebook for less than $30 million, has been shut down due to low usage, but provides plenty of learning opportunities for Facebook during this critical period, according to reliable sources. In addition to helping Facebook launch and tweak its own voting tools, the document clearly provides a growth strategy crafted to reach younger users.
“The goal of sharing these strategies is to provide guidance for Facebook’s product development — especially for products that have not yet reached the level of product market fit,” TBH’s founders wrote.
A TBH-style strategy could be the key to the company’s future growth. The company announced last week that 2.5 billion people use its apps — including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger — every month. To maintain that number, Facebook will need to keep one of its most important user groups fresh at times, a challenging task given that it has fallen behind YouTube and Snapchat in popularity among teens, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
“Facebook knows they need to win over the next generation and they need to try everything,” said Nikil Viswanathan, a tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Down to Lunch. “They’re smart to take a little time to pick and choose people to do something meaningful and then learn from it.”
Here’s how TBH developed its “psychological skills.”
Dispelling the notion that apps need spurts of media relations activity to gain early traction — a strategy that creates a “fragmented” user base and attracts “a handful of Silicon Valley socialites” — TBH’s founders outlined a “new approach” to attracting high school students.
TBH noticed that teens often list their high school on their Instagram profiles. So the company uses its own private Instagram account to visit a school’s location page and follow all the accounts that contain the school’s name. TBH makes sure that its private account is mysteriously linked to certain actions — something along the lines of “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app — stay tuned!” The startup creates a private account for each target high school.
The company found that children could not help being curious and followed the private account.
TBH’s founding team told their Facebook colleagues that they typically collect all the attention requests from high school students after 24 hours before moving on to the next critical phase of their strategy.
“When The Golden Launch Hour™ launches at 4pm, add The App Store URL to your private account profile,” The team wrote. Soon after, the startup will make their previously private Instagram profile public, triggering Instagram to notify students that their follow request has been accepted. Children will see notifications, access profiles, see a download link attached to the account’s public profile, and many people have downloaded TBH through the link.
TBH said its approach was “too aggressive” for a large company.
While TBH did not violate Instagram’s terms of use, which allows users to create multiple accounts and does not require them to reveal their real identities. It recognizes that Facebook may not agree to use this approach. But the TBH team saw “Facebook using a similar approach.”
“For example, when using Facebook’s Quick Promos(or QPs), we should avoid providing instant download links,” the note reads. “Instead, we should request push notification permissions to notify targeted users at a later date.” That way, we can engage them and connect with them synchronously to make sure that we have a crowd at launch.
Read the full TBH memo below:
1. Create a process that is renewable to the user community
At TBH, we’ve developed 15 products in five years. There were a lot of painful lessons learned about product development that led us to design a systematic approach to releasing and testing new apps. The goal of sharing these strategies is to guide Facebook’s product development — especially those that haven’t yet reached product market fit.
Traditionally, most products rely on media campaigns to reach their initial audience. However, with social products, this is usually the beginning of failure: your audience is highly fragmented in the live audience, which means that the user base will not cluster. Users won’t be able to find their friends, except for a handful of Silicon Valley socialites who are actively downloading new mobile apps.
In addition, the initial product is likely to require multiple iterations, resulting in a product market fit away from the product. Since the initial user base used the product when it was first released, users will get bored and ignore subsequent updates, and media coverage will be less likely to reach them.
Therefore, it is critical to design a process that allows you to deliver a radically different product experience to a specific audience, so that your product can be clustered and doesn’t exhaust the audience prematurely.
What do we do
Our team focused on finding ways to get high schools to use one product at a time. We designed a new, replicable, albeit non-scalable, approach.
Our first breakthrough came when we discovered that young Instagram users often listed their high school (e.g. “RHS sophomore”) in their profiles. We simply browse the school’s page and follow all the accounts that contain that school’s name. However, we ran into a snag: users looked at our attention requests at different times of the day, which affected our efforts to get their attention at the same time.
Eventually, we developed a chicken thief trick:
1. Make the app’s Instagram profile private.
2. Set your profile to something mysterious, like, “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app — stay tuned!”
3. Focus on your target audience.
4. Accept attention requests 24 hours later. (They were curious about our profile and requested access)
5. Add The App Store URL to your profile at 4pm when school finishes (The Golden Launch Hour™).
6. Finally, make your profile public
All students were notified at the same time that their follow request had been accepted — then went to our profile, checked out our app store page, and tried out the app.
We do these releases every few weeks until we iterate to get the product right. Each time, we further automated the process and found inefficiencies. For example, When our application is new and submitted, Apple slows down the review process. To solve this problem, we kept the same application binaries — submitting the new product as an update to the application.
While it’s true that some of our methods are too “cluttered” for a large company, there are similar ways to use these strategies at Facebook. For example, when using Facebook’s Quick Promos(or QPs), we should avoid providing an instant download link and instead request push notification permissions so that we can notify the target users later. That way, we can engage them, connect with them synchronously, and make sure there’s a crowd at launch.
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