TBH’s founding team told their Facebook colleagues they would typically wait 24 hours to collect all inbound follow requests from the high schoolers before moving on to the next, key phase of the strategy.



“At 4:00PM when school gets out (The Golden Launch Hour™), add the App Store URL to the profile,” the TBH team wrote. Shortly thereafter, the startup would make the private Instagram profile public, triggering Instagram to notify students that their requests to follow had been accepted. Teens would see the notification, visit the profile, and be shown a download link in the account’s new public bio. And many followed the link to TBH.



While TBH did nothing to violate Instagram’s terms of service — Instagram allows for users to create multiple accounts and does not require them to disclose their real identity — it recognized that Facebook might not approve of using the exact methods. Still, the TBH team saw “analogous ways to employ these tactics at Facebook.”

“For example, when using Facebook’s Quick Promos (or QPs), we should avoid providing an instant download link,” the note read. “Instead, we should request push notification permission to alert the targeted users at a later date. That way, we can collect their interest and contact them simultaneously to ensure critical mass during launch hour.”

Read the full TBH memo below:







At tbh, we built 15 products during the five years of our company. We had many painful lessons about product development that led us to design a systematic method of launching and testing new apps. 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.





1. Create a reproducible process of penetrating communities



Traditionally, most products get their initial users through press outreach. However, for social products, this is usually a formula for failure: you end up with highly fragmented users across your audience, meaning the community will not have critical mass. Users won’t be able to find their friends, aside from a handful of Silicon Valley socialites who are actively downloading new mobile apps.

In addition, the initial product is most likely multiple iteration cycles away from product-market fit. However, due to exposure created by the initial launch, the audience will be fatigued and ignore subsequent updates. And the press will also be unlikely to cover them.



Therefore, it is critical to design a process that allows you to launch vastly different product experiences within specific communities so your product can reach critical mass and so you don’t prematurely exhaust your audience’s attention.



How we did it



Our team obsessed with finding ways to get individual high schools to adopt a product simultaneously. We designed a novel method that was reproducible, albeit non-scalable.



Our first breakthrough was that we discovered that teen Instagram users would frequently list their high school in their bios (e.g. “Sophomore at RHS”). We would simply crawl the school’s place page and then follow all the accounts that contained the school’s name. However, we hit a roadblock: users would view our Follow Requests at varying times of the day so it derailed our efforts to get their attention simultaneously.



We eventually identified a psychological trick:



1. Set the app’s Instagram profile to Private.



2. Set the bio to something mysterious, e.g., “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app—stay tuned!”



3. Follow the targeted users.



4. Wait 24 hours to receive the inbound Follow Requests. (They were curious about our profile so they requested access)



5. At 4:00PM when school gets out (The Golden Launch HouseTM), add the App Store URL to the profile.



6. Finally, make the profile Public



This notified all students at the same time that their Follow Request had been accepted—and they subsequently visited our profile, looked at our App Store page, and tried the app.



We conducted these sorts of launches every few weeks until we arrived at the right product. Each time, we further automated the process and spotted inefficiencies. For example, Apple would review our apps slower when they were completely new submissions. So to solve that, we retained that same app binary—and submitted new products as an app update.



While some of our methods are certainly too “scrappy” for a big company, there are analogous ways to employ these tactics at Facebook. For example, when using Facebook’s Quick Promos (or QPs), we should avoid providing an instant download link. Instead, we should request push notification permission to alert the targeted users at a later date. That way, we can collect their interest and contact them simultaneously to ensure critical mass during launch hour. (Credit to [name redacted] for suggesting that method)