Lieb and two cofounders built Bump as a side project to make sharing phone numbers easier. Its phone-bumping novelty helped it spread by word of mouth, and being the billionth app downloaded from Apple’s App Store brought global attention. An Apple television ad later sent traffic surging, overwhelming Bump’s servers until YC founders helped fix them.
Google Photos Product Lead and Bump Cofounder
#Growth & Distribution#Product-Market Fit#User Research#Fundraising#Product Strategy#Organizational Design
Speakers
David Lieb, Google Photos product director and Bump cofounder, discusses product discovery, startup growth, and building Google Photos with Gustaf Alströmer on Y Combinator’s podcast.
Bump reached 150 million downloads and about 10 million monthly active users, but the team initially emphasized usage totals over cohort retention and frequency. Lieb says people kept Bump installed but used it infrequently, and each use created too little value to support the venture-scale business they had pursued. Small monetization tests suggested roughly one dollar per user per year.
Calls with Bump’s top users revealed that many mainly shared photos, which led the team to build Flock around automatic sharing between friends who took photos at the same time. Flock struggled because new users needed friends to join before it was useful, so the team explored a photo gallery app called PhotoRoll. Google acquired the team in 2013, and its product design insights combined with Google’s work on image recognition, search, and backups to help shape Google Photos.
Lieb describes imagining a tireless photo assistant that could back up pictures, identify people, make movies, and surface meaningful memories. At Google, he divides his time among product strategy, team development, product decisions, and feedback. He says large-scale user feedback includes thousands of daily reports, clustering tools, research, and direct conversations, while good product decisions still require interpreting what users say.
Lieb recommends using AI either to scale tasks people can do but cannot perform affordably at scale, or to tackle problems beyond human ability. He cautions teams against polishing performance when they may be solving the wrong problem. For consumer products, he looks for a durable human need that technology can serve more effectively, rather than a temporary novelty.
Takeaways
- Track retention and usage frequency, not just downloads or total activity.
- Ask users what they actually do with a product; Bump’s top users revealed photo sharing was its main use case.
- Give new users value before asking them to recruit friends.
- Test whether AI makes a real task cheaper, more accessible, or possible at all.
- Before polishing a feature, check that it solves a problem users care about.
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What was claimed 19
- role atDavid Lieb is product director for Google Photos at
Google“He’s a product director at Google, specifically for Google Photos.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- role atDavid Lieb is product lead at
Google Photos“He’s a product director at Google, specifically for Google Photos.”
YouTube Verified2 sources· Talk
- foundedDavid Lieb founded Bump
“you’re also a co-founder of Bump”
YouTube Verified2 sources· Talk
- builtDavid Lieb built Bump
“We started hacking away, trying to build an app”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- acquired
“we ... were ultimately acquired by Google.”
1:57inHow To Keep Your UsersYouTube Verified3 sources· Talk
- launchedBump: March 27, 2009
“We launched on March 27, 2009.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- featureBump: Users shared contact details by bumping their phones together.
“You can bump your phones together and it does something.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- feature
Apple Computer: Included Bump in an international 'There's an app for that' TV commercial.Included Bump in an international 'There's an app for that' TV commercial.“they put us in an international TV commercial.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- metricBump: Around 10 million monthly active users at its peak
“at our peak, around 10 million monthly active users”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- metricBump: 150 million downloads
“We grew like crazy, getting up to 150 million downloads”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- metricBump: About one dollar per user per year in estimated revenue
“we could maybe get one dollar for every user of the product per year”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- featureBump: Photo sharing became its biggest single use case.
“sharing photos became Bump’s biggest single use case.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- builtDavid Lieb built Flock
“That led us to Flock, which we built and launched.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- usesBump uses machine learningA server-based pattern-matching system predicted whether two phones would bump.
“a pattern-matching, early type of AI system that used a bunch of signals”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- featureFlock: Used Facebook friends and simultaneous photo-taking to prompt one-button photo sharing.
“Then it prompted you to share”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- builtDavid Lieb built Photo Roll
“The third product we built was something we called Photo Roll.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- featureGoogle Photos: Stores, organizes, backs up, searches, and helps users share and revisit photos.
“store all your photos, be a home for them, make them as useful as possible”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- usesPhoto recognition, face grouping, and image understanding support the product.
“a huge team working on face recognition and face grouping”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- metricGoogle Photos: Uploads a lot of photos every day
“Yeah, we upload a lot of photos every day.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
