Knowledge Planet Product Analysis

Community operation is the most important part of a community. The author of this article breaks down 60 pages and more than 100 product design details. By analyzing the needs of the target user group, he analyzes and verifies the product design of Knowledge Planet , and provides you with a product design reference for social tools.

I. Preface

1. Suitable for the crowd

(1) UI/interaction designer

By analyzing user needs, disassembling the product, and verifying the design strategy of an APP product, we can break away from the thinking of the design execution layer, cultivate a holistic view of design, and think about how to design a product from a holistic perspective.

(2) Product Manager/Operation

Obtain design references for knowledge communities and social tool products through comprehensive user needs analysis, product disassembly, and design strategy verification;

(3) Knowledge creators

Through comprehensive product design analysis, you can understand the operating model, product functions and data analysis tools of Knowledge Planet, and thus obtain a reference for community operations.

2. Purpose of analysis

By analyzing the user needs of the knowledge creator group, disassembling the Knowledge Planet V4.36.1APP, and then verifying whether the product design of the Knowledge Planet solves the user's pain points, finally providing a smart community operation guide for knowledge creators and a product design reference for related product design practitioners.

3. Analysis steps

(1) Demand analysis

Use the Fogg model to analyze the motivations, pain points, and needs of knowledge creators and derive real needs;

(2) Product disassembly

Through comprehensive product design disassembly, you can understand the complete product design details of Knowledge Planet;

(3) Design verification

Combined with the growth model, the product design strategy of Knowledge Planet is verified.

(4) Analysis and summary

Through analysis and summary, the core ideas are output to provide a design strategy reference for product designers and practitioners.

4. Analytical Model

(1) Growth model

Proposed by Dave McClure, it includes user acquisition, user activation, user retention, revenue generation, and user recommendation, corresponding to the five important links in the user life cycle, and is mainly used to analyze the functional value of the product.

(2) Fogg Model

Proposed by BJ Fogg, the founder of behavioral cognition, through the study of user behavior, he believes that three elements are needed to prompt users to take action, namely motivation, ability and trigger, which are mainly used to analyze user motivations and needs.

2. User Demand Analysis

1. Who are the knowledge creators?

To understand the product of Knowledge Planet, we need to first understand the group of knowledge creators. In simple terms, any creator who can continuously output original content can be called a knowledge creator, just like the author himself, who has transformed from a product designer responsible for design execution to a self-media that regularly outputs product analysis . The author can be called a knowledge creator.

The core user group of Knowledge Planet is the big Vs and KOLs who have accumulated countless fans on platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and Zhihu. These big Vs have extremely high popularity and appeal, and have gathered thousands of fans, with huge potential demand.

2. Why do knowledge creators need social tool products?

(1) User motivation

2016 is the first year of knowledge payment. In the past, the impression that Internet = free has been deeply rooted in the minds of users. Whether knowledge is worth paying for is a big question mark. However, in 2016, the number of users willing to pay for knowledge increased by 3 times, reaching nearly 50 million. According to iResearch's 2018 knowledge payment industry report, the market size will reach 35 billion in 2020 and the number of users will exceed 400 million.

Creation itself is not easy, it requires continuous persistence, and it also requires providing fans with diverse and creative high-quality content, which is a great test of the creator's ability and determination. Moreover, faced with the challenges of making do and going far away, it is difficult for knowledge creators to persevere without a decent income. Therefore, in a favorable environment where users are gradually developing the habit of paying, how to use professional digital tools to solve community management, realize fan monetization, and achieve healthy development has been a problem that has long plagued knowledge creators. Their motivation is very strong and urgent.

(2) Pain point analysis

Human pain - difficult management:

For knowledge creators, they have already had a huge fan base through long-term accumulation. But as the number of fans continued to grow, they became more and more difficult to manage. The more people there are, the harder it is to manage, and the harder it is to manage, the harder it is to develop healthily.

For example, how to monitor the activity of a community through accurate data, how to quickly activate users to participate in community activities, etc. Knowledge creators all understand that fans are the foundation of everything, and only with fans can they develop.

The pain of money - difficult to settle accounts:

When users recognize the value of a community, it is natural for them to pay to join. But as more and more fans joined, financial statistics became a very troublesome thing.

How long did the fan join the group? When is the renewal time? Should commissions be given to referrers? Should discounts be given upon renewal? The more people there are, the more busy and energy-consuming it will be for knowledge creators to rely solely on an Excel spreadsheet.

The pain of things - the difficulty of settling:

Objects represent content and information. The reason why a community can function is that content is spiritual food and information is the means of transportation.

WeChat public accounts can certainly accumulate content, but it is difficult to establish more efficient interactions with fans relying solely on a message board. A community of knowledge creators is like a city. If this city only has basic infrastructure such as water and electricity, but no other food, drink, and entertainment, fans will not know where to go even if they have transportation. Fans will not be active, which will lead to low retention rates and ultimately difficulty in commercialization.

3. The real needs of knowledge creators for tools

(1) Time requirement

According to Fogg's behavioral model, in order for users to start taking action, the capability cost must be low. Therefore, the ability to quickly build and launch one's own community requires a high level of time cost. If it is a large and complex SAAS background, knowledge creators will easily give up.

(2) Need for money

Knowledge creators are not averse to charging fees. After all, their main income comes from fans, but their ability to bear the cost is limited. This group of people is more developing on an individual basis. When it exceeds their expectations, they will make multiple comparisons and weigh the pros and cons.

(3) Mental Demand

The mental demand is the learning cost, and not only the fans’ learning cost but also the management team’s learning cost must be considered. A comprehensive investigation will be conducted on the product’s operability and ease of use.

(4) Functional requirements

There are not many functional requirements, but it needs to be able to solve the pain points of the community in daily operations, user and financial management. Of course, if there are a variety of rich marketing tools, knowledge creators can enjoy the Aha-Moment.

(5) Security requirements

As the community operates, how can the security of content data be ensured? Will the community content be lost one day due to server failure or other events? Concerns about safety will be very high.

(6) Platform requirements

After confirming to use the community product, we will also pay attention to what support policies the platform has for the community, whether it is fans, traffic or other benefits.

4. Summary

Through the analysis in this section, we understand the pain points faced by the group of knowledge creators in the development process. These pain points are not fatal, but very urgent.

The community of knowledge creators is like a city. They not only desire water, electricity and food, but also hope that the city will have entertainment venues, restaurants and cinemas, like a modern smart city, so that fans can settle here for life and lead a happy life.

3. Who is Knowledge Planet?

1. Product Introduction

The Knowledge Planet APP mainly provides professional and digital community tools for knowledge creators active on Weibo, Douban, Zhihu and WeChat, connecting hardcore fans, making community operations simpler and realizing knowledge monetization.

Secondly, Knowledge Planet is also a high-quality knowledge payment community. It not only helps knowledge creators serve their fans, but also hopes to recommend richer and higher-quality content to users through the accumulation of high-quality content on the planet.

2. Product life cycle

Knowledge Planet was founded in 2015 and has been developed for 7 years. It already has 30 million paying knowledge users. The product has entered a mature stage. The current business focus is not only on user activity and commercial monetization.

Secondly, we are also trying new business breakthroughs. For example, we have started to try Star Q&A since last year, trying to break down the barriers between planets and let star owners and fans work together to create a barrier-free, high-quality knowledge community.

Since there is no public official data, I have collected some data from iResearch Qianfan for your reference. From January to June 2020, the average monthly active users were 315,400, and the average daily launch times per person was 3.64 times.

3. Business Model

Knowledge Planet is committed to being a B2B2C platform. The first B represents the knowledge creator, the star master, the second B represents the knowledge planet, the platform, and C represents fans and ordinary users. It can be seen that Knowledge Planet will not be satisfied with just being a social tool and solving the last mile of community monetization, but will want to be a high-quality knowledge payment community, otherwise it will become S2B2C.

4. User Profile

According to statistics from iResearch Qianfan, the user population of Knowledge Planet is mainly male, young in age (24-40), with strong consumption power, and mainly distributed in first-tier and new first-tier cities, with the majority in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing.

Of course, as a B2B2C platform, the user roles of Knowledge Planet are actually divided into two categories. The first category is knowledge creators, and the second category is fans of knowledge creators and ordinary users.

5. Functional architecture

By combing through the complete functional information architecture and conducting a preliminary analysis, we found that the functions of Knowledge Planet are not complicated and the process is relatively simple. It can be said that the user experience is very friendly and it is very easy to get started.

6. Iteration process

As of May 8, 2022, from the initially ignored Xiaomi Circle which was only a private work circle, to the Knowledge Planet which has gathered 30 million knowledge paying users today, the Knowledge Planet has been moving forward in small steps and continuously optimizing, and has now been updated to version V4.36.1.

• On November 9, 2015, the V1.1.1 version was officially released, named Xiaomiquan, to create a private work circle with the concept of safe sharing and happy work;
• On December 21, 2016, it was upgraded to version V2.2.3, with major upgrades to the UI and interactions to create a high-quality community for users;
• On August 28, 2017, it was upgraded to version 2.11.2. Xiaomiquan was renamed as Zhishixingqiu, with the new value proposition of connecting one thousand die-hard fans.
• On January 7, 2018, it was upgraded to version 3.0.0, launching the discovery function and upgrading from a knowledge tool to a knowledge community;
• Upgraded to version V4.0.0 on April 30, 2019, users can follow each other and search for friends through knowledge accounts;
• It was upgraded to version V4.36.1 on April 30, 2022, and a new "Starry Sky Q&A" was added to the discovery page to explore new business directions.

7. Summary

After 7 years of development, Knowledge Planet has become a mature product. Their target user group is very precise. They are committed to helping top KOLs of knowledge creators solve the pain points of difficult community fee management and the inability to accumulate content. They are not satisfied with just being a community tool, but want to be a high-quality knowledge community and recommend better content to users.

4. Design Analysis and Verification

Through user demand analysis and product disassembly, next, we systematically analyze the product design strategies of Knowledge Planet to verify whether they solve the user's pain points.

1. Planet management

A planet is like a community, a forum, or a BBS. Users can create it for free, and the person who creates the planet is called the "Star Master". Secondly, the daily management of the planet can be achieved through the APP, which is very convenient.

(1) Create a planet

Planet Type:

Creating a planet is very simple. You can build your own planet in just a few simple steps. Planets are divided into "free planets" and "paid planets".

The free planet focuses on traffic generation and activation, while the paid planet helps star owners to monetize directly. Users need to pay to join (the platform charges a 5% membership fee). Paid planets provide more functions than free planets, such as management tools, marketing tools, and data analysis tools.

Data settings:

After the planet is created, the star owner can edit the planet again, including the planet cover image, planet introduction, etc. There is a "Planet Highlights" function in the paid planet, which mainly supports the star owner to carry out personalized design on the landing page displayed to fans, thereby increasing the user payment rate.

(2) Planet Settings

System settings:

After entering the planet management, the star owner can set the member joining method, modify the planet's membership fees at any time, and set user browsing and publishing permissions, such as whether new members can publish immediately, comment, ask questions anonymously, etc. This allows the star master to manage the planet more flexibly and diversely.

Content Protection:

Star owners can prohibit fans from copying and downloading, enable theme background watermarks, and even set reading time limits for new members, thereby providing a certain degree of protection for the planet's original content creation.

(3) Planet Team

In addition to the planet owner, a planet can invite up to 20 partners and 50 guests to manage it together. Partners are like moderators of a BBS community, who can help the star owner to operate the planet, while guests are like agents, who can not only bring their own resources to join, but also bring unexpected surprises to fans, thereby sharing the star owner’s time investment and establishing a good atmosphere for planetary communication and learning.

(4) Summary

For knowledge creators, the time cost of building a planet is extremely low. With just a few simple steps, you can quickly build your own planet and start operations quickly. Secondly, the design of the team model is very attractive to knowledge creators. It not only reduces management costs and shares personal investment, but also allows guests to enrich the content of the community, killing two birds with one stone.

2. Operational Tools

In order to have a more intuitive understanding, I classified the operation tools according to the four stages of the growth model to understand whether the operation tools of Knowledge Planet meet the needs of knowledge creators.

(1) Activation

Operation:

Star hosts can publish "assignments" for users to participate in. After the assignments are published, fans can create based on the content of the assignments. Star hosts can comment on the assignments and automatically generate assignment rankings. Homework can not only enable interaction between star hosts and fans and help fans improve their skills, but also quickly activate users and cultivate user habits, thereby increasing user activity and retention rate.

Check-in:

"Check-in" is a common way to cultivate user habits. Star owners can publish various types of check-in challenge activities with a cycle of 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, etc. to attract fans to participate, thereby helping the planet achieve user retention and spread traffic.

Question:

"Asking questions" means that fans ask questions to the star host or guests. This is a good way to activate users. It can not only effectively enrich the content of the planet, but also realize two-way creation, form a good planet communication atmosphere, and thus increase the activity of the planet.

(2) Retention

Ranking:

Based on the activity of fans, the planet will automatically generate a weekly member activity ranking list. Based on the user contribution value, a weekly points ranking list will be formed. Based on the number of fans invited to join the group, a daily, weekly, and monthly invitation ranking list will be formed. The ranking list makes full use of users' competitive psychology to increase user activity.

dynamic:

When a user joins a planet, "Dynamics" is like a circle of star friends, which will synchronously update the latest posting dynamics of the planet, and effectively improve user retention rate through high-frequency external triggers.

(3) Dissemination

share:

Planet supports multiple sharing methods, including sharing with WeChat friends, sharing to Moments, generating joining links, generating QR code posters, and also combining coupons, experience cards and other tools to generate richer sharing styles.

Commission:

Star owners can activate the "commission mode", and fans can get corresponding rewards for every successful friend they introduce to join, which can effectively help the planet spread and attract new members.

(4) Drainage

Discover:

"Discover" is like a square, which includes hot questions, popular planets, featured topics and rankings. The platform will select the high-quality content created by each planet and finally recommend it to the discovery section. This will not only give star owners more exposure opportunities, but also the opportunity to gain more fans.

Starry Sky Q&A:

"Starry Sky Q&A" is the same as Discovery. Star owners can answer questions based on their areas of expertise. On the one hand, this can inspire their own creative inspiration, and on the other hand, they can win recognition from the platform and fans through high-quality answers, thereby attracting new users to the planet.

(5) Summary

Operational tools serve as the operational arsenal for knowledge payers, and are also the real experience of star owners on the product during the operation process. Whether the product is useful and whether it can help them solve the pain points in the traditional operation process determines whether they continue to use the product. Through the research in this section, we can see that although the management tools of Knowledge Planet can solve the pain points faced by the current community, they are still a bit thin and lack some diverse designs, such as common group functions such as voting, chain games, questionnaires, and lotteries.

3. Management Tools

As a platform product, Knowledge Planet provides star owners with comprehensive and accurate data analysis tools on the PC side, thus helping star owners to achieve digital operations.

(1) Income data

"Income Data" is a visual data dashboard. Star owners can use the income data to have a complete data overview of the planet's income. They can check the cumulative income, this month's income, 30-day paid page conversion rate, and support exporting data reports. This effectively helps the star owner to achieve visual management of the planet and improve work efficiency.

(2) Promotion and new customer acquisition

Promotional data:

Through the promotion data dashboard, star owners can view detailed promotion revenue data based on the past 7 days, 15 days, 30 days or custom events, such as 30-day paid page conversion rate, new member data, new channel data, coupon data, etc. It also supports exporting data reports to facilitate standardized management of star owners.

New member coupons:

Star owners can set up "newcomer coupons" to attract new users to join. Coupons can generate promotional posters and links to facilitate publicity and promotion.

Channel QR code:

"Channel QR code" can be understood as the star owner can set up different agents or advertising channels to facilitate agents to help spread and attract new users. Secondly, the QR code data of each channel can be comprehensively counted to achieve real-time monitoring of the data.

Paid page optimization:

The "paid page" is the landing page that fans visit after the planet is shared. The conversion rate of this landing page is very important, so the platform provides personalized design functions to help star owners improve the conversion rate of the landing page.

(3) User activity

Active members:

This is the data dashboard for planet users. Star owners can view the total number of planet users, paid members, churn rate in the past 7 days, monthly active members, and detailed user activity data. This allows star owners to monitor the activity of planet users in real time, adjust operating strategies in a timely manner, and ensure the activity of the planet.

Active content:

"Content activity" is a data dashboard for the content produced by the planet. The star owner can view the content generated by users of the entire planet, including the number of new likes, comments, posts, etc. on that day.

Members standings:

"Member Points List" is a good tool to increase user activity. Points can be set for user behaviors, such as comments, likes, and posting topics. This helps fans increase points through high-frequency interactions. Points can not only be used to generate rankings, but can also be combined with other methods to give feedback to fans.

(4) Membership renewal

Renewal data:

In the member renewal section, star owners can learn about fans' renewal data through the data dashboard, including today's renewal income, this month's renewal income, members who can be renewed in advance, members who have not renewed within 7 days of expiration, and renewal page conversion rate.

Renewal coupons:

Star owners can set up "renewal coupons" to increase the renewal rate of fans. Coupons can generate promotional posters and links to facilitate publicity and promotion.

Renewal Notice:

Star owners can issue renewal notices and then send them to fans in batches to increase the reach rate.

Renewal discounts:

"Renewal discounts" are similar to renewal coupons, both of which are designed to increase the renewal rate of fans. Renewal discounts can be directly shared with WeChat friends and generate Moments posters.

(5) Operational tools

Inspiration:

Knowledge Planet simultaneously collects hot search data from Weibo, Toutiao and WeChat, making it convenient for star owners to create based on the latest popular Internet keywords.

Video Live Broadcast:

The Knowledge Planet and WeChat Video Account are fully connected. When the star owner is broadcasting live, he can choose to make it available to the planet members only, which helps enrich the planet's operating methods.

(6) Summary

From the analysis of the management tools section, we can see that the management tools of Knowledge Planet cover the entire life cycle of a community management, whether it is the activation of new users, renewal of old users, expansion of promotion channels, monitoring of user activity and churn rate. This is really like the operating philosophy that Knowledge Planet proposes to knowledge creators - design and plan your planet as a product.

4. Analysis and summary

Through the design analysis of Knowledge Planet, we can see that as a community tool, the three functional modules of Knowledge Planet are sufficient to solve the three major pain points of knowledge creators. It not only provides star owners with rich and complete management and operation tools, but also Knowledge Planet has never been satisfied with just being a community tool. Through years of development and precipitation, they have been constantly exploring more business directions, and are committed to providing star owners and users with a higher quality knowledge community.

5. Final words

When I was writing this analysis report, I actually encountered a dilemma. Because the help center of Knowledge Planet has already given a very comprehensive introduction to the functions of the entire product. If I just repeat it, it would be meaningless. I might as well share the link with everyone. So the version you are reading now is actually the second version.

I put aside the previous analysis structure and first analyzed the users' real needs, then verified the design of the Knowledge Planet, and finally expressed my own views. No one gives me money, but I am not afraid of trouble. I just hope that every product analysis can achieve a breakthrough.

As a knowledge creator who has just stepped into the threshold, I have transformed from commercial design to knowledge payment. In the future, I will also face the problem of how to monetize my creations and support my family.

It was not until I conducted a comprehensive research and analysis of Knowledge Planet that I suddenly understood. I really like a saying from the Knowledge Planet - knowledge has a price, so for a truly valuable planet, you don’t need to be anxious, they (fans) will use money and passion to push you to continue.

Wu Ruga, the founder of Knowledge Planet, once described his vision for Knowledge Planet in his entrepreneurial story - Knowledge Planet has no halo of its own and is very weak, but it is like an open market in Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Market", where anyone can come in and set up a stall. Some people have loud voices, and some people have good products.

We believe more in the power of the marketplace. We want to use the marketplace to allow more people to participate in content entrepreneurship, learning, and education. If we can accomplish this, we will be very satisfied.

Today, the Knowledge Planet has gone through its first seven years, and in the next seven years, they are building highways between these small planets, connecting the previously closed planets through knowledge, and forming an open and all-encompassing universe.

Author: Liao Qing Joseph

Source: Liao Qing Joseph