User growth ≠ fission and new user acquisition!

Fission and attracting new users should not be the only task of operations, and user growth does not mean fission. When considering user growth, we must consider not only the incremental amount but also the stock amount. If a company wants to increase its user base, it needs to have specific discussions based on its actual characteristics and the environment it is in.

I don’t know when it started, but fission and traffic generation seem to have become standard skills for many community operations and so-called user operations. Coupled with the title of growth hacker, the entire operation circle is talking about fission gameplay.

In the past two years, many well-known leaders have provided methodologies and practical cases on growth, and many of them are very useful. This is a good thing in itself, but the atmosphere is very strange. The strange thing is that many companies still believe that growth requires the hacking effect of attracting new customers.

For example, talk to the operations department in the education and training industry to find out what they understand about user operations. Basically, they use Taskbao to increase followers, and then offer trial classes to convert them. Some are even so paranoid that they believe fission is the core of growth operations, and that having done fission means being able to do growth.

As a result, various strategies have emerged in the industry to teach you: how to achieve explosive fission growth at low cost, how to build a million users from scratch in 30 days, and strategies like creating 3D special effects with 50 cents...

What I want to say here is: while the manipulators are trying every means to make money from users at a low cost, aren’t they also the ones being exploited by the advocates?

Why is it recommended that during the initial growth phase, you should not just focus on fission and attracting new customers?

As far as I know, the daily work content of many operators who have just entered the industry revolves around activity fission and community fission, and a lot of research is done on technical aspects such as activity fission gameplay and community fission tools.

It may seem like you have gained a lot of practical experience in user growth, but in reality your value proposition is also narrowing. Will I continue to organize activities and build community in the next stage or next job? Here are a few of my thoughts.

(1) Don’t just look at the surface. In the past two years, there has been a very high demand for growth operations positions. However, the industry’s overall understanding of growth and actual needs still puts the first factor in the hope that you are a panacea that can achieve a great result with a small amount of money and attract more traffic with the least amount of money.

When the KPI of this first factor cannot be met, it is impossible to achieve ideal growth in the entire chain of user value. At the same time, the more the traffic dividend crisis seems to be prevalent, the more important retention, conversion and monetization become, and the greater the opportunities. No product or company can bypass this link, and your value can go far beyond attracting new customers.

(2) All fission gameplays are only means of representing non-long-term tactics. Ultimately, it still comes down to whether the users brought in by fission can be effectively retained or generate higher value (students who are interested can study the series of new scenarios that Alipay has done in the past two years in terms of user retention and value extension).

When everyone is gathering in a pool to do something, even the most ingenious methods will inevitably create bubbles. One thing that capital must watch is the actual effective capacity of the pool only after the bubbles have dissipated. You can think of the process of Taojiji's rise, peak, and then decline.

(3) From the perspective of personal career development and the current domestic Internet enterprise environment, this may not be a good thing. Why? Because the resource allocation responsible for non-paid new customer acquisition is the most sensitive and fragile. How do you understand this?

If the number of people in a growth team increases, the cost of attracting new customers will inevitably increase directly. Once they fail in a certain cycle, the balance will be broken. But the reality is that most companies are not willing to continue paying for it. Currently, the vast majority of companies that have growth positions actually only have 1-2 people assigned to trial and error.

The core of growth is to conduct a form of team collaboration to quickly try out and implement growth strategies around different key growth goals. This is very dependent on the company's boss or leader having strong enough awareness and determination to do this well. In this case, how do you ensure that there is enough space to support what you want to do?

How to avoid pitfalls when preparing to join a new company to be responsible for growth

When it comes to user growth, let’s not talk about other things for now. The most important thing is that the boss or senior leader must understand what is going on . Even if the boss or leader is from a technical background and has nothing to do with operational growth, he or she must at least have the attitude and determination to support the entire chain from the business end to the product end to the user end, instead of just doing it on your own.

How do we judge whether the bosses have this attitude and determination?

First, you can look at it from the perspective of the interview. If you haven’t even met the boss or even the key senior management during the interview process, then there is basically no chance, because the premise of doing the right thing is to use good people.

The second is to see whether the relevant personnel and mechanisms have been set up. It may be that you are the only one now, but you must be given a clear staffing configuration or internal collaboration personnel.

The third is to see what the company’s most clear core growth indicator demands are at the moment? Is it the number of new users, retention rate, or activity? If they only talk to you about attracting new customers, you will have a lot of miserable days in the future. For example, the following picture

Another very important objective factor is whether the company’s development stage and business characteristics have the basic capabilities for growth. How can the company's development stage affect your growth?

The most typical and common one is the underlying data capability. Due to various previous reasons, many companies have never paid attention to product and user data. They don’t have full embedding points, user info data, or reporting systems... How do you do it?

But the most uncomfortable thing is the people. The development stage of the company largely determines the ability and professionalism of the employees. You are working with a bunch of people who are not at the same level and whose cognition is not on the same channel to develop growth, and you are also asked to form an SOP. Just thinking about this scene makes me feel sour...

Finally, let’s talk about business characteristics. This is more complicated. I will just take B-side business type enterprises as an example. I will quote a screenshot of Youzan Bai Ya’s quote and leave it for you to figure out.

What should you do if the company asks you to take over growth?

Whether to pursue growth or not, in fact, many times the boss is more anxious than we are personally. He is anxious because everyone else is doing it. In addition, the rise of concepts such as sinking and private domain in the past two years has exacerbated this situation.

I have several friends who have encountered situations where their bosses suddenly wanted to set up a growth team and wanted them to take the lead in doing this, but they were not so optimistic or positive about this.

If any of the readers have encountered this situation, don’t rush to comment on whether to take over or not. Let’s sort out the two major characteristics of growth and then work backwards to see the environment we are in.

Unique important indicators

The North Star Indicator, also known as the only important indicator, is known to many people. Growth guru Qu Hui explains it in his book: It is called the North Star indicator because once this indicator is established, it will shine high in the sky like the North Star, guiding the entire company to move in the same direction. That is to say, it has the highest priority and is the overall key guide for growth.

The embarrassing thing is that many companies seem to have never had a clear "North Star Indicator". In other words, if the boss expects everything to be high, there is no way to set the highest priority indicator, and even if there is one, it cannot be interfered with by other factors.

Rapid experimentation, rapid iteration

Growth is actually a process of integration and rapid experimentation around the business, product, user operation, marketing, etc. to find the most effective way to grow the business.

At present, many companies are indeed doing this, using AB testing and rapid iteration, and they are doing quite well. But to a large extent there is a survivor bias here, because growth hacking requires a lot of continuous experiments. Large companies can bear such risks and costs, and have enough rich data to guide them during the experiment, but what about other ordinary companies or even startups?

Taking the most basic fission activities as an example, it is also necessary to link product, design, and development resources to do things. Even if there is growth in the small market of fission, it cannot drive the overall market and cannot reverse the decline of the overall market. This is because no matter how much or how little these resources are, and how long or short the time is, they have affected the human resources on the original main line to a certain extent.

Final Thoughts

Let’s go back to what we said above. Let’s sort out the two main characteristics of growth hackers in combination with actual scenarios, and then work backwards to decide whether you should take over the growth responsibility if the company asks you to do it.

Finally, let’s summarize:

1. Can the company give a clear North Star indicator for growth? If so, can the company allow the growth team to be free from the pressure of the main business KPI to a certain extent? If the answer is no, it has deviated from rapid experimentation and rapid iteration.
2. The data from growth experiments is first and foremost used as a guide, not a goal, let alone a KPI! In other words, the data from growth experiments are used as guiding conditions to drive the experiments towards actual implementation, rather than starting with a goal of achieving a certain growth target for a particular experiment.
3. The main direction of growth should not only be towards incremental growth, but also towards existing growth.

Do your boss, leader, and yourself have such awareness of the above three points?

Author: RockLee

Source: RockLee