4 ideas to find seed users for product launch!

When a product is in the early stages of operation, the most difficult part is not product development, but how to find seed users to launch the product. This group of people is closest to the product positioning and directly influences the future development of the product. How to find seed users for product launch? What are the specific methods? This is what this article will talk about.

Question: Dear experts, I have seen many case reviews mentioning the need to find the seed users to start the process, but how do you do this specifically? How can we find the precise first batch of seed users to cooperate with?

I have four ideas on this issue.

Idea 1: "Cross-border cooperation" between upstream and downstream companies in the "industry chain" with the same target users

For example, the users of our “Operational Deep Selection” are operations practitioners.

Our business model is to provide enterprises with fission planning of WeChat ecosystem. Companies whose target users are also operation practitioners include: Qidian Academy (providing training), GIO (providing data operation tools), Getui (providing APP operation push) and other companies. There is no competition among their businesses, and they can cooperate with each other to promote each other and attract traffic.

Give priority to cooperating with companies of similar size as your own. When you are very weak, follow the strategy of "put in more effort to build the stage and invite others to perform": for example, if you plan an online knowledge sharing event, you are responsible for planning and execution, and others only need to provide resources but not manpower.

We can even use the "time difference" to replace resources during cold start.

When we cold-started, we found 10 personal accounts/WeChat groups/public accounts with about 30,000 fans to promote each other. Our strategy was to tell them to promote me first, and I will double the number of times when they need it later.

In this way, I gathered fans from 10 companies to participate in my fission activities and accumulated my first batch of seed users.

Implementing this kind of plan requires insight into the needs of multiple parties, knowing what the other party needs, whether you can create value for the other party, and your character.

Idea 2: Find competitors. If we don’t have guns or cannons, the enemy will make them for us.

When you are doing competitor analysis, you will inevitably enter many of the opponent's user groups, and you will also add many target users to conduct user research. These are your precise target users.

The first activity plan I made was based on collecting what these users were cursing and complaining about in their groups. This showed that they had unmet needs in this area, and I then detonated the selling points of the activity that I had extracted.

Idea 3: Vertical content community/APP

Zhihu, Weibo, Tieba, Douban and other old content communities have many vertical topics. You can accumulate a certain number of seed users by searching for relevant keywords. There are also many official media or marketing accounts on WeChat that need a lot of professional content submissions. If the team has strong content capabilities, you can use them.

This requires patience in laying mines and setting up baits to guide users to your personal WeChat account.

Because the circle effect of the WeChat ecosystem is very obvious: what kind of person you are, your friend relationship chain is basically what kind of person you are.

Previously, we had a client who was recruiting construction workers. Their operations manager was someone who used to move bricks on the construction site. Their job was to chat with the workers on WeChat every day and get close to them. Then they would ask these workers to invite them to a group, send them red envelopes after they joined the group, and then get familiar with the people in the group, add them as friends, and then ask them to invite them to other groups. With just one trick, they joined groups of tens of thousands of workers.

Idea 4: Centralized traffic distribution platform: Toutiao/Baijiahao/UC Dayuhao, Douyin/Kuaishou

If your team's core competency is content creation, you can use these algorithms to distribute traffic platforms.

Because these platforms have already labeled users very finely, you can target the preferences of target users and combine them with the rules for popular content on the platform. (Also read more popular articles/videos on the platform and summarize the rules of hot products)

Let’s take an example of a construction site. A customer shot a video on Douyin about the construction work going on at his own construction site. There was no modification (I don’t understand). He just opened the camera and shot it directly, with the text attached: My construction site is recruiting workers. In one day, hundreds of workers left messages in the comment section asking where and how much it cost.

Because TikTok has already labeled the users, it will push your content to a small number of target users. The more popular your content is, the more it will be pushed to users with that label.

Author: Jian Feng

Source: Operational In-depth Selection