「User acquisition」The core of new product user growth

When it comes to growth, the first thing that comes to mind for product and operations colleagues is the AARRR growth model. Today I would like to talk to you about the first A in the AARRR model, Acquisition, which means attracting new users .

Attracting new users is not something that needs to be considered only after the product is completed, nor is it just the job responsibility of sales, marketing, and operations staff. New customer acquisition work needs to be integrated into every step of product development. Next, the author will explain one by one from three aspects: determining the user scope, screening seed users, and user propagation fission .

1. Determine the user scope

At the beginning of product planning, it is necessary to consider the user range that the first version of the product needs to target, and to analyze the maximum number of users that the product is likely to cover. The most important thing at this stage is to exclude those people who are unlikely to become users of the product and to keep the focus on core functions in product planning.

Taking the “Innovation Diffusion Curve” as an example, the user range of a new product in the early stage should focus on “innovators”, “early adopters” and “early majority”.

The user range needs to be accurately determined in multiple dimensions

Take Pinduoduo as an example. When the product was first launched, Pinduoduo had a very clear definition of its user range. They mainly targeted company employees and freelancers in third- and fourth-tier cities, and took advantage of the fact that these people have a lot of fragmented time, pay attention to cost-effectiveness when shopping, and like to get small bargains. They provided a large number of popular daily necessities, snacks, clothing, shoes and other fast-moving consumer goods, and used group buying and discounts to stimulate user consumption, thereby achieving rapid business development.

After careful analysis, it was found that there is a 45.8% overlap between Pinduoduo's user base and Taobao's user base, which is much higher than JD.com's 24.9%.

User scope requires feasibility verification testing

Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, in order to launch the "Hong Kong Shopping Guide" (the predecessor of Xiaohongshu) before the Christmas sale in Hong Kong, the product manager took the internal beta version to the Shanghai Exit-Entry Administration Bureau and spent a whole day there, specifically looking for women queuing up to apply for passes to Hong Kong to try it out, and it received unanimous praise. At the same time, he carried a stack of small cards with him to distribute, with the QR code of the Xiaohongshu public account on it to guide users to follow it.

The users acquired through this channel are very accurate in terms of Xiaohongshu's product positioning: they are represented by women, most of whom are white-collar students, and they are also people who love overseas shopping.

2. Selecting seed users

After determining the user range, you also need to select the first batch of seed users from the user range. Before discussing how to select seed users, let’s first discuss a concept called “cold start”.

"Cold start", called cold boot in English, was originally a concept in the field of data mining. It means that data mining requires data accumulation, but the initial data of the product is empty or the amount of data is too small, resulting in the required amount of data not meeting the requirements. In the early stages of a product, when there is no complete functional architecture, and content and services are not perfect, the process of acquiring the first batch of users from scratch is a "cold start" process.

With the Internet now so mature, it is basically impossible to make a large and comprehensive product that is popular in the entire market. Therefore, a more appropriate approach is to first enter a field, grasp the needs of a part of users (corresponding to the "innovators" and "early adopters" in the "innovation diffusion curve"), meet their pain points, and let these users become loyal users of the product. From the usage behavior of these early users, summarize and analyze the shortcomings of the product, verify the business model of the product, strengthen and highlight the advantages, improve the shortcomings in a timely manner, and quickly remove useless and redundant functions.

When serving seed users, the core purpose is retention. Retaining these users is of great help to product transformation, subsequent operational expansion, and even strategic adjustments.

Let me share with you some famous cases of selecting seed users.

1. Zhihu: Send invitation codes to influential Internet professionals

Zhou Yuan, the founder of Zhihu, initially adopted the "killing the familiar" strategy by sending emails to invite friends.

In the first two weeks after going online in 2010, they invited about 200 users, most of whom were friends or colleagues of the founding team, almost all of whom were from the IT startup circle, including many media people or industry commentators. This small circle began to "ask and answer each other." But it is difficult for outsiders to get an invitation code, and it is almost completely closed in the initial stage.

When Zhihu gradually opened registration until the number of users reached 2,000, IT celebrities such as Lei Jun and Kai-Fu Lee emerged, contributing various high-quality answers; they also chose Zhihu as their voice platform because of the purity of the community.

In the first two years of its development, Zhihu has been using the invitation registration method to maintain the professionalism of the community, thus forming the first batch of seed users. It was not until it opened for registration in March 2013 that Zhihu made significant progress in covering a wider range of topics.

2. Facebook: Satisfy the student population first

This world's largest social networking site originated on the campus of Harvard University. When it first went online, it was only open to students from Ivy League universities, and then gradually expanded to nearby schools and even the United States and the world. This clever strategy helped it accumulate a large number of high-quality seed users in the early stages, and also aroused the interest of the outside world in integrating into this elite social circle, laying a solid foundation for its future expansion to the general public.

3. MIUI: Serving the first 100 users well

Xiaomi had accumulated a group of seed users by releasing MIUI long before launching its own mobile phones. At that time, Xiaomi's approach was to carefully select and actively invite a group of people from competitors' websites, ask them to try out the MIUI, which was still being improved, listen to their feedback, and keep them in their own forum.

On August 16, 2010, when the first version of MIUI was officially launched for internal testing, Xiaomi specially wrote the IDs of these 100 seed users on the boot screen to express its gratitude. These 100 users were affectionately called "sponsors of 100 dreams" by Xiaomi, and a micro-film was specially shot on this theme.

4. Keep: “Chief Internal Tester” + “Mine Laying Plan”

Chief Beta Tester:

Before going online, the first thing Keep did was to recruit many users who like fitness and are willing to try new things through Weibo, WeChat, QQ, and Tieba. They called these users "Chief Beta Testers". They originally planned to find 200 people to test the product, but ended up recruiting 4,000 people.

These people are particularly tolerant because they know they are internal testers and will tolerate some mistakes made by KEEP and help KEPP provide effective suggestions. Through the continuous feedback from these 4,000 people, Kepp iterated two more versions and was officially launched only after it was overall stable.

Mine laying plan:

Keep is in all fitness-related user gathering communities, such as the weight loss bar, fat loss bar, and fitness bar in Baidu Tieba, and various weight loss groups on Douban. It buries some Keep posts or content, mainly posting some fitness experience posts and maintaining the popularity of the posts. By the time the product was launched, everyone was talking about Keep.

Through these two methods, a large number of seed users were gathered, and then with the operation of Weibo + WeChat public platform, the seed users achieved a huge explosive growth.

When selecting seed users, avoid " product locusts ". " Product locusts " refer to people who use your product not because of their own needs, but as curious tourists, investors looking for projects, or product managers doing competitive product research.

They look similar to seed users and like to express their opinions and make suggestions. However, due to their insufficient research on the product and lack of understanding of the product's planning and background, it is likely that the opinions they put forward are nitpicking about some minor details or pseudo-demands of one-sided personality. The opinions put forward by these people are likely to mislead product decision makers and affect the statistical accuracy of product behavior analysis.

3. User Spread Fission

Before a product has the ability to grow and split, the cost of promotion and traffic generation is high and the results are generally not very good. We should think more about building our own ecosystem for the product and how to use technology at low cost and use the demand triggers of the product itself to achieve effective growth.

Fission depends on communication, communication depends on word of mouth, and word of mouth depends on service . The core of fission is to meet user needs and solve user pain points. Only after users’ pain points are resolved and they experience good service, can the product guide and motivate users to spread good word of mouth.

There are three core components of fission: content, channels, and activities .

(1) Content

Package the product's core functions, quality services and brand endorsement. It can be text or video, the key is to be simple and direct and highlight the attractiveness of the product. When introducing the main functions, be careful to avoid making the "basic standard" functions too exaggerated and lengthy, and be sure to highlight the core features and the core that distinguishes it from your competitors.

(2) Channels

A platform or individual that can generate dissemination behavior. Including active communities, KOLs and new media. Similar to platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, each platform has its own user base. When choosing a fission channel, you must make sure that the user base of your product matches the channel user base.

(3) Activities

Operational activities are used to stimulate users' enthusiasm for spreading good word of mouth. Make different activity plans based on different user attributes. Common forms of fission activities include: group buying, checking in, collecting coupons, prize tasks, voting, and lucky draws. These activities have become very mature and can be seen on major e-commerce and group buying shopping platforms.

In addition, ASO, SEO and soft-text promotion are also good ways to promote growth. Different growth strategies need to be adopted at different stages of product development. For a new product, promoting growth is also a process of testing and optimizing the product. This stage requires product leaders to respond quickly and know how to make trade-offs.

Author: Kevin

Source: Kevin