How did “Her Community” win tens of millions of users in four months?

Anti-counterfeiting startups have now become an extremely bright landscape in the Internet circle, but there are also times when they encounter unjust, false and wrongful cases.

Around August 11, several media outlets pointed the finger at the Her Community, which had just been launched: "After more than 40 days online, the number of downloads exceeded that of Taobao. Was Her Community faking rankings ?" 》. This title is also scary enough, the analysis logic is:

The number of downloads on her community showed an abnormal and violent growth, with the curve rising strangely within a few days: it was launched on June 21, ranked 260th on the overall list on July 26, ranked 135th on July 27, and instantly rose to 27th on July 28, and now it has climbed to 7th. The reporter found that the number of followers of her community’s official Sina Weibo account was only 170,000. For a time, doubts about chart manipulation arose one after another.

At that time, her community hurriedly found Huxiu, hoping to clarify the matter through in-depth reporting. Two months later, the doubts were proven out, and her community became the number one product in the social community category in Tencent App Store's third quarter ranking. On October 22, the search on the App Store Life Free List ranked 20th.

Okay, now the question has changed from whether there was any manipulation of the rankings to why her community had such an amazing explosion in a short period of time?

Her community is a new product, but it is not just a new product, it also tells a story of 1+1>2.

1. Serial entrepreneurs with more than ten years of experience: one majored in science, the other in liberal arts

1. He is the youngest Chinese director at Google, but he neglected the big trend of consumption

Zhou Jie, who graduated from Tsinghua University of Computer Science, was once the youngest Chinese director at Google. He was classmates with Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan, YiXin CEO Hu Chen, Tuan800 CEO Wu Xinran, and NetEase Youdao head Zhou Feng. Zhou Jie said: "When I was studying at Tsinghua University, I participated in the Chinaren project, and the seeds of entrepreneurship were planted for my classmates at that time."

After graduation, Zhou Jie, who was studying for a PhD at Yale, couldn't wait six or seven years to graduate, so he went to Google halfway through his studies. He initially worked on Google's advertising system in the United States, and later became the director in charge of Google's anti-fraud platform, also the youngest Chinese director. In 2006, Google returned to China with Kai-Fu Lee. In order to break the competition with Baidu, Google China urgently needed a product that was number one in its field, and they chose maps. After 2007, Google Maps products became stable, and Zhou Jie, who had always wanted to start his own business, left Google China and went out on his own.

Continuing his work background at Google, Zhou Jie founded an advertising precision marketing platform called "Lang Tao Jin". The company expanded rapidly at the beginning and received a US$10 million investment from Jingwei in 2010. Even large companies have encountered bottlenecks. With Baidu on one side and media resources difficult to integrate on the other, it is difficult for a company to grow big in the advertising industry. Jay Chou now often reflects on this entrepreneurial choice:

"The biggest pitfall I encountered was that when choosing a business direction, I only saw the short- and medium-term direction, but failed to see the long-term direction with consumers as the main body."

In 2012, Zhou Jie began to think about adjusting the company's business. Zhou Jie took stock of the customer resources at hand and decided to enter the women's product market. In addition, the trend of wireless terminals was obvious, so the company started to develop a new app every day, recommending women's clothing based on algorithms, and also providing virtual fitting rooms . During the 2014 Spring Festival travel rush, there was a huge explosion in the number of users of new models every day. When it comes to the strategic judgment of new projects, Zhou Jie believes:

“ Melishuo and Mogujie have already achieved great success in recommending clothes and have received many rounds of financing. Other products are indeed far behind them. However, in the entire women’s product market, other than clothing recommendations, the other markets do not seem to be so sufficient.

The team tried to insert a community section into the daily new products, and the activity was very high, so the women's community was positioned as a new direction for the company. But when it came time to get started, the team, which has always been technology-driven, seemed to be missing something.

2. He founded the largest women’s community in the PC era, but he didn’t believe in the mobile trend

The next person is also a serial entrepreneur, Wang Hongda. He started a poetry website in 1997, worked in the media at Sohu in 2001, and started Kongzhong at the end of 2003. In 2008, Wang Hongda founded Hers.com.

If you don't know Aiwu, Wang Sicong's "young model" girlfriend Xue Li is a contracted model who became popular on Aiwu some time ago.

It was very difficult when I first started my business. I moved from an office building to a basement in a residential complex and worked in the basement for a year and a half. "There was a time when I didn't have enough money to pay salaries, so I sold my car and mortgaged my house." Fortunately, by 2010, Aiwu had accumulated 30 million users and achieved a profit of more than one million that year. In 2010, Aiwu.com was considered the largest women's fashion community in China. Over the years, it attracted thousands of online shopping experts. It was also the community website that brought the most women's clothing orders to Taobao at the time, and received millions of dollars in investment from Matrix China.

Afterwards, the group buying war became popular, and Aiwu launched Aituan.com, which received more than 100,000 orders a day during its peak period. Later, mobile became popular, Meilishuo and Mogujie became popular, but Aiwu.com did not catch up. Wang Hongda made a wrong judgment: "I firmly believed that traffic was still mainly from PC, and Aiwu did not make any layout for mobile terminals."

2. When the golden wind and jade dew meet, it is better than countless things in the world

Seeing this, the next story is very clear: both focus on the women's community, Zhou Jie's team is strong in technology but lacks operations , while Wang Hongda's team is strong in operations but lacks technology. What’s even more coincidental is that they have the same investor – Jingwei. He met Jay Chou in December 2014, and after two meals they decided on a merger strategy, which was completed within two weeks.

It can be said that "when the golden wind and jade dew meet, it is better than countless things in the world."

Her community began preparations before the Spring Festival in 2015, started trial operation in March, launched the Android version in April, and the IOS version in June. During the trial operation, Daily New Products was embedded in her community module to direct traffic to her community. At that time, Daily New Products had millions of users, with hundreds of thousands of active users every day. Therefore, this group of female users with a per-customer spending of less than 100 quickly formed the first batch of seed users in her community, with more than 100,000 new users added every day, leading to the explosive growth mentioned at the beginning of the article.

Regarding the outbreak in her community, Zhou Jie believes it is "inevitable in an accident":

1. Both teams have sufficient experience. Daily New Products has accumulated a large number of users and possesses technical capabilities in products and algorithms.
2. Aiwu has also accumulated a group of talents and operational experience in the PC era, but it just needs a traffic platform to display it;
3. In addition, the popularity of female smartphone users and the formation of mobile phone usage habits have led to low expression costs;
4. Nowadays, young women aged 20-30 have a strong desire to talk and share, and the demand has reached an explosion point;
   
5. On mobile devices, there are not enough community products for women.

Zhou Jie is very optimistic about the women's community, this "blue ocean in the red ocean": "We are now ahead of the trend. Capital is still in the O2O industries that were hot last year. These industries have relatively less money and fewer competitors." Her community just completed a round of financing of 12 million US dollars in July. The company is not short of money at present, and does not rule out the possibility of larger financing in the next six months.

Two teams with completely different temperaments are merging in a short period of time. I am curious whether there will be many problems in team coordination. In fact, there is a third co-founder, Li Li, a woman sandwiched between two big men. She did a lot of work in coordinating the team. When the Aiwu team just moved to the office of Daily New Style, Li Li specially held two "blind dates" for the employees, allowing the two teams to get to know each other and integrate in an equal atmosphere, rather than one side hosting a welcome party for the other.

3. Algorithms and operations drive her community

Considering that most male readers will not use it, let me first briefly introduce the products of her community. Her community products mainly consist of "She Said" (posts, main information flow) , "Circles" (theme posts) , "Virtual House" (trial products, derived from daily new styles) , messages and mine. The main information flow is posts, and pulling down to refresh will result in the algorithm recommending popular posts. In the early days, the operators of her community manually created 100 circles, and later on, they were created by users themselves. Now her community has a total of 1,990 circles and 443 circle owners. Every time the circle is refreshed, the machine will automatically recommend 10 popular circles.

If you search for her community on Baidu, you will find many questions about how to play the "virtual house". In addition to relevant information, my page also contains many tools . My beauty profile includes five tool-type tests: dressing style, basic body shape, local body shape, my skin color, and my skin type. My test account is a zombie account that was registered not long ago, so there is not much movement, but I saw some posts with hundreds of replies and interactions, so I guess there will be a lot of small red dots flashing in the upper right corner.

Where is the moat of her community? Zhou Jie believes that the short-term user number lead is a good result. Now the number of users in her community has reached 14 million, with 1.35 million daily active users. But in the long run, the moat of a community product can only be the team itself, and this is what Zhou Jie is confident about.

Zhou Jie's Langtaojin team has deep experience in algorithms and can select high-quality content from huge amounts of data. Wang Hongda’s Aiwu team has rich operational experience and community expert resources, and more than half of the company’s 100 people are in operations. Although users have a strong desire to talk, they also need a safe community environment. Her community uses third-party verification, review of new posts, user reporting and other mechanisms to screen out the "male spies" lurking in the pollen pile.

As a community, Zhou Jie believes that the core is still content, that is, content, just content.

First, when users first enter the community, they need to judge whether the community is worth staying in. What they see is the content. At this time, operations need to seize hot topics, and algorithms need to pick out good content to keep users.

Second, her community now has more than 1 million new posts every day, but it still needs a group of mid-level V experts to write good content and create a writing atmosphere. According to her community, community posts are now pure UGC, and operations are only responsible for event planning and guidance, with no content output.

Third, it is difficult to satisfy the tastes of all users. In order to cater to each individual, a large amount of content is needed for the algorithm to learn and select.

4. Her community is heading towards a large platform

1. Can it cover all female users?

Many purely mobile products, limited by the 4-5-inch mobile phone screen, choose the "small and beautiful" vertical route, but her community is aiming for platform-level products from the beginning. Her community insists on being a community platform. It does not focus on topics and groups, but focuses on producing good content.

Zhou Jie’s logic is that, taking search as an example, there are many excellent vertical searches, but in the end only the top five brands can be remembered by people, which is difficult to achieve in vertical searches. Although vertical communities are more likely to succeed in vertical fields, they lack imagination. So her community wants to cover as many women as possible, put them all in one pot, and have them all come to her community to play. But is this possible?

The first batch of users in her community came from Daily New Styles, with an age range of 20 to 35 years old, and they often bought clothes with a per-order price of less than 100 yuan. We can roughly imagine the portrait of this group. The content of community posts is mostly about emotions, family issues, and baby photos. Later, fashion experts who love things were introduced to recommend consumer products for women. This kind of family gossip and "come on, young lady" ( the user levels of her community are divided according to the level of her harem) community atmosphere is probably difficult to attract young white-collar women in first- and second-tier cities who need style and taste.

Here the author has a judgment that if the mobile community is not deliberately emphasized, the crowd will automatically differentiate and gather to form a relatively vertical and stable crowd. It is almost impossible to fully cover all the women's platforms that her community wants. Of course, I never questioned the number of users and the level of activity in her community. Just one random emotional confusion would have hundreds of interactive messages ( I manually scrolled through hundreds of them but couldn't get through them all, so I gave up~).

In the past six months, wireless female community entrepreneurship has been a high incidence event. Media person Yu Kunkun set up Linglong Salon, which gathered "hipster" young women and played with the tone. The product is still in the beta stage, with clear target users, a unified community atmosphere, and high-quality content that can be spread. This group of users has good spending power, and in the future, shopping guides and e-commerce will be highly targeted at these users. They may become the next Xiaohongshu. Lu Binbin, who runs a financial forum, accidentally attracted a large number of female fans with his female emotional video "Binbin is reasonable". He also set up a female community on WeChat to answer emotional questions.

Although the content is not of high quality, it hits the pain point that women’s private needs for expression have not been met for a long time. Moreover, Binbinyouli entered the e-commerce and course industries early on, mainly addressing needs such as weight loss, beauty, and emotional needs, and has achieved good cash flow.

In addition, there are women's communities such as Fengmi that are currently in internal testing. These communities concentrate PC traffic and users scattered on Tianya and Douban on new mobile products according to the scenarios. The introduced scenarios set the tone for the product, and female users are naturally divided into different products according to the contact scenarios.

In addition to products that specifically enter the female market from the community, there are general tools for women such as Dayima , and products that enter the female consumption from a single category. For example, there are beauty products such as Meila, clothing shopping guide communities such as Meilishuo, and overseas shopping communities mainly for female consumers such as Xiaohongshu. This type of women's community often has clear tool or consumption topics and lacks an atmosphere for discussing private and life topics. Tool-to-community products such as Dayima often encounter bottlenecks in terms of activity.

2. Can it become a big platform?

Regarding this issue, Zhou Jie said that her community uses "algorithms" and "circles" to solve it. The content that users see is customized according to the algorithm, and different interests are carried by "circles". But in fact, this cannot attract all female users, but only makes users who fit the platform's tone play more comfortably.

There are two requirements for judging the so-called platform nature of products:

First, it serves as an entry point and is instrumental. For example, WeChat has evolved from an IM tool to a super app that can perform many other functions. Her community also has some tools for weather, recording menstrual periods, and measuring body fat, but they are not reasons to open it frequently.

Second, the number of users is large enough. Her community has 14 million users in more than half a year, with 1.35 million daily active users. It should be a high-frequency app for many users, but it is still far from being a platform.

3. Monetization depends on advertising, and you need to be a "commercial real estate"

The profit model relies solely on advertising. The media model that relies solely on advertising may sound unimaginative, but Zhou Jie believes that products need to be focused. As long as there is good content, her community will become a "commercial real estate" for women's products.

Jay Chou’s Langtaojin has already brought in a group of advertisers, which has supported a large part of its commercialization. As for the display of her community products, Zhou Jie mainly uses feed flow, which not only attracts attention but also meets the needs of users.

The feed stream highly concentrates users' attention. The more concentrated the attention is, the easier it is for the algorithm to select good content. The efficiency of content and advertising is higher, and the algorithm matching is more appropriate. WeChat also focuses attention on the main information flow and the circle of friends, trying to avoid diverting attention away from the products. This may also be the logic behind her community not engaging in commercialization such as e-commerce and courses.

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