Former Douban Operations Director: How to acquire high-quality seed users?
1. Construction seed usersThe so-called constructive seed users are generally suitable for large UGC (User Generated Content) communities. The UGC community's demand for seed users is that they hope that the seed users can have UGC qualities (which we understand as the ability to produce content and activate the community atmosphere) so that the website has a good starting atmosphere. There is a very classic story here. Of course, this story is not a story about seed user operation, but a detail of seed user operation, that is, Airbnb. As a p2p house sharing community, it has a very important visual appeal, which is that the photos of the house must have a very good visual experience. In this case, they found many photographers to take pictures, and after doing so, the transaction volume increased significantly. From this story, we can see that this kind of constructive seed user needs to ensure a certain quality of original content. Well, there are actually two famous websites that can be used as examples of how to acquire constructive seed users: one is Douban, where I used to work, and the other is Zhihu. Douban actually had a very good community atmosphere in its early days. We all know that Douban was originally a website focusing on "books". For a website like this, it is not easy to obtain high-quality or diverse book tastes and reviews. At that time, Douban's first batch of seed users came more from Abei's (Douban founder Yang Bo) own life experience. Abei is actually a very famous programmer in the domestic Pascal community, so almost all of Douban’s early users came from the Pascal community. The programmers here are different from the programmers now. If we find some programmers to set up a reading forum now, I believe it will be an anime gathering. But at that time, the entire Pascal community members covered a wide range of topics, including philosophy books, high-quality literature books, humanities books, etc., and programmers in the entire community were using a product called Blog, so these members all had good UGC literacy, and they were already very accustomed to compiling long articles. Therefore, they have these two attributes: first, they are good at and accustomed to writing long articles; second, they have rich tastes and high-quality reading demands and are very diverse. This makes them a very good source of seed users in Douban's early construction stage. So Douban did a particularly good job in the early days based on the Pascal programmer community. This story is not only an example of finding constructive seed users, but also a very good and counterintuitive source of constructive seed users. Logically speaking, if I want to create a reading community, who can read books directly? It seems that I should go to the college to find some students to do it, but intuitively, students do not have the good habit of writing long UGC articles. So from this perspective, Douban's acquisition of seed users is very counterintuitive, and this counterintuitiveness is precisely the important source of Douban's ability to build a great community atmosphere in its early days. This is also a very important lesson in the Stanford Entrepreneurship Class, taught by Paul Graham: Many things in the early stages of entrepreneurship are counterintuitive. This is indeed very important. If some paths are counterintuitive, then the correctness of this path may be very high. Let’s take another very intuitive example of Zhihu: If we say that China now has two communities with very good UGC atmosphere, it can be said that Douban existed earlier and Zhihu exists now. Zhihu now poses a great challenge to Douban in many areas. There is a very popular movie recently called "Mad Max 4". Logically speaking, film reviews are Douban's base camp and its core competitiveness. However, the most popular review of this film is on Zhihu rather than Douban. Many people know about "Mad Max 4" through this Zhihu movie review that went viral online. From this perspective, it is indeed a big challenge. The early development of Zhihu is a very good example of constructive seed users. A community like Zhihu definitely needs high-quality answers. In fact, this was a very funny, sarcastic type of answer that was formed on Zhihu during the period before the Zhihu Daily was created. Even now, there are still quite long answers with pictures and text on Zhihu. It is not easy to build this kind of atmosphere. In the early days of Zhihu, this kind of atmosphere was achieved through an invitation system. Zhihu was an invitation-based community in its early days, and not everyone could answer questions. This invitation system continues to influence Zhihu today. Users raise questions and invite people to answer them, and the invited people generally take the matter very seriously. Zhihu is a bit like Douban in this respect. The early invitees came from the Internet crowd and programmers. We know that programmers use a website called getup to manage code. Programmers have the habit of writing long documents, and have aesthetic and strict requirements. Therefore, many long-text UGC communities originated mainly from programmers. Zhihu also expanded from the Internet circle in its early days. We will leave a point here and talk about it later. Is it a good idea to use Internet users as seed users to expand the company? Because many Internet entrepreneurs are in the circle, your products are used by many Internet people, so many Internet products have a deep Internet imprint, such as Huihui and Yuefan. This may not be a good idea. We will talk about another type of seed users later and focus on this aspect. Back to Zhihu, as a representative of this type of constructive seed users, Zhihu was very clear in its early days that if registration was allowed in the Internet era when Zhihu was launched, one topic would attract many people, and the early community atmosphere would not be maintained. Therefore, Zhihu's invitation-based approach did a good job of community operation in the early transition period. The invitation system has two functions: one is to screen early users, and the second one we will talk about when we talk about community seed users below. Taking these two examples, does it mean that there is no other way to build a UGC seed user community except for Internet programmers? In fact, not necessarily. I think there are two types of UGC for constructive seeds: one type of UGC is the typical long-text UGC, and the second type of UGC has many other forms, like NICE which is UGC with pictures. For example, what I am doing now, Xianjie, is doing UGC of items, and what we need to obtain are good items. All of these things are to understand where your users are. What you need to do next is to work hard. The means of acquiring users is a matter of patience and how much effort you put in. Let's take ourselves as an example. In the early days, we hoped that good things would enter the community. You can imagine that we are now operating in a very good atmosphere. We want the items that people put in, whether they are electronic products, books or other items, to be of very good quality. There are many high-quality iwatches on Xiangjie now, which makes many people find it unbelievable. There are also very few bestsellers on Xiangjie, and the degree of diversity is also very high. This is related to the atmosphere of "uploading good things" formed by our early seed users. I know that many second-hand communities have fallen into this trap. There are all kinds of weird things on them: cosmetics, clothes, very broken and worn-out mobile phones, etc., which makes the atmosphere there very bad. Therefore, we emphasized the acquisition of constructive seed users in the early stages. For us, people who are curious about good things, have aesthetic ability and want to obtain good things are a source of our seed users. In the early days, we sent a lot of private messages in communities like newone and Zhihu, and used this method to acquire many constructive seed users. Our product was launched at the end of October last year. It was an internal beta version. During the internal beta version, we tried to invite seed users to participate. Almost all seed users were obtained through these channels. And a very important point is that, generally speaking, you will be eager to seek talented people when acquiring seed users. If others can use it, it will be considered as a face for you, so you will definitely want to strongly invite others to use it. But we were not like that at the time. We used one question for screening and we were very strict in looking for early seed users. We write a very sincere invitation letter copy, but it does not mean that you can enter immediately after receiving the copy. Instead, you need to fill out a form first. Through this form, we can obtain your daily behavior habits before you use our products. In this way, there will be no loss of users, and the conversion rate will definitely increase, giving users a psychological hint that they will cherish this opportunity and this community more. So we did put in a lot of hard work in the early days, inviting people on various forums, trying to use various keyword methods to find some users and conduct secondary screening. The number is huge, we have sent out enough invitations and have enough patience to do this. So far, Xianjie has been doing one thing very well and one of its unique features is that compared to all the idle items in the community, the items on Xianjie are the best. This is the first constructive seed user suitable for all communities with strong UGC and strong user quality. You must understand what kind of people to find to become your seed users to maintain a good atmosphere.2. Verification type seed usersThe demand of the constructive seed users just mentioned is to build a UGC atmosphere, and the verification seed users actually see whether this demand exists. Many examples of verified seed users come from the e-commerce field, especially vertical products. What needs to be done is to verify whether the market is big enough. Of course, the product can be sold, but what is important is how much can be sold, what is the conversion rate, and is its market demand a niche demand or a mass demand? Therefore, the core point of verification-type seed users lies in the scope of users to be found. For example: suppose I create a community for anime products. If I go to a die-hard fan and anime forum to find my seed users, then of course they have the demand to buy. What I need to do now is to know how big the scale can be. Wanting to do big business but using all core users for verification is a problem for many e-commerce products. It is true that products can be sold by finding core users for verification, but the ceiling is very low and can be easily reached. Verification seed users are very similar to many questionnaire-based consulting companies looking for consulting samples. Your sampling samples must be representative and extensive enough. Therefore, the number of verified seed users must be sufficiently representative. A representative community like this in the early days was Xianyu (Taobao second-hand). Of course, Xianyu’s own seed users are very simple. It obtains seed users through Alibaba channels because it is the original Alibaba second-hand and then adapted to mobile Internet . Well, from this perspective, although it is not replicable, that is, none of us has Alibaba's backing and we don't have such traffic, but at least Xianyu did not start from some very niche categories to make a high-quality second-hand product, because Xianyu's second-hand products are more refined than traditional ones. In the process of verifying this quality, if some very niche circles are involved, it will certainly appear to be a high-quality product, but it will be very bad in terms of popularity. In this regard, if we can reach a certain scale and start from Taobao second-hand products, the popularity can be guaranteed.3. Diffusion seed usersMany communities want to find such users to help achieve influence. But it is extremely difficult to acquire such users. I have two good examples to illustrate this, which are Xiaomi and Tesla : When Xiaomi first started to diffuse seed users, it was MIUI rather than Xiaomi mobile phones. When MIUI was acquiring seed users, it did not actually make much use of Lei Jun's personal influence. Its initial seed users were actually the so-called 100 super users. The acquisition of super users is not simply to assume that forum moderators are super users. During this process, Xiaomi spent a lot of effort to study which community forum users were the most active and influential. If you often visit football fan forums, you will find that many active users do not actually have influence, and influential users are not necessarily active. Therefore, Xiaomi actually spent a lot of time studying who are the super users of the forum and who are more influential in the Internet's ROM ecosystem. Because before Xiaomi, there were also many people who released various ROMs, but the truly influential ones were not necessarily the people who made the ROMs, but the people who had the ability to evaluate the ROMs horizontally, point out bugs, and make suggestions. And this group of people is what Xiaomi needed in its early days. There is a misunderstanding here. Many people think that diffusive seed users and KOLs are the same, but this is not the case. First of all, KOLs are paid. They don’t like the product and take the initiative to act as a salesman for you, but they make money by selling their own traffic. So they are very different from diffusion-type seed users. Diffusion-type seed users can actually follow up, while KOLs use your product once and never again. The marketing seed users we will talk about later all have this kind of characteristics, and they will not continue to help you spread your products. Therefore, in the early days, Xiaomi did not look for a few celebrities or stars to be its seed users. Instead, it looked for users in the flashing circle who could continuously make requests to Xiaomi and interact with it. Only in this way could it gain traffic in various forums. People usually use Weibo, WeChat, communities, and forums. However, the influence of real KOLs is actually limited. They can attract people to this place, but they cannot attract people to stay. A good path to attract people to stay is those diffusive seed users who go out and attract users in. So if your community needs a good reputation, then what you need to operate are community-based seed users, not KOLs. Let’s talk about Tesla. Tesla’s early seeds included both some KOL users and a large number of diffusion-type users. Because the people who bought Tesla in the early days were some upstarts. They might not be particularly rich, nor might they be famous celebrities, but they felt that they had a good taste in life. In the early days, Tesla adopted an invitation-based purchase system. Because the quantity was very limited in the early days, many people could not get their cars and even went to protest. Therefore, Tesla's early users were not particularly famous. For example, Huang Yimeng, the founder of eMule, had a general influence on the public, but he did have a certain influence on the early core buyer circle. Therefore, for many hardware products, diffusive seed users are still very important. You must get into this circle and find the person with diffusive potential.4. Community seed usersThis type of seed users requires each other to identify their identities, which means that I must know that the people joining this community have the same identity as me before I am willing to join. There are two points to such a community: the first is to lock in identity, and the second is to find these people. Generally speaking, such communities have a strong invitation mechanism. This invitation is different from the invitation on Zhihu. Zhihu's invitation is the ability to screen users, and users need to have UGC demands; the community's screening is to hope that users have an identity. For example, on Aibai Mama.com, only children born in Harmony Family can become members of the network. Another example is Zhenghe Island. The Zhenghe Island community requires a very strong identity recognition, but it has nothing to do with us. It is a social platform for high-end entrepreneurs. It requires the company to have annual sales revenue of 100 million in the previous year and no major disciplinary records in three years. In addition, the company must abide by Zhenghe Island’s own set of similar precepts before being able to join. Let’s look at the example of P1, which is a trendy community where people dress up beautifully to go to Sanlitun . The two methods it used to acquire seed users in the early stage are very interesting. It used to do street photography in China, so P1 would send many photographers to the Lido Hotel and the vicinity of Sanlitun to take pictures of people who were dressed very fashionably. These fashionably dressed men and women who come to Sanlitun have certain demands for being seen by others for their appearance, so they can get two things at once: the seed users themselves and the materials disseminated by the seed users. Then it posted all kinds of street photos online, causing many people to want to join, but it is still an invitation-only community and ordinary people cannot enter. The proportion of friends of trendy people who are also trendy people is higher, so they will send an invitation to these trendy people, saying that you can invite your friends in, which creates an atmosphere where rare goods are in high demand - I especially hope that I can be photographed and posted on P1, so many people will dress up beautifully and go to those places (waiting to be photographed), and some people will even ask the photographers of P1 if they can take a photo for them when they see them. So they have formed a very strong community atmosphere of common identity, and the same is true for the Aibai Moms Club. This kind of community that requires identity recognition, has a screening mechanism, and is promoted through interpersonal relationships is extremely good. Mothers like this know each other in the delivery room of Harmony Family Hospital. After giving birth and staying in the hospital for a few days, they will get to know each other and form a good circle. There are many such WeChat groups . Many mothers are happy to share their parenting experiences. Before having children, they do not have such a strong motivation to socialize. After having children, they add all kinds of people, which will automatically screen out a group of very fashionable and wealthy mothers. Therefore, Aibai Mama.com obtained very early seed users from this aspect, and the valuation of 30,000 people is very objective, because this part of users is very accurate, highly active, and has a strong sense of identity. In fact, other mother-child communities will have identity issues because women are particularly sensitive to identity and community atmosphere. If a woman feels that other mothers in the community are not the same as her, it will greatly detract from the user experience. Therefore, women's communities must establish a good identity when acquiring seed users. People with a sense of identity will definitely form associations and circles in real life, so when looking for seed users, you must find such WeChat groups or old forums and infiltrate them, so that you can "catch them all in one fell swoop." For example, when it comes to entrepreneurship, I am in various entrepreneurship groups and I can clearly feel that the atmosphere of each WeChat group is different. The people in it are very different, especially the active ones. They basically make direct screening based on identity recognition. So suppose I create an entrepreneurial community and release an entrepreneurial product, then I certainly will not bring in all entrepreneurs. This is impossible. Many products have failed because of this - they try everywhere to attract entrepreneurs, but find that everyone has no identity recognition and it is difficult to form a good atmosphere. If you really want to build a good entrepreneurial community, you must realize that there are very strong identity differences in this circle, and different entrepreneurs just can't communicate with each other. You must find the core people, and such people have already joined large and small WeChat groups centered on interpersonal circles, and can help you with the screening. Therefore, it is very important to screen this type of community seed users. Characteristics of the above four types of seed users The above four types of seed users are what I think are the most typical user classifications and the most typical things to do and channels to obtain seed users. On the other hand, these four types of users need to pay attention to the matters during the operation process: Constructive seed users: To obtain the core KPI, the most important thing is the quantity and quality of UGC. Verification-type seed users: After obtaining seed users, a lot of verification of the secondary purchase rate is required, especially for e-commerce, which determines the success or failure of obtaining this batch of seed users. What needs to be emphasized here is that if the second purchase rate is too high, then it will definitely not be successful, because very few things have a particularly high second purchase rate - either your promotion is too aggressive, or you are not finding the right seed users. Diffusion-type seed users: The key is to see the growth of the community. Just like Lei Jun said, the first one million users don’t spend any money. If you really don’t spend any money and find the first one million users, it means you are doing it right. Community seed users: The most intuitive verification method is activity. If there really is identity recognition, then the activity level will be much higher than other communities. These four types are the most representative.5. Marketing seed usersMarketing seed users just need to find a group of KOLs. Let’s take two bad examples: Sohu Weibo and Huajiao Live. Sohu Weibo is a Weibo that uses celebrities as its selling point. For example, at that time in Beijing, a large group of celebrities did commune advertising: I am using Sohu Weibo, I am using Sohu Weibo... After that, many people were attracted by the celebrities and registered for Sohu Weibo, but what happened after using it? The effect was not good. Because Sina Weibo already existed at that time, they should have attracted community-type seed users, and only when everyone identified with each other could they play on it. Celebrities are all for marketing, they have no other demands and cannot create a healthy atmosphere. The same is true for Huajiao Live. They found a bunch of small celebrities to use it, but the problem is that these small celebrities definitely don’t know how to use Huajiao Live. You find that they are using it when the screen opens. After you go in and follow these small celebrities, you find that they haven’t posted a status for several months. So Huajiao Live is now starting to live broadcast beauty reality shows. It can be seen that the early use of marketing-oriented seed users is problematic. I think the best time for marketing seed users to enter is in the middle and late stages of the product, when the volume needs to explode. Doing it in the early stages can easily lead to high expectations among users, who then fail to be satisfied after they come in.6. Data seed usersThis type of seed user is very special and requires entrepreneurs to have strong capabilities. Why are they called data-type seed users? In simple terms, it means that you are very clear about the "numbers" required for a certain project at a certain stage. To put it bluntly, entrepreneurs need investment. In each round, investors actually look at some core data, or the story and logic that you tell investors are based on these data. Therefore, from this perspective, if the entrepreneur is very experienced, he will know exactly what number he wants. To put it bluntly, the seed users he is looking for are to make up this "number". Once this "number" is reached, he can get the next round of financing. So, as an experienced entrepreneur, I went back to think about this problem. This is my own experience, and I am also doing it myself. Many entrepreneurs can think about this problem: you can think from the above five categories. Making a product is to maintain a product's basic data, user volume, user activity and some core marketing data. In fact, this model considers: What do users need and what do I provide to them? What characteristics do early users have? But we must also understand that there is another logic: if you have a profit and loss statement, the source of profit on the profit and loss statement is venture capital. Therefore, on the one hand, the product is made for users to see, and on the other hand, the product has a strong purpose of completing the framework standards and evaluation goals required by venture capital. On this basis, you must know what data you want, and this data is actually strongly related to the seed users. I think entrepreneurs really need to think about this issue. On the one hand, they should think about the actual needs of users, and on the other hand, they should think about the financing nodes of each part and come up with a number. Coming up with this number is the next round of financing. What data? What kind of users are needed to realize this data? What kind of matching means are needed? This is also an important thing. APP Top Promotion (www.opp2.com) is the top mobile application promotion platform in China, focusing on mobile application promotion operation methods, experience and skills, channel ASO optimization ranking, and sharing App marketing dry goods . Welcome to follow the official WeChat public account : appganhuoThis article is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Reprinting this article must be approved by Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article! |
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