How did Meilishuo attract its first 1 million users?

How did Meilishuo attract its first 1 million users?
Meilishuo was founded in 2009 and now has nearly 10 million mobile users. His early user promotion was 1 million, but how did he do it? Let me reveal the secret to you below.

500 yuan seed user The preparation for Meilishuo began in mid-2009. During a meal and conversation with a female colleague (who later became the operations director of Meilishuo), Xu Yirong keenly discovered the need to "share shopping with girlfriends." At the same time, he noticed that in Wudaokou, where he had lived for many years, roadside vendors began to set up stalls at 4 o'clock every afternoon, and a considerable portion of them sold girls' clothes and accessories. Girls living in Wudaokou are becoming more and more beautiful and fashionable. Xu Yirong wants to bring this trend online through Internet services. At that time, mobile Internet had not yet emerged, and the typical idea was to develop a client. So he found someone to work part-time and spent a month developing a browser plug-in called "Guangguang". As a result, the "prototype" of Meilishuo was cumbersome to install, and test users were not convinced. In the end, there were only 4 or 5 users, all of whom were internal staff. In November 2009, Weibo started in the country. Xu Yirong began to consider combining Internet communication technology with vertical fields, borrowing the model of Weibo and combining it with women's fashion, opening up a new battlefield for homogeneous merchants who were accustomed to price wars, and telling different stories to prove their own characteristics. After several weeks of tinkering, in March 2010, with only one R&D, one product, one operation, one formation and one consultant with knowledge of fashion in the team, the first version of Meilishuo was officially launched. From day one, Meilishuo positioned itself as a vertical online community, focusing on women's fashion categories. Its target audience is fashionable and beauty-loving white-collar and quasi-white-collar women aged between 18 and 35 with an annual salary of around 100,000 yuan in first- and second-tier cities. The product form is basically a more vertical Weibo. Users can post links, generate pictures, follow people of interest, and browse products in the product library. At the beginning of the launch, team members were not very sure whether users would accept it, so they asked people around them to test it. It turned out that after testing more than 20 people, no one stayed. There is an anxious colleague who always complains to Xu Yirong: Yirong, ours is not good enough, how can we compare with others. At that time, the mainstream women's fashion communities were still 55BBS and YOKA, which had obvious traffic advantages. However, relying on his understanding and grasp of the rigid demand of female users who "want to become beautiful", Xu Yirong firmly continued to call on the team to recruit people to try the product. According to Xu Yirong's recollection, he and his colleagues sneaked into various shopping guide QQ groups, but they were kicked out by the administrators before they could send a few promotional links. If the hard way doesn’t work, try the soft way. They found the group owner, paid him 500 yuan per month, and asked him to bring people in the circle to join in. In May, two groups with a size of about 100 people and a low user churn rate were finally formed. One of them came from a shopping group on Douban, and the group leader liked fresh and interesting Internet products very much. On the last day of July, there were more than 400 users online at the same time. The ecstatic Xu Yirong led all the employees to Golden Leopard for a big meal, and everyone got drunk in the end. By August, Meilishuo had more than 10,000 active users, and the number of items shared daily increased to 1,000. By the end of the third quarter, traffic had doubled. By the end of the year, the daily IPs increased to 50,000 to 70,000. Reject the man's world The standard color of the Meilishuo website is determined to be rose pink. The team thought about this for a long time. Since they wanted to provide vertical social services for women, they had to drive the men out and prevent them from coming in to cause trouble and destroy the community atmosphere. For this reason, blue and green were eliminated from the alternatives. At the same time, since the target users are white-collar workers in the city, neither Internet cafe girls nor ladies who buy luxury goods, black or other colors are not suitable. The rose pink that was finally selected was once ridiculed or puzzled by peers, but now it seems that the main color of similar websites in the industry has gradually become pink, and there is a reason for this. Meilishuo allows men to browse, but registration is strictly prohibited. When it first became a hot topic in the industry, I tried to register through Sina Weibo to experience it in depth. As a result, the system learned of my male identity through my Weibo information, clearly informed me that only women could register, and forcibly ended the registration process. No matter how I change my gender later, it doesn't help. Even if the gentlemen successfully "go undercover" and use Fan Bingbing's portrait on their posts, they will be resolutely banned once they are discovered. Xu Yirong even summarized a set of experience on how to judge users by "profile pictures": "There are almost no real beauties who use beautiful women as profile pictures on the Internet. Real beauties usually use small flowers, grass, dogs and cats, or daily life photos as profile pictures." The engine of community activity Meilishuo divides users into four types: The first category is fashion experts, numbering around 300 people. For brand promotion purposes, they need to look good. Meilishuo signed cooperation agreements with them and became their agents, paying considerable fees to encourage them to remain active (this fee has gradually decreased as the platform has grown). For Meilishuo employees, the discovery, operation and maintenance of fashion influencers are the most important KPIs. The second category is super users, which are the core of the site. There are no requirements for the appearance of a super user, but they must be very knowledgeable about fashion, have a strong desire to express themselves, and be responsible for creating and producing high-quality content. This type of user accounts for about 5% of the entire user base. The third type of users are active users. They love fashion and dress beautifully. Although they may not be able to create content, they are at least willing to spread it and will recommend things they are interested in to their friends. The fourth type of users are the demand crowd. Their behavior is driven by demand. They will wander around freely and search. After finding the goods they want to buy, they will turn around and leave until they come back next time when they have new needs. Super users and active users are the main group of Meilishuo, with a current size of about 5 million people. They are the engine driving the community's activity. The long tail of the demand group is even larger, ranging from approximately 20 million to 60 million, and the information for their consumption depends on the creation of the first two groups. With the contributions of fashion experts and super users, Meilishuo produces a large amount of high-quality content every day. One of the classic features is called "Flip Magazine", which is similar to a public favorites. It allows opinion leaders to organize their favorite products into categories and make themed magazines, such as "Vintage Paintings", "Sweet Style", and "Accessories Collection". The "Mori Girl" style is a dressing concept that has become popular in China in recent years. It originated in Japan and the overall look is "like coming out of a forest." A conservative estimate is that there may be more than 200,000 people in this group in China. Meilishuo organized popular "magazines" related to Mori girls into easy-to-read graphic and text formats and posted them on its own social network, effectively introducing backflow from the outside. From February 2011 to the end of the year, Meilishuo's various indicators increased by at least 30 times. Sharing links smarter Share a URL in Meilishuo, and the system will automatically crawl important product information contained in the page, including titles, pictures, etc. Users can make predictions directly from the shared link without clicking on the original website. This practice is now common on websites such as Douban and Zhihu, and has become an industry standard. But few people know that this idea first came from Wang Xinmi, the product director of Meilishuo. When he first came up with the design draft, Xu Yirong was "stunned". He did not expect that this long-standing but difficult to solve problem in the industry could be solved in such a technically simple way. Traditional fashion magazines allow users to view pictures but not click on links, and the attached QR codes have a low scanning rate. Although communities such as Meilishuo can send links, users do not know what they are and are unwilling to click on them. A netizen once made an analogy: It's like sending you a photo of a beautiful woman but not giving her contact information. The new system reduces the cost of user judgment and improves the efficiency of dressing. According to statistics, in the first quarter of 2012, Meilishuo brought about 500 million traffic to downstream e-commerce websites, with an average of 5 million clicks per day. During this stage, Meilishuo will also provide a certain amount of rebates or group purchase prices to users who successfully purchase through the shopping guide links. This has also attracted a considerable number of female users who are extremely sensitive to discounts. Snowballing of small tests Psychological tests and fun quizzes have always been popular consumption content for girls. Regardless of whether the results are accurate or not, everyone is happy to check themselves in and have a beautiful vision of their ideal self. Xu Yirong accidentally saw the potential in it, so during the period of rapid development of Weibo, he led the team to develop dozens of small test programs on Weibo, covering psychological age tests, personality based on blood type, what type of obsessive-compulsive disorder you have, and of course, "Test which character you are in The Legend of Zhen Huan" by leveraging popular TV series such as "The Legend of Zhen Huan". At its peak, we could launch six to seven models every week. To open the small test done by Meilishuo, users must first pass the authorization authentication of Weibo. After that, you will usually have to do a few simple multiple-choice questions, such as choosing your favorite color, the thing you most don't want to lose, the name of your favorite animal, etc. The program will calculate the corresponding scores through different permutations and combinations and come up with a result - of course, these results are purely for fun and "for reference only." There is also a "brainless" test. You only need to authorize Weibo and it will automatically determine "what your occupation was in your previous life" based on your nickname. Meilishuo deliberately made the test results so that they can only be seen after being shared. When curious users share and view the results, it naturally brings promotion to Meilishuo. This viral spread is quite effective. Although the life cycle of a small test can be as short as three to five days or as long as two weeks, it can usually reach a user base ranging from hundreds of thousands to three hundred thousand. For a while, the Moments were flooded with all kinds of tests. The same gameplay was later copied and applied to QQ Space. After more than a year of development, Meilishuo has accumulated about 3.6 million fans on Sina Weibo and more than 17 million fans on QQ Zone, and the majority of the fans are real women. According to Xu Yirong's observation, among the people who come to Meilishuo through Sina Weibo, there are relatively more opinion leaders. These people are relatively mature and like to talk. QQ Space is mainly composed of a large number of women from second-tier and third-tier cities, and there are many active participants and followers. Chinese white-collar women are the main body of the middle class. They have various demands and expectations for life and hope that a good life will accompany them. Xu Yirong hopes that Meilishuo can help them in this regard. Search Engine Optimization Xu Yirong's wife Wang Mengqiu was once the vice president of product technology at Baidu. I won’t say much else. Mobile layout With the rapid growth of traffic on the Meilishuo website and the booming development of mobile Internet, the strategy of deploying mobile terminals has been put on the agenda. On July 22, 2011, the iPhone version of Meilishuo was officially released, and the number of downloads exceeded 100,000 two weeks later. As to why the iPhone platform was chosen as the first choice, the person in charge, Hu Song, believed that the spread of fashion is top-down, and women's shopping guide products that focus on fashion should first be made for the iPhone, and then adjusted and extended. Although Android is huge in scale, its versions are fragmented, and the sizes and color differences of screens from different manufacturers are not standardized. In the early days, it was only suitable for general tool applications. In summary, he believes that mobile products for shopping guide communities contain the following major rules: First, among the terminal users of several platforms, most are novice users who use the WAP mobile web version to access the platform, and are prone to impulse buying when they see cheap things; iPhone users have strong purchasing power and are not very sensitive to prices; Android users are the most stingy and do not spend much, but the click-through rate of advertisements is several times that of iPhone users, presenting a situation of "curious about everything, trying everything, but just not buying"; second, female shopping guide communities need to be based on high-end models. iPad users have the strongest purchasing power, and the shopping guide experience for low-end models is difficult to provide due to screen size limitations. Third, in terms of user composition, 80% of users use models priced above 2,000 yuan. The number of iOS and Android users is similar overall, but the total revenue of the former is 2 to 2.5 times that of the latter. Fourth, in the user's behavioral data, the most popular action is "like", which is to collect it for personal enjoyment, with an average daily click number of millions. In comparison, few people click on the altruistic “share” option. The first version of the Meilishuo mobile client is based on the Webkit kernel and developed with HTML5. Such a cross-platform solution will help reduce the cost of future Android version development and can effectively connect web content with application data. But after the product was launched, it was found that HTML5 was not yet mature and did not support features such as calling the camera to read local files and gesture recognition. Later, the development team adopted a combination of HTML5 and native code, using HTML5 for operational content and native code for non-operational content. This is also the standard development strategy for many mobile applications in the future. There are two design principles for the Meilishuo mobile client: first, an application should only do one thing; second, it should take users no more than three steps to reach their desired content. The early product versions included functional modules such as "My Attention", "Popular", "Take Photos Together", and "Find Girlfriends". The idea of ​​"shoot together" comes from the photo app Instagram. The R&D team believes that women love to show off their beauty and have a need to collect images, and that showing each other their images can form a community. However, subsequent operations proved that "Take Photos Together" could indeed contribute a certain number of pictures to Meilishuo every day, with 10,000 to 20,000 pictures at its peak, but it failed to form a community. It's like building a shopping mall to sell clothes and placing a photo booth machine next to it. Users will take photo booths while shopping in the mall, but the mall and photo booths provide completely different values, and the latter is not an organic part of the former. The launch of the "Find Girlfriend" function was completely a user demand imagined by the R&D team. "We believe that if users have close friends here, they can shop together and the user experience will be better. But the reality is that women don't have much demand for this in mobile applications. This function requires setting up a certain scene and then guiding users to discover it. Simply looking for close friends seems awkward." So these two functions were either cut or buried deep. It took two months from adding functions to subtracting them. The peak usage of the Meilishuo mobile app is at 11 pm, lasting about 24-26 minutes. This means that girls spend most of the half hour before going to bed browsing on Meilishuo. 30% of mobile users use the web version, and the remaining 70% basically only use Meilishuo on their mobile phones. The rapid development of the iOS version is largely due to Apple's official recommendation. Apple attaches great importance to design. If a newly launched application is well-designed and of high quality, it is relatively easy to attract the attention of editors, and it is difficult to imitate. In order to increase user coverage and direct traffic to the main application, Meilishuo has also launched seven independent sub-applications with different styles, such as European and American style, Xinwei Ruili style, Hello Kitty Cute Animal Magazine, etc. The target audience and product value of these applications are very clear. They were well received after their launch and brought in hundreds of thousands of users in a short period of time. In fact, in addition to the appearance of each application being packaged closer to the theme style, the content is completely customized and output from the main site background, which is low-cost and easy to mass produce. Regarding paid promotion, Hu Song said that the promotion cost of women's shopping guide communities such as Meilishuo is different from that of other tool and game products. If the CPC conversion rate of games is 10%, one user can be acquired for 3 yuan. Dianping.com is about 5%. The rate for Meilishuo is 1-2%. In the fourth quarter of 2011, the promotion costs of Meilishuo mobile client reached 5 million yuan. In 2012, as the cost of acquiring a single user was further pushed up, Meilishuo's strategy quietly changed: on the one hand, it made a good product and spread it through word of mouth; on the other hand, it strengthened cooperation with mobile phone manufacturers and upstream and downstream applications. For example, we cooperate with some mobile phone manufacturers that focus on female concepts to provide in-depth customization, and guide traffic to each other with upstream and downstream applications such as photography and e-commerce. Embrace the platform At the end of 2010, suddenly one day, a friend who worked in Taobao Alliance indirectly found Xu Yirong and claimed that Meilishuo brought good traffic to Taobao and the model was quite interesting, and he wanted to cooperate. He also gave some tips on how to motivate users to increase click-through rates. The cooperation between Meilishuo and Taobao officially started from that point on. Xu Yirong clearly remembers that the first shopping guide commission Taobao paid to Meilishuo was 28 cents - two items, 0.6 cents each and 2.2 cents each. This model has been proven to generate real revenue, and the entire team is excited. Later, more than 70% of Meilishuo’s traffic was directed to Taobao. Meilishuo has its own technological genes and will monitor and analyze the effectiveness of each channel to promote it in a more scientific and efficient manner. In 2011, Meilishuo's own traffic soared rapidly. In a traffic analysis in June, the data showed that a considerable proportion of users would frequently send each other links to Meilishuo on QQ, resulting in word-of-mouth spread. The Tencent QQ team also noticed this situation and later included the Meilishuo link in the QQ chat whitelist. In this way, when users post a Meilishuo link, the chat window can directly preview the product image, price, and comments, which is a very good experience. Later, in April 2012, Zhang Xiaolong, vice president of Tencent, invited Meilishuo to join the open platform beta test period. Meilishuo accepted without hesitation and flew to Guangzhou on the third day to discuss the matter. The product staff stayed in Guangzhou for two days and finalized the main details of the cooperation with the WeChat team. After returning to Beijing, they finalized the prototype and process within just one week and entered the development phase. On April 24, Meilishuo announced that it had become one of the first applications to log on to the WeChat open platform. Users can share their content in Meilishuo to WeChat. Meilishuo is also the only application among this group of partners that mainly targets female users. Gather traffic and stick to your dream Looking back at the development path of Meilishuo, it can be roughly summarized into three stages: the first stage is to form a community where everyone can shop together; the second stage is to sort out all the products and make them into an aesthetic shopping guide catalog, which is then directed to external e-commerce websites, that is, to acquire traffic at a lower cost and sell it at a higher price; the third stage is to continue to dig deeper into the needs of white-collar women and continuously expand and enrich the community's ecosystem. If traffic is compared to water, then today's Meilishuo has gathered not only the vast oceans, rivers, lakes, but also the trickles of water, wells and springs, and has not let go of even a can of bottled water. Xu Yirong claims that he is a person who likes to summarize. Talking about the success of Meilishuo, his understanding is: Entrepreneurship requires dreams, not ideals. Dreams are determined by your heart, they may not come true, but you will like them. Ideals are determined by your brain, which can easily put too much pressure on yourself. As the saying goes, more haste makes waste. When people are praised too highly, they will lose their composure. Now that I’m running Meilishuo, I hope to slow myself down, stop comparing myself with others all the time, and first perfect the user experience. Everything else is just empty talk. If you have a dream, stick to it and follow the trend. "What I made before was what I liked. Now I think what I make should be what the market needs and what everyone likes." Obviously, the technical experts of that time have found their own place in the business world.

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