How does product operation perform a cold start on a product?

Cold start is a dirty and tiring job, and it requires hard work to maintain every user who is willing to try. Accumulate user base while honing the team's internal strength to prepare for future growth.

What does a cold start mean?

A complete product life cycle can be roughly divided into four stages: investment stage, growth stage, maturity stage, and decline stage. When the product has gone through initial polishing, the potential market for demand has been verified, the overall business process is basically running smoothly, and user problems can be solved relatively perfectly, the investment period has passed. What is most needed at this time is to promote the product, let the product transition to the growth stage, and serve more users. The hurdle that needs to be overcome at this time is the product cold start.

The cold start phase of a product focuses on how to operate the early product to acquire core users. The cold start strategies for different product types are also different. According to different strategies, the products are roughly divided into the following categories: tool-type products, content community products, and transaction platform products.

Tool products

Most ideas for tool-type products come from pain points in actual work and life, such as accounting, note-taking, beautification, etc. Since the aim is to solve problems in actual scenarios, the targeted user portraits are relatively vertical and easier to visualize. For example, user portraits for beauty enhancement, those born after 1990, female, deep users of social media, etc. can be listed in great detail, and they are not very different from typical user types.

There are two approaches for this type of product:

1. Explore products with similar user profiles

For example, is the user portrait of beauty products very similar to that of Xiaohongshu? Go to Xiaohongshu and do a beauty camera review or make a ranking of the best beauty cameras, insert your own product in it, and then take the opportunity to flatter them. And then you know.

2. Use search engines well

Tool products are generally positioned to solve certain specific problems. When users encounter a problem and don’t know how to deal with it, they usually choose to ask Baidu first.

Take note-taking products as an example: just search for “how to take notes” on Zhihu and Baidu, and you will find a lot of results about this question. You just need to make your product appear under these answers. This method is applicable to any knowledge-based community with traffic, such as Baidu Knows, Zhihu, Guokr, Tieba, etc. I just searched "how to take notes" on Zhihu and saw that the average number of likes was several thousand. Are you tempted?

There are two aspects to pay attention to when attracting new customers with tool-type products:

• The first is keywords. How to make your product appear under the corresponding keywords? Different platforms have different rules. This requires you to combine your own product characteristics and platform to continuously explore these keywords and continuously optimize.
• The second is the user perspective. When introducing a product, avoid talking to yourself, especially when introducing a tool-type product. It is easy to end up boasting about the product.

Content community products

Content community products provide users with a platform for content consumption. The entire content community revolves around content production and content consumption. The content production methods include PGC, UGC, and PUGC. The cold start strategy varies slightly depending on the content production method.

The PGC content platform is simple and direct. You can just find the corresponding KOLs according to the content tone of the platform. As for poaching, it depends on your own ability, so I won’t introduce it in detail. When live streaming platforms first emerged, major platforms poached each other’s top influencers, which is said to have driven up the value of influencers. The transfer of a top influencer from one platform to another directly led to fluctuations in the platform’s DAU by hundreds of thousands, which was terrifying to watch.

When the UGC content platform is cold-started, the focus is to find a group of stable and high-quality content producers. You can invite users from communities with similar status, such as Douban, Weibo, etc. Douban's loose content aggregation method indirectly helped many content-based products complete the initial content accumulation and cold start.

When Chunyin’s Chanyouji was cold-started, it captured the “travel Weibo posts” posted by “people who are traveling” on Weibo, and then wrote a script to automatically invite these users to Chanyouji to post content, thus completing the cold start of the content.

Or they could spend money. In the early stages, some platforms launched content subsidy plans worth hundreds of millions of yuan. It is naturally good at the moment, using profits to stimulate high-quality creators to continue producing content. But there are always people with bad intentions, which is why some people ask about "moving content through self-media and getting platform profits". In the early stages, a large part of such incentive plans will enrich these porters.

The key to cold-starting a content-based product is to find a stable source of high-quality content. A healthy content source should be olive-shaped. The top content sources should be well served and maintained, the mid-level content sources should be incubated and supported, and the long-tail content sources should be incentivized for product feedback. We will talk about this topic next time.

Trading platform products

Platform products generally involve multiple roles in the entire business closed loop and are the most complex type of cold start. Depending on whether there are offline services, it is divided into pure online business and O2O business.

1. Merchant side

For multiple roles on the platform, which end should be started first?

My answer is the one that is most sensitive to price . The price-sensitive role can quickly accumulate a certain scale through short-term investment, and then use this as a starting point to run the entire business closed loop. The merchant side of platform-based products is more sensitive to price than the consumer side. As long as it can bring in revenue, they are also more tolerant of the product. Therefore, the cold start of platform-based products should first revolve around the merchant side.

For merchants, trying out products is simply about making more money. Due to different types, the ways to reach merchants are very limited, and it is necessary to rely on ground promotion or sales teams to cover them one by one.

O2O business is different from pure online business. The merchant service capabilities of O2O business are limited by the service radius, which indirectly limits the ceiling of the number of users. Every time we expand into a new city, we have to go through a market cold start process.

2. Consumer side

When consumers face a new platform, the most important thing is to build consumer trust and help users reduce decision-making pressure, which generally includes the following ways:

• Endorsement by a big brand: This type of product always mentions a new business or sub-brand of a big brand, using the brand value of the big brand to endorse its own products and build consumer trust.
• Friend’s guarantee: The various group buying businesses that are popular nowadays are a disguised form of friend’s guarantee.
• The platform promises to provide a guarantee: For example, Alipay’s initial compensation promise states that as long as there is a problem with the user’s account, Alipay promises to compensate regardless of the reason.
• Try with zero threshold: For example, when Didi first started to cultivate user usage habits, it provided crazy subsidies, so users could take taxis almost for free, and the explicit cost for users when making decisions was almost zero.

A cold start method for all products

1. Dig out customers from competitors

Poaching users from competitors is always the most vertical customer acquisition channel. Of course, you have to give users a reason to use your product.

2. Old users bring in new users

When old users bring new ones, word of mouth will always be your best way of spreading the word. Old users bringing new ones will always be the most efficient channel for acquiring customers and the cheapest way to acquire customers.

3. Bring your own halo resources

They have their own various user resources. We don’t understand these wealthy families and we dare not say anything about them. Of course, this does not mean that these products do not need a cold start, but that there is no need to worry about attracting users in the early stages. Instead, you can use existing user resources to gradually and systematically introduce users to test the product and continuously iterate and optimize it.

Cold start routine

1. About the product

The cold start is the process of an ugly daughter-in-law meeting her parents-in-law. No matter how perfect the original plan and concept are, there will be various frictions when it comes to facing users. In particular, product managers must maintain a good attitude, serve users and serve as connectors between the team and users. At this point, the most important tasks for the product are:

1. Establish a healthy communication mechanism and feedback loop for product issues to create a good communication atmosphere for the team;
2. Find the position of operating users and build users' trust in the team;
3. Collect user feedback and continuously iterate and optimize the product.

Users believed your lies, and experienced your services with great reluctance. It is normal for users to complain and grumble. At this time, it is important to maintain smooth communication and build products together with users, rather than just talking to yourself according to the old plan.

2. About cognition

At this time, users' understanding of the product is still in a vague state. Various methods can be used to slowly build up product awareness in the minds of users. The tone of promotion and publicity should be flexible, because users may not necessarily use your product to do what you want them to do. In the end, you find that your publicity and the user experience are completely different things, and the damage caused is irreversible.

The initial service quality and content type of the platform and content-based products directly affect the platform's perception in the minds of users. The initial seed users directly determine the tone of the future platform. In order to ensure consistency between the initial product tone and goals, some obstacles will even be set up during the product cold start phase, such as Zhihu's initial registration invitation system.

3. About Data

What needs to be paid attention to in the cold start phase is the user acquisition cost and retention rate. Willingness to become a seed user represents recognition of the product. Seed users are mostly those who are brave enough to try or have been troubled by certain problems for a long time. The high user acquisition cost at this time indicates that there is a problem with the user acquisition channel, or the value added by the product is not obvious. The retention rate determines whether the product can operate sustainably.

At what stage is the cold start completed?

My definition is that the product can achieve self-growth in users while operating normally but without any promotion investment. This means that the seed users recognize the product itself and are occasionally willing to recommend it to their friends.

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3. Product operation: 2 major ways to get started to accurately capture private domain traffic!

4. Product Operation | How do stranger social products guide users?

5. How can product operations conduct good competitor research and analysis?

6. Product operation and promotion | 5 underlying ideas for traffic growth!

7. Product operation: application of data system under the growth model!

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Author: Mr. Zhao

Source: Mr. Zhao (G_Gluck)