Analysis of 11 cases and 4 logical points of growth hacking!

The 4 key points of growth hacking:

1. Providing high-quality products and services : the core of growth, often solving one problem in the short term can bring incremental growth
2. Quickly build a network of relationships : common in social products or social products
3. Combine external hot spots : create, capture, or undertake hot spots. Exclusiveness is better than fragmentation.
4. Create external incentives : Inducement features that can be reused independently of the product

11 Case Studies

1. Provide high-quality products and services

Case 1: Airbnb — High-quality photos

Airbnb’s rapid rise in market share was entirely due to its visual strategy in the early days.

When photo-editing software was not popular, many B&B owners' photography equipment was still at the 2-megapixel level. It was hard to imagine a traveler booking a room on Airbnb. The scale of the platform is not even enough to screen high-quality photos for B&B owners. What should we do?

Airbnb's founder and professional photographers went to these homestays to take beautiful pictures for free. As a result, the platform’s business volume grew exponentially that year. This strategy is also used today by food or niche vertical platforms such as "Keep", "Yuehui" and "eye".

Case 2: Meituan — Refundable

There are many reasons why Meituan was able to stand out in the battle of thousands of groups, but one of its growth points killed many competitors. The earliest group buying websites did not support refunds for many reasons: financial settlement, loss of profits, industry practices, etc.

• On the one hand, for users who purchased the group purchase at that time, the lack of refund support means that they must consume within a certain period of time. The loss aversion caused by the delay will be superimposed on the group purchase platform, causing irreversible losses.
• On the other hand, for the team platform or the business manager, the money received has been refunded, which directly affects the revenue and no one dares to make the decision to change it.

Under such irreconcilable contradictions, Meituan's decision-makers were still user-centric at first and were the first to allow refunds for group purchases. Not only did they not lose profits that year, but they also won Meituan a large number of long-term user retention. By the time other platforms responded, their users had already been led away by Meituan Education.

Case 3: Taobao — Intelligent Recommendation

Before the advent of the system, most e-commerce platforms’ banner positions relied on manual recommendations by experienced operators. The conversion rate of recommendation positions controlled by humans had many fluctuation factors. Even though there were occasional hits, it had remained at a bottleneck value for a long time. Especially when faced with a major event like Double 11, even the slightest mistake in manual recommendation may result in staggering business losses.

At that time, there were even two schools of thought: manual recommendation and intelligent recommendation. People believed that machine algorithms could not achieve the same results as recommendations from senior operators. But after the first intelligent recommendation application on Double 11, the intuitive conversion rate broke the long-standing bottleneck of manual recommendations and brought intuitive incremental revenue to the platform.

Case 4: Foraging Bees - Delayed Discount

Mishifeng was the first to apply Qiandama’s delayed discount strategy online. Logically speaking, Meituan already has a monopoly on the market share of food group buying, and the chances of any emerging group buying platform are very slim. However, Mishifeng has risen rapidly this year, and a large number of users have begun to shift.

All of this is based on a set of product gameplay: delayed discounts. Taking a group purchase of a hot pot worth 100 yuan as an example, if you check it at 1 a.m., it is 100 yuan, if you check it at 12 noon, it is 80 yuan, if you check it at 7 p.m., it is 60 yuan, and if you check it at 23 p.m., it is 40 yuan. The later you check the price, the lower it will be. However, the quantity of each group purchase is limited. It is possible that when the user enters, the group purchase has been sold out. This causes many users to click on the Mishifeng app from time to time to check the prices of group purchase products. It has to be said that this gameplay quickly attracted a large number of highly active users in a short period of time.

Case 5: Bicycle worship - shortening the process

For high-frequency and rigid-demand products, the lighter and more streamlined they are, the easier it is to expand the market in the early stages. Let’s compare how Mobai shortens the process:

① Early usage process for new users: scan the QR code → click to jump to the landing page → jump to confirm → click to download from the Appstore → register.

②Usage process after accessing the mini program: Scan the code → Authorize

Taking into account the user's network loading and waiting time, the streamlined process has undoubtedly won back a large number of potential users. It is said that in the month when the Mobai + WeChat mini program was promoted, more than 50% of the users of the mini program came from Mobai, which can be regarded as a strong combination to increase growth.

Case 6: Rantu - Search Optimization

This is an incubation project I am in charge of. Compared with Taptap, you can think of it as a mobile game app store that solves the market demand of users to find good games.

At that time, the churn rate of new users was extremely high. In order to find the cause, we did a lot of data processing and analysis on the user path and found that the last node for many user churn was: "game search box". After repeated discussions, we came to a hypothesis that users are not satisfied with the search results because they cannot find the games they want.

During the one-month subsequent operation, we optimized keywords for SEO within the app and matched high-frequency downloaded games, which resulted in a stable increase in the retention rate of new users by several percentage points.

2. Quickly build a network

Case 7: Maimai - Forced Interaction

There are many social products that provide forced interaction, such as Weibo. However, Weibo is more of a news organization rather than a social networking product, so it does not fall into the category of building a network. Maimai is a platform focusing on workplace social networking. For people in the workplace, word of mouth is one of the most important aspects, after all, the circle may be so small.

Maimai will use your address book or connected friends to force someone you are familiar with to give you a positive label, such as: strong leadership. This small-scale test does have a certain effect, just like Facebook, which forces you to have a list of recommendations as long as you have three friends who follow each other, so as to achieve the highest retention. Let professionals start operating their own labels on the platform.

I have encountered such a situation before. After consulting with people many times, I found that they did not do anything like labeling. Because it was positive, there was not much backlash in the experience.

Case 8: Playing with friends - Virtual interaction

This is a community app for mobile game users. I started from scratch and it once reached the top 3 of the Aladdin social rankings.

It goes without saying that content plays a big role in the impact of traffic. To this end, a set of community interaction tools have been specially developed to solve the interactive aspects such as user posting, commenting, liking, private chatting, etc. Through the algorithm's default configuration program, virtual interaction is given to achieve a real experience, and even the use of AI voice is considered to achieve authenticity.

Once the solution was applied, the average length of stay per person, the amount of real interaction, and the active time all doubled to varying degrees. The system only began to fade out after a real interactive atmosphere emerged in the later stage.

3. Combine external hotspots

Case 9: Renren Video - Exclusive combination of hot topics

There are many companies that can combine with hot spots, but it is rare to be able to combine with hot spots exclusively. Moreover, it is even rarer to achieve a one-year growth target in one month without realizing it. Renren Video has encountered this once.

In 2018, Miss Polaris became very popular on TikTok, and the entire platform was filled with related BGM. It also made the American TV series "The Gifted" popular. At that time, only Renren Video could watch this American TV series, which was absolutely exclusive. Within a month, a large number of TikTok users flocked to Renren Video, and the barrage could see content related to "from TikTok".

Renren Video also took advantage of the opportunity to promote this American drama, achieving a smooth connection in popularity.

Case 10: Taptap — SEO Integration

16 years ago, independent games still had a relatively scattered user group, and there was no relatively centralized communication platform. Many independent user players would search for corresponding forums or discussion groups through Baidu to nourish themselves. The more vertical the user is, the more active they are, and the same is true for a specific independent game.

At that time, Taptap made a bold decision and bought the search advertising space for most independent games. As long as you search for the name of an independent game, the first one must be the game name with the suffix taptap. Clicking it will enter the tap-related game area. In less than a year, all the scattered and highly active independent game users were gathered on the platform. Later, competitors like Youpinwei, Rantu, and Sodatuan all found it difficult to get a piece of the pie.

4. Create external incentives

Case 11: Millionaire Heroes - Independent Traffic Generation Function

If it were not forcibly stopped, answering questions would become a standard mode for attracting traffic. As a complete product, the question-answering function is separated from the core functions, and its greatest value is to bring traffic to the product.

By attracting users' attention through high bonuses and high-frequency matches, the unit price of traffic per user is actually very low. Using this independent product function as a way to attract traffic has also extended to many ways of playing.

For example, the daily sneaker draw on the “Du” app is to attract you to log in once a day. The "Play in Black" applet draws game skins every day, and the retention rate of active users is stable at more than 30%.

Growth Workflow

An excellent growth team is actually a group of excellent experimental teams that achieve their goals through the process of continuous failure → verification → failure → verification. Taking the growth plan of a certain platform as an example, let’s see how it is done.

1. Preparation period

Set growth target: 10 million room bookings in 2018

Confirm the focus area: Increase the success rate of first-time bookings for new users

Determine your growth strategy: Optimize your booking process

Provide assumptions:

1. New users think the price will drop in a few days and want to come back in a few days
2. New users find registration troublesome and don’t want to place an order
3. There are so many options, it's hard to decide

Experimental hypothesis:

New users think the price will drop in a few days and want to come back in a few days

1. Write "Lowest Price on the Internet"
2. Marking “Sold Out” increases users’ sense of urgency
3. Put a "Limited Time Special Offer" to give a sense of low prices

2. Execution period

Development, testing, and launch: Cooperate with various departments to optimize product functions

Results: Verify results based on fluctuations in data indicators

3. Backtracking period

Analyze data: process data indicators to find out the reasons for success/failure

Verify assumptions: Re-verify assumptions, repeat.

About the North Star Metric

Like the key growth factor "North Star Indicator" in Growth Hacker, in fact, the conclusions of more and more growth teams' practices in recent years tell us that it is unreliable!

• Social platforms: those who have left personal information and follow three people;
• Mutual finance platform: for purchasing financial products;
• E-commerce platforms: those who have received coupons;
• Information platform: those who have left comments.

The growth of these behaviors themselves is nothing more than a manifestation of the cost of silence reaching a certain level. If you really apply this model to growth hacking, you will eventually encounter a bottleneck in conversion behavior, and find that there will always be a large number of people who will never achieve your North Star indicator, no matter what operations you take.

Products are there to solve problems, not to create algorithms. Only by understanding this can you achieve growth.

1. Operational promotion: a low-cost growth hacking experiment from 0 to 1!
2. Product operation: a low-cost growth hacking experiment from 0 to 1!
3. Growth Hacking in Action: A complete case study explains the core operation methods in detail!
4. Growth hackers are so popular, can we make money from them?
5. Growth Hacker’s Guide: How to Improve User Retention
6. Qutoutiao’s Growth Hacker: Decoding 4 User Growth Strategies Before IPO

Author: Professor of Operations

Source: Operations Professor