How to develop App overseas business from 0 to 1?

“If you want to dig for gold overseas, you need to look at the country. Every country has its own barriers. If the barriers can be cracked, you can definitely dig for gold there.”

The key to success in gold mining is to seek dragons, and there is also a dragon-seeking technique for gold mining overseas. To some extent, going out to sea to dig for gold is very similar to the so-called dragon hunting and gold dividing. Both involve exploring the unknown world and facing numerous difficulties. At this time, it is very important to have reliable theoretical guidance. Hu Bayi and others make a living by following the Dragon-Seeking Techniques that have been passed down for thousands of years by the older generation of tomb-raiding lieutenants. Therefore, those who aspire to go out to sea to seek gold also need a set of "Dragon-Seeking Techniques for Going Out to Sea to Seek Gold".

"Going abroad to seek gold and find the dragon's jinx" means that overseas markets are very different. Each country is like a checkpoint, and even a country is divided into several markets with obvious differences, such as India. Therefore, when going overseas, one must start from one's own business, conduct research in combination with the target country or market, and demonstrate whether one can "break through" this "level".

So, how can we prove whether we can "crack" this "level" and thus make money overseas?

Going out to sea is beautiful, but there are also hidden dangers

Generally speaking, the first thing is to analyze vertically how to start a business from 0 to 1; the second is to analyze horizontally the similarities and differences of overseas markets, and conduct research in combination with specific industries from aspects such as localized team management, business environment and cultural differences; finally, you can consider the five factors that affect entrepreneurial success, including timing, team, ideas, business model and funding.

This article will first discuss the first part, which is a vertical analysis of how to develop overseas business from 0 to 1.

(Disclaimer: This article is the result of sharing between the author and a group of colleagues in the industry who are at the forefront of going global. It was processed and polished by the author. Special thanks to @中国式出海研究院!)

How to develop overseas business from 0 to 1?

For companies that have no experience in overseas markets and are entering overseas markets for the first time, the first problem they face is how to develop overseas business from 0 to 1.

Specifically, it can be divided into six aspects:

1. How to conduct localized user and market research?

2. How to conduct localized competitive product analysis?

3. How to determine user needs, determine functions and quickly make a product demo?

4. How to cold start and determine the promotion channels? (How to get 10,000 seed users?)

5. How to quickly obtain real feedback from users and quickly iterate products?

6. How to determine product P/MF?

1. How to conduct localized user and market research?

1) Localized market research

The purpose of localized market research is to understand the actual situation of the target market and prepare for product and operational decisions.

Localized market research mainly includes two aspects:

First, the Internet infrastructure in the target countries

1 GDP, GDP per capita magnitude and growth rate

2 The country’s main economic pillar

3 Internet infrastructure - Internet speed, tariffs, smartphone coverage, mobile Internet coverage, mobile payment coverage

4 Internet market size - e-commerce size and growth rate, digital advertising revenue size and growth rate

Second, the analysis of the target country track

1. Scale and growth rate

2 Business Model

3 Main competitors

4 Industry Chain

5 Industry Pain Points

When conducting research on target overseas markets, you can consider three levels: short-term indicators, medium-term indicators, and long-term indicators. Short-term indicators point out aspects that need special attention during the start-up phase of overseas entrepreneurship, including per capita GDP, mobile Internet penetration rate and the level of infrastructure construction; medium-term indicators are important factors affecting the future growth opportunities of enterprises and are also important manifestations of potential energy, including GDP growth rate and mobile Internet growth rate; long-term indicators represent the ceiling or upper limit of future market space, including total population size and the proportion of young people.

How to conduct localized market research?

Information about the target country's Internet infrastructure can be obtained through data released by international organizations such as the World Bank, the official website of the target country's statistics bureau, and national industry reports from consulting firms such as KPMG, Ernst & Young, and McKinsey. In addition, you can also use relevant media in the local country. For example, the media that can be paid attention to in the Indian market include Financial Times, Zhixiang.com and Zhudao.com.

To understand the information about the target country's track, you can visit industry insiders to gain understanding of the situation. Secondly, do not neglect to communicate with competitors' suppliers, advertisers, etc. to understand the real situation of the industry.

2) Localized user research

The purpose of localized user research is to understand and determine the real needs of users and provide direction for the product.

What problems do we need to solve when conducting localized user research?

1) Determine whether local users have this demand;

2) Whether there is a better solution for this demand locally;

3) Why has this demand not been addressed?

4) Reasons for excluding products, what are the key obstacles to meeting user needs, such as government policies, infrastructure, user customs, culture, etc.;

5) From the product perspective, how to find an entry point;

6) What is the target user profile and how large is the user base?

How to conduct local user research?

1. Stay rational and objective, and avoid preconceived ideas and assumptions.

People are subjective, and product managers and operations staff are no exception. They will subconsciously assume that users think the same as they do, and often ask misleading questions, which leads to wrong conclusions. For example, "How helpful is this new feature to you?" "How much does this change improve work efficiency?" These are all based on potential assumptions and provide subjective guidance to users during the survey process. To avoid this, you can refer to Zhihu’s questioning rules: first ask if it is, then ask why.

2. Be realistic and don’t just sit in the office and daydream. Be sure to conduct situational investigations and field surveys.

Chairman Mao said, "Without investigation, there is no right to speak," and this sentence still applies to this scenario today.

Let’s take an example that everyone knows, the problem of slow Internet speeds in some overseas areas. Many European, American and Chinese products are aware that Southeast Asia and India have slow Internet speeds, but few have a deep understanding of the impact of this pain point on user decisions.

According to an old Uber employee, when he was at Uber, many people often complained that the product manager sitting in the San Francisco office did not understand the suffering of the people and that the new features they developed tended to focus on developed cities in Europe and the United States. Later, Uber set up an APM team and asked the newly appointed product managers to choose a city outside the United States for field research. It was then that those product managers who were usually "pampered" realized how painful it was to be on the scorching streets of India with temperatures of 30 to 40 degrees Celsius, trying to use their mobile phones to scan for a car for a long time without being able to find it. Later, when these product managers took office, they immediately regarded this work as a high priority and quickly produced a network-optimized Lite version.

3. Combine qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Generally speaking, questionnaires and A/B tests are more qualitative analyses, while user interviews, focus groups, and participatory design are more quantitative. Sometimes, a single research method cannot lead to a definite conclusion, and a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is needed.

Back to the issue of slow Internet speed in Southeast Asia, a friend once used the same card from the same operator to test the Internet speed in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and Cabuyao, a second-tier city. The results showed that the Internet speeds in the two places were very different.

If a place has a problem with slow internet speed, what impact will it have on the user's product experience?

When users open their phones outdoors in this place, it takes 15 seconds to display the cover of a page of short videos, and 99% of users basically give up using the App if the cover cannot be displayed within the first 5 seconds. In other words, slow Internet speed will lead to a large number of 0 playback problems in the area.

Therefore, when a problem is discovered, it is important to know not only what the problem is, but also what it affects and to what extent.

How to combine qualitative and quantitative analysis? For example, many companies collect information through Facebook advertising, but Facebook’s questionnaire only has a few questions and cannot obtain further information. Therefore, first of all, you can simply collect some information through Faceook’s delivery, but for further discussion, you can design a rewarded interview at the end of the questionnaire, and you can guide users to leave their phone numbers or email addresses to participate in in-depth research by sending Amazon coupons.

2. Localized competitive product analysis

Know yourself and know your enemy, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat. Localized competitive product analysis can help you keep abreast of competitors’ products and market trends, understand their product strategies and capital background, maintain market sensitivity, provide references for your own product decision-making, obtain new entry points, quickly adjust yourself and maintain your advantage.

Different competitive product analysis reports have different purposes and specific focuses. Some tend to focus on early industry research or company development, some tend to focus on functional comparison, and some tend to focus on specific functional solutions.

Here we discuss the first purpose. For companies going overseas for the first time, it is necessary to conduct preliminary industry research and competitive company analysis, which can be analyzed from the following aspects:

1) How big is the competition?

2) Retention of competing products

3) Competitors’ recent growth and customer acquisition costs

4) Core functions and core advantages of competing products

5) Problems faced by competitors and future plans

How to conduct localized competitive product analysis?

Localized competitive product analysis can be conducted from the data level, user level and product level:

Data level – You can scan competing products through third-party public data platforms such as Appannie, Quesmobile, Googlestore, etc., view download rankings and other data, and understand the cost and volume of delivery through relevant delivery agents.

User level – Download all reviews of competitors from the app store through Appannie, and then analyze popular high-frequency words to refine its core capabilities and points that users feel are lacking. Secondly, you can also go to the official website of the competitor to find the core users who have left messages, and conduct interviews through private messages. This will give you a general idea of ​​how users learned about the product, where they downloaded it, their user profile and experience using the product, whether they would recommend it to others, what suggestions they have, etc. In addition, focus interviews can also be organized between students of minority languages ​​and international students from that country studying in China.

Product level – find a group of users similar to the target user profile of the competitor and observe their usage and real feedback

So, how do you find users of competing products to collect information?

One very effective way is to collect information through social media. Find your competitor’s social media accounts on Facebook or Instagram and send them a link to the survey with a list of questions!

(Tips: How to determine whether someone is a social media user of a competitor? You can search through the competitor's hashtag, because people who are willing to post with the competitor's # are likely to be the core users of the competitor!)

3. How to determine user needs, determine functions and quickly make a product demo?

After completing the localized market and user research and competitive product analysis, the next step is for the team to determine user needs, determine functions, and quickly create a product demo. Completing this step first requires the team to think about and answer these three questions:

a. What is the most important need of users?

b. What is the simplest product form that meets the needs?

c. To what extent do these functions need to be achieved?

There will definitely not be enough resources and time in the demo phase, and the demo is not perfect, so expectations cannot be too high.

Just carry on with the basic assumptions, look at the trends, and you can take the basic assumptions seriously.

Let's take an example of how a short video export team (anonymous at the request of the sharer) determines the shooting tools that users need:

1). Requirements collection: idea collection, clear target pool, capture ideas with image or video content, tips are to use cross-border or more mature industry skills (similar to live broadcast gameplay, refer to variety shows and games)

2) Prioritization: Brainstorming will vote and rate based on multiple dimensions (such as operational difficulty, awareness, content consumption, technical difficulty, design difficulty, etc.)

3). Make delivery materials: Use AE or PR combined with idea materials to quickly make delivery materials;

4). Delivery test: Combine fixed delivery and precision delivery, and increase the volume according to the assumed ROI

5). Data feedback: observe the delivery data based on CTR and CPA and get feedback quickly

4. How to determine the promotion channels for quick testing?

According to the lean startup thinking, after we make the MVP, we need to launch the product for rapid verification. Therefore, after determining user needs, confirming functions and quickly making a product demo, the next question is how to determine the promotion channels for rapid testing.

My understanding of this question is to identify the target users and match the channels according to the characteristics of the target users. The strategy is to test various channels at a low cost, then quickly and accurately focus on the channels based on the results, and determine the operational investment resources and manpower based on the channel's customer acquisition situation. The overseas traffic structure is composed of the two giants, Facebook and Google, as well as internet celebrities and vertical field traffic. For details, please refer to past articles: How to build an overseas operation and promotion system from 0 to 1.

Secondly, there are a few more insights on the summary of promotion channels:

1). Product characteristics determine the channel type. For social and tool products, almost 100% of the traffic comes from online, so online traffic must account for the majority; in the 020 and e-commerce fields, most of the traffic on the consumer side comes from user recommendations (referral), and most of the traffic on the supply side comes from offline.

2). Seize the initiative in promoting channels. All promotion channels will eventually become worse and worse, the cost of acquiring users will gradually increase, and the user value will become lower and lower. A large number of players bombard users' minds through the same channel, and it will become increasingly difficult to convert individual users, while users will also become more and more likely to change their minds. Find a good channel, and after testing and proving its effectiveness, quickly increase the volume before other players enter. The same dollar will have different effects in the early and late stages of the same channel.

Therefore, be intentional about exploring new channels. As mentioned above, all traffic channels will go through such a life cycle. In the initial commercialization period, the quality of user acquisition is relatively high and the customer acquisition cost is low. As more and more companies or marketers enter the market, the customer acquisition cost increases and the user quality decreases relatively. At this time, it is necessary to explore new traffic channels. Therefore, overseas operations and promotions require a keen sense of smell and the ability to tap into new traffic channels in order to achieve better promotion results during the channel’s bonus period. How to acquire young overseas users? Want to win young overseas users like TikTok? Three suggestions for you!

3). Don’t just focus on CPA, especially for community-based products. If you buy a large number of low-quality users to reduce costs when the user LTV is not particularly clear, it will bring the community atmosphere and tone into an uncontrollable situation. The best way is to build communication channels around seed users and bring in users with the same tone through channels such as social media. There is also a key question here about how to obtain 10,000 seed users, which will be discussed in subsequent articles.

5. How to quickly obtain real feedback from users and quickly iterate products?

After determining user needs and making a demo, we need to quickly determine the promotion channels for verification. For the fourth question, we mainly focused on the discussion of promotion channels, and now we will discuss how to quickly obtain real user feedback and quickly iterate products.

To solve this problem, the following problems need to be solved:

1) Who are the target users?

2) What problems do target users face when using the product?

3) What is the priority of interaction and product function in product revision?

4) Have the target user needs been met? Are you willing to analyze them?

5) What are the target users’ expectations and what are the feedback users’ needs?

There are many ways to quickly obtain real user feedback and iterate products. The following are three main methods:

1) Monitor customer acquisition channels. If the campaign is delivered through Facebook and Google, test the customer acquisition cost at the beginning. However, you need to have more control groups, corresponding to different delivery areas and delivery tags. Connect appsfly and the company's own data background to view the customer acquisition cost, retention, consumption data, and production data of the corresponding delivery group.

However, for early customer acquisition, if there are vertical customer acquisition channels, such as music products, offline comedy music clubs, and door-to-door customer acquisition, although the early costs are high, it is very beneficial to quickly obtain product feedback and iterate on the product.

2) Conduct omni-channel user feedback testing, open up the user feedback channels between R&D and product operations, set up official email addresses and even phone numbers in the app store, major social media, and product entrances, track them every day, check the negative reviews in the app store, organize them, collect priorities, and directly synchronize bugs with R&D. If there are problems at the product demand level, the organization

Second return, internal discussion within the product team.

3) Regular user sampling surveys, telephone interviews with active users of social media, to understand user profiles, evaluations, needs, and expectations, collect product feedback from app stores, and organize product target user profiles and usage scenarios.

Jing et al.

6. How to determine product P/MF?

We believe that overseas startups should focus on achieving product/market fit (P/MF) in the early stages, rather than spending money to buy volume right away. But when it comes to how to achieve this goal, many overseas companies are groping in the dark.

So, how should we determine the product P/MF?

1. To define data indicators, you need to first define the minimal product MVP, including user portraits and user stories, to determine one or more core "user tasks". The process of users performing the task will leave data traces, which can be used as indicators.

2. Predict key data indicators and calculation methods in advance through competitive product analysis and past experience.

3. Data collection and verification are actually key competitive advantages and require patience. It is very common for many new products to have incomplete or wrong data collected or counted due to time constraints.

4. After the product is launched, try to target groups with different profiles, collect key data, compare predictions, analyze differences, and propose solutions.

Of course, in the actual process, determining the product PMF is not static. For some products, the search process is the opposite. For example, snaptube first launched the app download product, and then accidentally discovered that the video download function was used more, so it simply focused on video downloads and found P/MF.

In addition, to determine P/MF, you can refer to several questions that Rahul Vohra, co-founder and CEO of Superhuman, asked about user research:

1) How would you feel if you could no longer use our products? ① Very disappointed; ② A little disappointed; ③ Not disappointed

2) What type of people do you think would benefit most from this product?

3) What are the main benefits you get from this product?

4) How would you like us to further improve the product?

The goal of the survey is to ensure that at least 40% of users would be disappointed without the product in their lives. But in its first survey, Superhuman’s numbers were well below that threshold.

First survey shows only 22% of users would be disappointed if a product wasn’t in their lives

In order to improve the "score" of the fit between product and market demand, you can find product supporters through segmented data, build user portraits of high-expectation users, find the main pain points that the product helps users solve, and thus improve the key areas of the product and sort out the product roadmap. The product roadmap is divided into two parts: investing more in the parts of the product that users love, while correcting the problems that hold the product back. By making the product-market fit score the most obvious metric and continuing to survey new users and tweak the product, Superhuman has increased the percentage of users who say “you’d be very disappointed if you can no longer use Superhuman” to 58% in just three quarters.

Therefore, when determining the P/MF of a product, we must be guided by user needs, analyze data and iterate quickly during rapid testing to accelerate the achievement of this goal.

This article will first discuss the first part, that is, vertically analyzing how to develop overseas business from 0 to 1. In fact, each sub-problem can be broken down into a long article. Due to limited space, I hope to stimulate discussion and everyone is welcome to leave a message.

Source: Overseas Operations (chuhaiyunying)