How to do user operation? You need to know these!

A company that claimed to have tens of millions of users survived for two or three years relying on investment money. Then when it started to monetize its users, it was shocked to find that its revenue was only tens of thousands of yuan, and everyone was dumbfounded. What is this problem? I guess many people don’t know. Some people say it is a problem of monetization methods, some say it is a strategy problem, but in fact the most fundamental problem is the user problem.

There is an obvious reason for the emergence of this problem, that is, the users they call are not called users, or they are not users at all. For a long time, many people have had many misunderstandings about the identification of user characteristics, to the point that they treated users who were not users as users and did a lot of meaningless work. In today's Internet entrepreneurship field, there are many exaggerated users. Let me give you a few examples.

Mistakenly taking pv as user

I once met a person who runs a game community. He talked a lot about the community activities we organized, with hundreds of millions of PV users, and sometimes there were over 100 million users for a single activity. When I heard that, I thought that with such a large number of users, the income must be at least the same as WeChat. When I asked, how did you make a profit? He said there was no profit, but there was investment. This situation is that the PV is mistaken for the user, and it is constantly promoted to the outside world. In the end, I was shocked and admired it very much. So I downloaded the other party's App and took a look. I was dumbfounded. The activity he mentioned was similar to the h5 activity page, such as a small survey, a zodiac vote, which can be shared to Moments and Weibo, and then these shared pages will generate a lot of PVs... and then there is nothing else.

In fact, these are not users, they are just visitors, or even not even visitors. 90% of these users cannot bring revenue to the company. They are just WeChat users, or just Weibo users. If you count them according to independent IP addresses, and then count them according to truly activated users, and then count them according to loyal users... I think there are not many of them. If it comes to monetization one day in the future, the number will probably be even fewer.

Mistaking downloads for users

I saw an App release a PR article before, celebrating that the number of downloads of a certain app exceeded 50 million. I laughed after reading it. The number of downloads is such a vague number. You can just use a simple program to refresh it, which will probably take ten minutes, or you can just find the person behind the program to change the number. Of course, there are even more bizarre promotional articles, where the number of active users is greater than the number of registered users. An App has 100 registered users and 200 active users, and it is still looking for venture capital investment. I don’t know how the logic of this user calculation is used. There are many such situations, mainly due to unprofessionalism or the need to deceive people.

If your download volume really reaches 50 million, even if it is the user's download volume, there is still a long way from the download volume to the user. The user may accidentally click and be counted as downloaded, but in fact the user has not downloaded it, or the user has downloaded it but did not download it, or was interrupted in the middle, which may also be counted as a download. There are also cases where the user downloaded it but did not install it for various reasons, or even if it was installed, the installation failed, or there are various reasons. We have encountered too many of them. In terms of the conversion rate from downloads to users, depending on the size of the software package, the quality of the software, and registration restrictions, in the end it may be only 1%. If you calculate based on daily and monthly active users, only a handful of people will actually stay. Therefore, don’t always think that apps with tens of millions of downloads are just a very vague number and your efforts will be in vain.

Mistaking the amount of brushing for the user

With the popularity of App, App promotion also became popular, and then many businesses of inflating the number of users also got better. Many people knew that it was fake, but still insisted on doing it. Maybe it was for the job, to show it to the boss. In fact, sometimes the boss also knew it was fake, and he probably showed it to the investors, and then the investors showed it to the LPs, and finally they successfully earned income from the LPs. Then the bubble came, the companies went bankrupt, and everyone started a business in another field. Some people aim to cash out through listing, while others want to turn their company into a century-old enterprise. This is the difference between a fake boss and a real boss. So there are a lot of fake users, which is so boring. The key is that they still treat these users as users and promote their successful experiences and methods everywhere, which is really misleading.

Mistaking active users for users

Nowadays, many companies use many radical methods to attract users, such as giving out coupons, holding lucky draws, pushing prizes, sending out red envelopes, etc. The purpose is to attract users, but are they really attracting users? As people in the industry say, most of them are there to take advantage of the situation and are not real users. For example, a few days ago I saw a certain express car doing ground promotion and recruiting drivers. The method was that anyone could participate, just fill in the license plate number and name, even if you were a car owner or a user, and soon you would see a group of people gathering around to receive the prizes.

Can car owners promoted in this way be considered users? Can they provide good services to future passengers? We need to question this. Another thing is that I saw a certain carpooling app doing ground promotion at national conferences, drawing red envelopes, and giving out red envelopes when you installed the app, and then basically all users who had installed the app uninstalled it. In addition, a certain email address’ method of promoting apps is even more bizarre. As soon as you open the email, you will receive a lottery event, and then you will be told that you have obtained a lottery code. Then, you will be told that if you want to see if you have won a prize, you need to download the client. Will users pay for such playing with you? It is unknown.

Of course, there are still many people who mistakenly believe that they have a lot of users, but in fact those are all fake. When one day you are ready to cash in, you will find that the so-called users you have spent tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to bring in can only bring you tens of thousands of dollars in revenue a day, which is not even enough to pay the salary of one employee. Therefore, real users are not so easy to come by, but are a slow accumulation process. Look at those short-lived apps such as Faceun and Zuji that instantly gained a large number of users, and you will know how vulnerable their so-called users are. Of course, there are many more. If there is no so-called venture capital support, how many apps can survive? The result is estimated to be vulnerable.

So, what is a real user? Through the case we will find the following three characteristics.

Users who can generate cash

I once saw a joke online about borrowing money. Many people said that they had a wide network of contacts, but when something went wrong, no one helped them and no one was willing to lend them money. In fact, you can also use this method to measure users. That is, when you need to monetize, users who are willing to pay are the real users. These users have a certain consumption capacity and economic income and can bring revenue to the product. If you have 1 million users, and when you need to monetize, 500,000 users pay for you through monetization, then your real users are 500,000, and the monetization rate is 50%. This means that your users are real users. If another platform has 10 million users, and only 100,000 people are willing to pay when it comes to monetization, then the monetization rate is only 1%, which only means that you only have 100,000 users. Therefore, users who can generate monetization for your product are your real users.

Customers who are loyal to the product

It means that they have a certain degree of loyalty to the product and will not change their choice due to changes in the external environment. Such users recognize the product and are willing to continue using it. For example, a user who likes to buy Xiaomi will still choose Xiaomi even if someone tries to sell him a Coolpad phone. This is user loyalty, and such users are your users.

Users who have contributed to the product's reputation

This type of user highly recognizes the value of the product and is willing to promote the product for free, which can bring word-of-mouth effect to the product. For example, I have recommended Uber to more than a dozen users because its price is really cheap and the ride is fast. So I am an Uber user.

Therefore, real users are those who recognize the value of the product, have a certain degree of loyalty to the product, can contribute to the word-of-mouth effect of the product, and are willing to consume the product. In this era of popular entrepreneurship, many entrepreneurs keep promoting their tens of millions of users, but they rely on venture capital to survive. After three to five years, without financial support, they can only sell their products at a low price. This is a good thing. The bad thing is to lay off employees, reduce the scale, and finally disappear.

If we only focus on the number of users and not the quality of users, it will end up being just a bubble. So don’t look at the number of users you have, but look at the quality of users, the monetization rate of users, and the value of users.

Source: Li Jianhua