How do Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, etc. acquire seed users?

Seed users refer to those who actively interact with the product in the early stages of its development, recognize the product, and are willing to give you feedback. This type of seed users is very important for the early development of the product, so how can we quickly tap into seed users?

In the early stages of a product, it is necessary to find and hold on to seed users, especially for startups that do not have resources, connections, funding, or teams. They must take small steps and quickly enter the market through seed customers.

The so-called seed users are those who are very active in the early stages of product development, willing to interact with the product, and are very enthusiastic and supportive of the product. This group of people, because they are passionate about the product, are willing to actively interact with you and give you feedback.

Why look for seed users?

First, the cost of directly promoting a new product may be relatively high. If such a product can have a seed, and the users have accumulated some word-of-mouth and potential energy, then if we promote it, the effect may be better.

Second, early products have imperfect experience and functions. Seed users can help you find product bugs and understand users’ real needs for the product.

Third, help enterprises refine their operations. If you fail to attract early innovators and early adopters of a product, you may not have the opportunity to directly reach the mass user market. Because in the early days, it is very costly to spend money to attract mass users. My promotion costs and other costs will be very high, and the user churn rate may also be very high.

Therefore, a more prudent approach is to have seed users first. Having seed users will be more conducive to the growth of our products, and the cost of acquiring users for a product can be reduced to a sufficiently low level. This is one angle.

The author classified users into:

(1) Valuable users: The most advanced users of a product are valuable users. They are not only product users, but also creators or transmitters of product value.

DJI drone aerial photography experts, Echo skill developers, Gopro users extreme sports stars; they are often technical experts and media KOLs with extremely high influence. Not all products have valuable users, but if they do, these are the most valuable user value of the product.

(2) Core users: refers to users who are committed to the core value of the product. Among Echo’s early users, there were indeed geeks who used ifttt to connect their homes, but the novelty of the technology was not its core value point. Enjoying music through voice interaction is the core value that is promoted to the public, so the core users of Echo in the early days were music lovers and home users.

Among the early users of DJI drones, geeks who like model airplanes are not the core users. Only those who are aerial photography enthusiasts are the real core users. They prefer aerial photography rather than dismantling model aircraft.

(3) Mass users: Based on the layer-by-layer transmission of the core value of the product, the final outer circle is the mass users. Here are fans of KOLs, customers who make impulse purchases, geeks who make novelty purchases, and so on. Once the core value of the product is established, the process from valuable users to core users and then to mass users is almost linear and continuous, with no gap or fault.

Start-up small and medium-sized enterprises have no money and no resources, so customer acquisition must be accurate and the trust established with customers must have the highest conversion rate. This is the way to get the greatest return at the lowest cost.

In the early stage, if we can find more typical seed users, such as those who have a certain influence in the industry, are willing to interact and make suggestions on products, and are willing to share and spread the word to others, then we must operate and maintain these people well.

At the seed user stage, our absolute number of users cannot be too high. It is very likely that your seed users will only be a few dozen or a few hundred, or at most less than a thousand people. So at this stage, if your user base is so small, the role and significance of the guidance that the data can give you may be relatively small.

Therefore, at the seed user stage, I recommend that you spend a lot of time with your typical users, or even turn yourself into a typical user.

What do your users like? What are they doing? In this case, most of the time it is actually the real feeling you get.

For example: Do you feel close to this group of people? Or do you feel the atmosphere in the entire seed user group is good? How do you feel about the experience and emotional identification of our products among everyone? What is their status and awareness?

In a shorter period of time, the evolution of users is always linear and continuous, without any breaks or leaps. The user evolution model should not be like jumping over a cliff, but more like a drop of water falling into a lake, spreading from core users to mass users layer by layer.

So, how should we find our seed customers?

There are many methods, such as lurking in peer groups for a long time to find active people, starting from relatives and friends around you, searching for tags on various platforms, finding opinion leaders in the industry, initiating online and offline user participation activities, etc. As long as you locate the seed users, find the seed channels, edit the marketing content, and then achieve corresponding conversions, it will be effective.

Here are some examples of well-known Internet companies looking for seed customers in the early stages for your reference. I hope that this will provide some experience and ideas that will help you in finding seed users for your projects.

Xiaomi mobile phone obtains seed users:

At that time, Xiaomi imitated the model of car owners' clubs and built a platform for mobile phone enthusiasts to communicate with each other. On this platform, mobile phone enthusiasts get everyone together to "get high" through an activity called "Popcorn", providing users with a stage to showcase themselves and make friends.

The "Popcorn" activity allows users to participate in the entire process, including:

1. Vote in the forum to decide which city to host the event;
2. There will be user performances on site, and the performers are selected in advance in the forum;
3. There will be rice noodle volunteers involved in setting up the venue;
4. Every night after the "popcorn" party, local senior Mi fans will have dinner and communicate with the Xiaomi team... This is how Xiaomi retained the best users during the startup phase.

To find the user habitat, Xiaomi’s co-founders and the entire product R&D team constantly interacted with forum users, answered their questions, posted about Xiaomi, and interacted continuously, thus attracting core users one by one. Use the large platform of Weibo to create topics and hype up products, such as "Retweet Weibo to win a Xiaomi phone or exquisite gifts" and other extremely tempting activities.

Xiaohongshu obtains seed users:

In order to launch the "Hong Kong Shopping Guide" (the predecessor of Xiaohongshu) before the Hong Kong Christmas sale, the product manager took the beta version to the Shanghai Exit-Entry Administration Bureau and spent a whole day there, specifically looking for women who were queuing up to apply for passes to Hong Kong to try it out, and it received unanimous praise.

At the same time, he carried a stack of small cards with him to distribute, with the QR code of the Xiaohongshu public account on it to guide users to follow it. The users acquired through this channel are very accurate in terms of Xiaohongshu's product positioning: they are represented by women, most of whom are white-collar students, and they are also people who love overseas shopping.

KEEP obtains seed users:

Keep’s user base exceeded 100 million in August 2017. So how did KEEP acquire its first batch of seed users in the early stages of its business? The method was “Chief Beta Tester” + “Mine-laying Plan”.

Chief Beta Tester:

Before going online, the first thing Keep did was to recruit many users who like fitness and are willing to try new things through Weibo, WeChat, QQ, and Tieba. They called these users "Chief Beta Testers". They originally planned to find 200 people to test the product, but ended up recruiting 4,000 people.

These people are particularly tolerant because they know they are internal testers and will tolerate some mistakes made by KEEP and help KEPP provide effective suggestions. Through the continuous feedback from these 4,000 people, Kepp iterated two more versions and was officially launched only after it was overall stable.

Mine laying plan:

Keep is in all fitness-related user gathering communities, such as the weight loss bar, fat loss bar, and fitness bar in Baidu Tieba, and various weight loss groups on Douban. It buries some Keep posts or content, mainly posting some fitness experience posts and maintaining the popularity of the posts. By the time the product was launched, everyone was talking about Keep.

Through these two methods, a large number of seed users were gathered, and then with the operation of Weibo + WeChat public platform, the seed users achieved a huge explosive growth.

Zhihu obtains seed users:

Zhihu in China imitates the question-and-answer community Quora, whose founder is the former CTO of Facebook.

Just like Zhihu, Quora is a high-level question-and-answer platform. When they first had no users, they had no money to spend on advertising, so how did they do it?

Ask and answer your own questions, and they are all of high quality. Next, they invited test users to continue asking questions and answering them until the website's popularity gradually increased. They then opened the entire website to allow users to ask questions, answer questions, and maintain and modify content themselves.

Those who have used Zhihu know that in the early days, most of the users on Zhihu were from the IT industry, which was related to Zhihu's invitation registration mechanism at the time. They invited Kai-Fu Lee and Lei Jun to endorse it. A large number of people who wanted to register on Zhihu had to spend money to buy an invitation code. If you have the resources of a big boss, you must learn to leverage his power and cling to his thighs.

Other examples of “ordinary companies” acquiring seed users:

A maternal and infant brand acquires seed users:

I have a client who makes maternal and child products, it’s a new brand. What we planned for him was to register hundreds of small accounts, constantly join WeChat groups and QQ groups for mothers, which added up to nearly 3,000, build relationships with group owners, do live broadcasts and serial sharing lectures in thousands of groups, send red envelopes, and organize activities. Under relatively easy circumstances, he gradually formed the first batch of stable and serious users.

Good content gets seed users:

This sentence was said by Xu Husheng, the founder of Yitiao. In fact, Yitiao initially spent a lot of money on WeChat Moments advertising. Later, the continuous production of high-quality videos encouraged various influencers and KOLs to forward them.

For example: After a video introducing China's unique hotels came out, friends in the hotel circle were all flooded with messages. After a photography video came out, the art circle was flooded with messages. Not to mention the food video, it was forwarded tens of thousands of times in an hour.

Table game store obtains seed users:

A board game store that is only open for two days on weekends. There was no publicity at the beginning so almost no one in the surrounding area knew about it. Considering that the architect's work is quite busy at work, it is impossible to invest too much energy and money in the promotion of the board game store. So, how can we efficiently complete the promotion to target users?

The first step is to imagine the target user portrait in my mind. Those who may be interested in board games should be "young people living nearby", so what other characteristics do they have? In what kind of scenarios would they naturally see the promotional information of a board game store?

The scene that comes to my mind is the various "newsstands" near my home, which are places often visited by young people living nearby. So I printed a batch of flyers for board game stores: the front side contained relevant information about the board game bar, and the back side contained coupons of different sizes.

Then, I used cigarettes to "bribe" the owners of all the nearby newsstands and asked them to put these flyers in popular newspapers and magazines. Soon, this publicity channel brought batches of new users to the board game store.

The confinement center obtains seed users:

For example, the slogan of a certain confinement center: There is no male medical staff. The purpose is to make the confinement center deeply rooted in the hearts of the local people, and to use water armies, big Vs and the media to spread the message: the water army posts claiming to be male graduates of nursing majors, and after graduation there will be endless spring scenery to see. First, they gather fire and make thousands of local people curse them, and then the confinement center jumps out and says that they will never use male medical staff... They buy local big Vs and media to make it a local hot topic.

Movie review apps get seed users:

Movie apps are used to write film reviews. Based on this function, I set up a professional film lover organization named "Zhiying" with the slogan "The warmest film self-media". It is presented in the form of WeChat group + official account, and specifically goes to Zhihu to invite media people who are capable of contributing high-quality content to join. The point that attracts them is the high-end status of this organization and the communication with like-minded movie fans. After the organization is established, I promise to frequently organize online exchanges, offline activities, write film reviews and publish them on my own media, etc.

Source: Miao Liwei Talks About Marketing