APP user growth: One model solves 90% of growth problems!

If growth cannot be achieved, it is most likely not because there is a problem with the means of growth, but because the growth environment has changed.

Just like the reason why dinosaurs became extinct was not because there was something wrong with their way of survival, but because their living environment suddenly changed.

This article will explain "growth" in detail in 3 parts, and will also cover the gameplay of the top content companies:

1. Comparison of past and present growth environments, and new growth models;

2. Discover the growth mistakes that were often made in the past;

3. Use growth methodology to improve actions.

01. Comparison of growth environments and new growth models

To find a new growth model, we must first look at how companies achieved growth in the past.

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1. Past growth logic - using exposure as a division

In the era of print or television media, users received information passively and roughly, which we call "strong exposure."

Think about the fear of being dominated by "giving away Melatonin as a gift" and "Hengyuanxiang Sheep Sheep Sheep" in those years...

Why would a company or brand do this? ——Because it works.

Brands gain high ground in user awareness through strong media exposure, so that users will remember you and buy from you when they have needs.

Moreover, in the era of print media and television media, users have very limited channels for obtaining new information. When men, women, young and old get home from get off work, they basically only have the option of watching TV, so it becomes very easy to brainwash users.

As long as a brand spends money and grabs the prime time to air advertisements before and after CCTV's "News Broadcast", users will most likely see you and remember you, and will be more likely to choose you when they need to buy something.

In this way, the company's users will increase and sales will increase.

In the past, the entire growth process was like a huge funnel, starting with exposure and then filtering people down layer by layer, doing division.

So if you want growth, choose the most expensive channel, get the biggest exposure, and increase the conversion rate at each level.

However, as the media environment changes, this means of growth has gradually become ineffective.

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2. Current growth logic - using fission for multiplication

Fast forward to now, how long has it been since you last watched TV? Also, how much time do you spend on WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, Kuaishou, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Toutiao, Douban, and Zhihu every day?

Users’ attention is becoming fragmented and they are becoming increasingly difficult to influence because there is too much information and it is too difficult to remember a brand.

This is why self-media advertisers have become particularly concerned about "brand and effect integration". Simple exposure can no longer bring effective conversions. If users cannot remember you, they will not buy from you.

Furthermore, user purchasing decisions have changed - when there is too much interference information, we will be more inclined to rely on recommendations from acquaintances.

Imagine that you are brainwashed 200 times in the elevator with the message “find a job, talk to the boss”. It is not as effective as your friend saying “Brother, I found a job at Boss Direct Hire, do you want to try it?”, right?

Let’s take a look at the content brands in the self-media field that have the strongest ability to bring goods (not exposure), and which one does not have super high user stickiness, such as "Hong Pangpang" (now called "Li Lili").

For "Hong Pangpang", fans are not just fans. In addition to participating in early research, they also provide suggestions and materials for "Hong Pangpang"'s content creation and topic selection.

"Hong Pangpang" also tried hard to create a feeling that "makes fans feel that "this is a fashion account that I built up myself", becoming a close friend of fans and sincerely recommending good things to them.

More importantly, when fans become your own people, they will frantically cheer for you, canvass for votes, and promote you. All of this is based on their personal relationships and spreads through word of mouth, so the user growth is very fast.

This is the same as the "Produce 101" program that allows fans to participate in star creation. This kind of fission gameplay exists in all industries:

A few years ago, Lei Jun's "Xiaomi" started by gathering 100 super fans, from the vertical positioning of "born only for enthusiasts" to the current mass positioning of "ultimate cost-effectiveness", step by step using word of mouth to achieve fission and growth.

This process of starting from a small group of core fans, building deep user relationships, and then expanding to the entire market will be the mainstream growth logic in the future.

This is fundamentally different from the logic of using a funnel for division in the past.

The new growth logic is the process of continuous multiplication through fission.

Now we know that the old growth logic no longer works because the environment has changed.

Users have become more difficult to brainwash and influence, and they have more choices. So, let’s use the “fission multiplication” standard to see which past behaviors were problematic.

02. Common growth mistakes made in the past

Friends who have run a public account must have received advertising flyers for facial masks, honey, and local specialties. The purpose of these brand owners' placement on new media is to gain exposure.

This is exactly the same as advertisers who placed ads on CCTV 20 years ago, but users are hard to be influenced nowadays, so the actual conversion rate can be imagined.

This is silly, but if you look at it from another perspective, we all make this mistake all the time.

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Mistake 1: Don’t use “exposure logic” when upgrading your account

Due to market competition pressure, content brands have been upgrading their accounts one after another. In order to solve the cold start problem, they sometimes choose to test new content on old accounts.

However, this logically exposes thinking.

For example: I have 1 million fans, and they originally like to read the family stories of "Friends". If you suddenly change it to "One Hundred Years of Solitude" that "Douban Literary Youth" likes to read, users will not buy it.

This is exactly the same as when we use public accounts to promote facial masks and honey. It only provides exposure but not conversion.

The only difference is that we don’t have to spend money to buy our own headline advertising space, which makes it easier for us to lose our sense of the cost of trial and error.

Because it's free, it's a waste.

We expect to filter out those who like to watch from the existing users layer by layer. This is a process of division and it is very painful:

① Content creators cannot get real feedback from target users (because they test new content among old users);

② It lost the favor of original users, resulting in a large loss of assets and the cost of trial and error was too high.

So how do we use the “exposure” growth logic? Don’t worry, we will explain it in detail in Part 3.

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Mistake 2: Don’t blindly create a group, find 100 core fans first

Classmates often complain that they have built a fan group with 20,000 people, but they don’t know any information about these “fans” except whether they are male or female.

If you ask them why they set up a group, they may say that it is because more content can be exposed, the article readership will be higher, and maybe they can also sell some goods.

Gathering people together to expose them and sell goods is still an exposure mentality.

In the article "Get 1,000 True Fans and You'll Win the World", a definition of "fans" was given: fans are supporters, people or organizations with whom you have an emotional connection.

You can ask yourself: Do the fans in the community have an emotional connection with me? Do I know what my fans usually watch? Where do they appear? What topics are you interested in...

Even someone as strong as Mimi Meng needs to use her fan base to deeply interact with users and build relationships. She needs 5,000 people to vote on the title alone , and her fans often don't buy into the titles she thinks are good.

Uncle Mana is also terrible. The team spends 70% of their time replying to messages . There are about 10,000 messages every day, and the author replies to almost every one of them.

He himself has also shared his creative inspirations: replying to messages is a process of maintaining relationships with fans, and it is also a process of finding sources of inspiration . "If you don't communicate with users, you don't know how to write good content. Art comes from life, and self-media comes from messages."

If you were asked to choose again, how much time would you be willing to spend replying to messages every day?

It is indeed hard to do this, but this is the first step to solving the growth problem: get close to your users, make friends with them, let them feel your values ​​​​and attitudes up close, and let them slowly trust you and rely on you.

Okay, we have finished comparing the old and new growth logics and talking about common mistakes in the past. Now, let’s use a growth methodology and the “fission multiplication” logic step by step to start growth from scratch.

03. Use growth methodology to improve your actions

Before answering the question “how to grow”, please remember one sentence: products create value, and growth amplifies value.

If you spend 100 million yuan to make a name for yourself by selling low-quality facial masks, the market reputation will immediately backfire on your brand.

Think about why it has become increasingly difficult for bad domestic films to survive in recent years. This is the reason why users’ ability to obtain information has become stronger, and word of mouth is very important.

Therefore, before increasing the fission diversion flow, please make sure to polish your product.

Following this logic, I will break down the growth process into 4 steps:

① Find your first 100 core users

② Make a minimal product prototype to verify its value

③ Find the core indicators, iterate the product, and test continuously

④ Break through the circle with growth

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1. Find your top 100 core users

Try asking yourself:

If you were asked to start a business from scratch, where would you find your first 100 target users? What are their characteristics?

These 100 core seed users are the starting point of the entire "fission multiplication" and are 1 in 1,000,000.

All our testing and growth needs to be based on the needs of the target group. Look at this picture again to avoid self-congratulation:

Because there are only 100 users, compared to directly testing on a large account with tens of thousands of followers, it not only reduces the cost of trial and error, but also obtains real feedback from target users.

What do we need these 100 fans for? Let's introduce a model - the 1990 model:

1% of core seed users provide insights and innovations;

9% of highly sticky users provide dissemination;

90% of the general population provides consumption.

The 100 core seed users we are looking for are the 1% of users who provide insights and innovations.

Therefore, they are better off: (Standards from the book "The Tipping Point")

① An expert in a certain field: can provide enough insights and enjoy helping others solve problems;

② Is a contact person: has a wide network of contacts;

③ Be a salesperson: able to motivate and influence people around you.

Let’s take the fashion account “Hong Pangpang” as an example. Before opening this account, “Hong Pangpang” collected 5,200 data points through questionnaires, covering 10 large groups of 500 people, 2 groups of relatives and friends of 100 people, and at the same time interviewed 200 people, asking fans what they need and care about - this is to gain insights from 1% of users.

Then, you have to go through 4 months of research and 3 proposal defenses, but the plan was rejected. At the defense meeting, not only Mimi Meng, Andy and Huang Xiaowu, but colleagues from the entire company will participate. If you fail the defense, you can only come back next time - this is innovation together with experts.

For example, Zhang Tianyi, the founder of "Baman Hunan Beef Noodles", found it difficult to make authentic "Hunan Beef Noodles" in Beijing. So he came up with a solution. He searched for the keywords "Beijing" and "Hunan" on Weibo, found Hunanese people in Beijing, and selected those with more than 1,000 Weibo followers. He invited them to taste the noodles offline, built a community, and learned about their tastes...

Why choose Hunanese people in Beijing with more than 1,000 fans? Because they are the connectors and KOLs in the target circle and have extensive connections.

Of course, without that bowl of noodles, it would be difficult to find those 1,000 people and have an opportunity to communicate, because we still need a tool - the minimum product prototype, that bowl of beef noodles.

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2. Use the smallest product prototype to recruit seed users and verify the value

What is a Minimum Product Prototype?

It doesn’t mean that you have to be able to write code. The “minimum product prototype” is the smallest prototype that “can let your users know what you want to do”.

It could be a business plan made by "Hong Pangpang" before opening an account, to collide with Mi Meng, the super user;

It can be a video, go to TED or Yixi to spread your views and see how many people agree with you;

It can also be a community that verifies at low cost whether what you want to do is valuable.

"Duozhaoyu", a second-hand book trading tool that was very popular last year, did not have an app at first. The founder pulled less than 20 people from his circle of friends, set up a group, and told them that if they wanted to sell or buy books, they could just tell him in the group.

He just wanted to see: Is there really anyone who would sell him books? How is the condition of the book you received? Can everything collected be sold? How much is the appropriate amount to charge? …

We need to use the smallest product model to verify its value among the target population.

As a content creator, we can write an article about the new content we want to create and the new projects we want to initiate, find people where the target users will be, polish the content with them, and verify its value.

For example, when I was running the "Business Growth" account before, I would write a valuable content prototype and publish it on "Everyone is a Product Manager", "Note Man", and "Marketing Knowledge Planet", telling them what I wanted to do and finding people to do it together.

I quickly found 20 seed users who were at a high level and who agreed with my ideas. We all had a clear goal, which was to do this together.

Looking back now, our previous content upgrade actions were more like a process of production in a factory and then forced sale to users.

A big reason why the user base is not growing is that the product itself is too self-satisfied.

If you don't give users the opportunity to participate, users will not give you the opportunity to grow.

After gathering the core target users and having a product prototype, all that remains is to keep polishing and testing it, but this is by no means easy.

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3. Find the core indicators, iterate the product, and test continuously

Peter Drucker once said something that hit me right away: If a goal cannot be measured, it cannot be grown.

Without a scale, you will never lose weight, it's that simple.

Therefore, it is necessary to find the core evaluation indicators of content products before conducting iterative testing.

Weibo does have this indicator - the reading-to-transaction ratio. When a piece of content exceeds a certain reading-to-transaction ratio within a fixed dissemination time, you can use a big account to forward this content, because the value of the content has been verified at the lowest cost.

Douyin also has this indicator, but the platform hides this process and uses algorithms to achieve it automatically.

In the "recommendation mechanism" of "TikTok", if you publish a piece of content, "TikTok" will first push this content to 500 users who have been tagged with a certain label to see their reactions. If their reactions are good, more resources will be given to this content to continue "fission". If the reactions are not good, it will be forgotten.

The final spread of a good content on Douyin has little to do with whether you have fans or how many fans you have.

You see, this is all about the "fission and multiplication" logic, starting with a wave of people to verify the value and then spreading it out step by step.

The same goes for WeChat, but we have to find the content evaluation indicators ourselves.

It is definitely wrong to only look at the number of readings, as this falls into the error of "exposure logic".

I suggest you look at the sharing rate within the account, that is, how many people among the existing fans of the public account choose to share your content after reading it. We want this ratio, which corresponds to the "one-time dissemination" in the background of the public account.

Let’s first look at the fission process of WeChat:

Click to see full image

You will find that, unlike Tik Tok, WeChat’s initial reach will definitely be your existing fans, and even if your content is amazing, you will not be given additional traffic support.

Therefore, to judge whether your content is good or not, just look at how many of your existing fans choose to share it after reading it. The higher this ratio is, the more your existing fans like it, and the more valuable your content product is.

Moreover, this indicator has basically nothing to do with the publication location or title of your content, and is most likely determined directly by the content.

Because this is the ratio of existing users who read and forward the content after opening it (regardless of the title or posting location).

When I was testing new content on an old account before, in order not to affect the likes of the original fans, I had to find the intersection of the new and old content:

We tested new content on 2 posts and found that when the forwarding rate within the account was > 3% (different for each account), old users were able to accept the new content. We then decisively pushed it on the headlines to minimize the cost of trial and error.

Do you remember "What is marketing and product capabilities" mentioned in "To New Media People"? ——We must find ways to find common ground and create win-win situations.

All the work done before is to minimize the risk in the process of finding intersections.

There is a great saying: If new content is not tested, it is equivalent to testing it on 100% of users, which is fatal to a large account.

If you successfully reach this step, it means that the product is almost complete and its value has been verified. The last step is growth, that is, amplifying the value.

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4. Break through the circle with growth

As mentioned earlier, if your content product is not growing, it is likely that the product itself is too self-satisfied. The solution is to iterate the content based on the target audience.

What if the iteration is successful but there is no growth? There is a high probability that the circle is restricted and the growth has reached saturation. This problem is particularly obvious on WeChat accounts.

Why is WeChat account so miserable? The reason is very simple, as mentioned earlier: the WeChat platform does not provide you with additional traffic support.

On Weibo and Tik Tok, as long as your content is good, the platform will provide you with traffic support. They are "public domain traffic pools" and the traffic is centrally distributed by the platform as a large center (centralized).

This is also why we find that excellent content brands are more likely to stand out on Weibo and Douyin.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

The good thing is that this mechanism can help creators get effective and real market feedback and quickly iterate content; it can also solve the problems of difficulty in cold start and inability to break out of social circles. (This is what we want)

The bad thing is that this makes the entire content competition more intense, and the iteration speed must be very fast to ensure survival; and the users you have accumulated with great difficulty are not yours, but the platform's, that is, content creators are highly dependent on platform algorithms.

But WeChat is a "private traffic pool" and will not give you additional traffic. It relies on your initial fans as the starting point for dissemination and on the fission of social relationships.

This is both a bad thing and a good thing.

The bad thing is that it is difficult to start from a cold start, and social communication is limited to acquaintances. It is difficult to break through the circle, and even if you finally break through, WeChat will block you.

The good thing is that once your initial traffic is sufficient, the competitive barriers will be established and you will not be highly dependent on WeChat traffic; and through the official account, you can have a deeper relationship with users (which is what we want).

Therefore, if WeChat accounts want to grow, there are at least 3 ways (free):

① Mutual promotion

Everyone knows this, but the significance of mutual promotion needs to be re-understood - the essence of mutual promotion is to go to other groups of people and verify the value.

You use an article to express yourself on an unfamiliar public account, tell their fans what you want to do and how you plan to do it, and invite them to play together. This is a process of verifying your value.

So, if your mutual promotion doesn’t work, there are only two possibilities:

First, the target audience is wrong; second, your content has no value.

② Go to vertical traffic platforms other than WeChat to attract new users

For example, an account that covers literary and artistic life can go to Douban to answer questions. I once posted 5 pieces of content that were proven to be valuable on WeChat on Douban. Within 2 months, I had 2,000 Douban fans, and my efficiency in attracting new users was very high.

If you are running a maternal and child account, go to places like Babytree and Mayu Maternal and Child to find people and take the initiative to step out of your circle.

If you run a funny account, you can try to place it on places like Jike, Tieba, and Baozou Manhua (yes, competitor accounts are also good places), and use your content product prototypes and excellent works to attract people.

In a word, media is a means. Don’t worry about whether you are using a WeChat account or not. The goal is to find the right people and convey your value to them.

③ Use the algorithm platform to iterate content and break through the circle

For example, Uncle Mana has already polished its products on WeChat, and started working on Douyin at the end of last year to solve the problem of being unable to break out of the circle using WeChat;

"Fengqun" started out as a joke teller on Weibo, and has been using Weibo and Douyin to quickly iterate content. This year, they plan to transfer Douyin's traffic to WeChat, because WeChat is more in line with the logic of "making friends with users" and has sufficient competitive barriers, making it worthy of long-term investment.

Even more extreme is the creation of "Office Ono" onion video, according to the logic of fission multiplication, how to incubate an IP is divided into 3 stages:

Introduction phase: three phases of videos, IP online, focusing on obtaining user feedback, observation and analysis, making adjustments, and iterations;

Hot-selling period: After the iteration is completed, the content tone is understood, and ways are found to create hot-selling products and quickly drive the growth of IP. The shorter the time, the better, but respect the rules of the content, after all, there is an element of luck;

Full operation period: distribution channels, resource introduction, promotion, and rapid growth within a controllable range.

Of course, after the free means are exhausted, there are also paid means. For example, "Xin Shixiang" established its own growth team and paid growth.

Once again, new media is a means, not an end.

04. Summary

This is a long article that will help you re-understand "growth".

We started with the changes in the growth environment, talked about the new growth logic, and gave a growth methodology and 1 judgment that conforms to this logic.

1. Comparison of growth environment

① In the past: using exposure as division;

② Now: use fission to do multiplication.

2. Growth Methodology

① Find your first 100 core users - 1990 model, find the 1%, they are experts, promoters, connectors

② Make a minimal product prototype to verify the value - write down what you want to do and what you want to invite everyone to do

③ Find the core indicators and iterate the product - share within the account

④ Break through the circle with growth - proactively go to where the target users are

3. A judgment

There are probably two reasons why growth is slow: there are problems with the product, or growth has encountered a bottleneck in the industry.

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Combined with the previous article "Positioning | To new media people: Why I advise you not to do new media", we have sorted out the positioning, products, and growth in a relatively systematic manner.

What remains is to put it into practice, from "knowing" to "doing".

Finally, let me give you a quote from Teacher Mimi Mengmi: Any good product is made by smart people using hard work.

mutual encouragement.

Source: I don’t like to talk about reason (ID: norule_hu)