Tik Tok is popular, Yinyue is hot: How are Toutiao’s hit products created?

The social entrepreneurship market in 2018 can be described as one wave after another. Compared with Bullet Messenger's high opening and low closing, Soul has been hovering at a high level but has had difficulty breaking through. Yinyue is indeed a shining new star in the entertainment and social track, and is even hailed as the "successor" of the post-TikTok era.

If we dig deeper into Ren Yuan, the helmsman behind Yinyue, we can find that not only is the founder a Toutiao entrepreneur, but most of the entrepreneurial team also come from Toutiao. From Douyin to Yinyue, it is not difficult to see that Toutiao has indeed formed a mature Toutiao growth methodology in product design and user growth. From the perspective of how to quickly create a hit product, Toutiao's products are the most user-friendly.

Let’s first take a look at the product logic of Douyin and Yinyue.

Douyin focuses on videos + special effects, providing users with a window for DIY video creation, integrating characters + songs + a variety of technical special effects. The product itself has entertainment effects, and users create original works for their own entertainment, which fully stimulates the creativity of users and spontaneously forms the driving force for fission dissemination.

Yinyue focuses on karaoke + social interaction, simulating a KTV scene with multiple participants, integrating "singing + making friends + competitive games" together, increasing the entertainment value of competitive games. Some gameplay also draws on the live experience of variety shows, allowing every user to have a sense of participation and achieve the purpose of "making friends through singing."

Let's take a look at the similarities between these two products, and we can see some clues.

Whether it is Douyin or Yinyue, the main user groups are young people born in the 1990s and 2000s who like fashion and trends. Why? Because this group likes to hunt for novelty and pursue exciting things, and they have grown up in the world of the Internet, they accept new things quickly and do not require too much market education costs.

On the other hand, young people have a wide circle and the speed of fission propagation is very fast. When they encounter an interesting product, many young people will immediately share it with their good friends. Do you remember the farm stealing vegetables and grabbing parking spaces that were all the rage in the past? At first, it was the young people who were fascinated and then led the elders astray.

Nowadays, appearance is everything, and products are no exception. Since it is a product aimed at young people, the UI design generally has all kinds of cool and dynamic color effects. The red and blue shadow texture effects of Douyin and the cute line effects of Yinyue really attract the attention of young people, and the more exciting and exaggerated the effect, the better.

The two hottest software areas on the market right now are social and gaming. It is not difficult to find that both Douyin and Yinyue have added various gamification methods. Douyin's gameplay is simple and crude. The short videos themselves are entertaining, and then various strange special effects are added to attract attention. Yinyue has incorporated the gameplay of competitive karaoke into the original popular karaoke, which is fascinating.

The short video and karaoke fields are the most competitive areas in the entertainment and social market, and product homogeneity is becoming increasingly serious. Douyin has added variety show elements created by editing on the basis of the original short videos, and Yinyue has added social and competitive elements on the basis of the original karaoke field.

Users who frequently use Toutiao products will find that Toutiao's products are almost all close to people's lives and have a low threshold for use. They read the news in the morning, find a joke to complain about after dinner, and entertain and socialize when they get home from get off work. These are things that ordinary people experience in their daily lives. By adding fun to these products, ordinary people's lives become less monotonous.

By comparing the similarities between Douyin and Yinyue, we can find that Toutiao’s product logic is based on user needs. Their growth methodology is not based on systematic training and teaching, but is honed by constantly putting themselves in the role of users and practicing bit by bit in daily life.

In an interview, Chen Lin, CEO of Toutiao, mentioned the four major capabilities that an excellent product manager should possess, which is also the focus of Toutiao's growth methodology for talent training and assessment.

In fact, it means completely integrating yourself into the role of a user, using the product's functions in depth, and gaining something that you can empathize with the user.

Only with logic can you think about what functions the current product has, why you need this function, and what problems this function can solve for users, so as to verify whether your ideas are reliable.

You must think further than others, whether the current functions are complete, whether there are better solutions, and think from different perspectives and visions.

The essence of the product is to make work decisions, and decisions need to be based on massive amounts of information, including what to do next? How to improve the next function?

There is another important reason why Toutiao can continue to create popular products - it is addictive. Whether it is Douyin or Yinyue, they are the kind of thing that young people can't stop using once they like it, just as Nir Eyal mentioned in the book "Addicted" the four stages of the addiction model:

The reason why young people fall in love with Tik Tok and Yinyue is that they love to have fun. With the popularization of mobile Internet, young people have more ways to pass their time, such as playing games and watching live broadcasts, which are their spiritual food and lifestyle.

Users have certain expectations when they use a product in the early stages. If the first experience is good and in line with expectations, they will increase the frequency of use. The root of user action lies in human nature and subjective will. Posting on TikTok may be to show off and showcase oneself, while singing karaoke may be to prove that one is good at karaoke.

Only with rewards can users be stimulated to have a strong desire to act spontaneously. For example, having a large number of fans by posting on Douyin videos can get material rewards, and K song selection can get spiritual rewards. When users are looking forward to these rewards, their inner desire has actually been ignited.

The core of a product's long-term retention is to be able to provide long-term value to users. UGC and interaction with friends are the investment made by users to enhance the product experience, such as physical and mental pleasure. The way to drive users' continuous investment must be value rather than temporary novelty.

Products are the core of entrepreneurship. Popular products cannot be copied, but the logic behind their popularity can be traced. Perhaps, Toutiao is currently the best Huangpu Military Academy for product managers in China.