Why do early products need seed users?

When it comes to the concept of seed users , I believe that as long as you often hang out in Internet forums and communities, or pay attention to some Internet information, you will be familiar with this concept, because it is mentioned in many places. I will write a series of articles about seed users soon, including how to understand them and what value they bring. What methods and ideas should be used to find seed users and how to expand these users? How to operate seed users, what kind of things should be paid attention to, and how to execute?

This is the first article, and it mainly aims to understand its value and necessity, that is, I hope to help everyone understand what seed users are? It can tell you specifically where it can bring value.

Table of contents:

1. What is a seed user?
2. Why do early products need seed users?

1. What is a seed user?

What are the so-called seed users like?

This is possible, you have found a group of people, and the significance of these people to you is like you are now sowing them into the soil as seeds, and in the future they will gradually sprout, grow, bloom and bear fruit. In other words, this group of people can help your product grow slowly and become better and better . This is basically how you can understand the concept of seed users.

Therefore, the expansion and operation of seed users is very common in the Internet world. It is the most common and effective means of operation in the early stages of Internet product development. Yes, let us first simply lay the groundwork for seed users.

We have had an abstract understanding before. We are told that seed users are a group of people who can help a product grow, right? What kind of people can play this role and help our products grow?

It's probably like this. For the so-called seed users, they should be very active in the early stages of product development, willing to interact as the person in charge of the product, very enthusiastic about the product, and very supportive. This group of people, because they are passionate about the product, are willing to actively interact with you and give you feedback.

Therefore, they can play a relatively important role in improving the product in the early stages of product development, including subsequent promotion , subsequent growth, etc. This is the definition of seed users.

2. Why do early products need seed users?

Yes, why do our early products need such a group of people? Why do early products need seed users? There may be several reasons. Let's talk about them one by one:

2.1 The experience of early products is often not guaranteed, and there are even a lot of bugs

The first reason is that for early products, our product experience is often not guaranteed. Even the first version of many products, or even the first five or six versions, may have a lot of bugs and a lot of complaints. So because your early products were, generally speaking, terrible, right?

So you definitely cannot throw such a bad product to a large number of users at once. If you do that, a large number of users will have a very bad evaluation of you, and basically you may never have a chance to win back their hearts. So in the early stages, you may need to have a group of people who recognize you, are enthusiastic about you, and are willing to interact and give you feedback, and have them use your product first.

Because they are more proactive, they can continuously help you improve the product, tolerate bugs, and tolerate your bad experience. Yes, so this is one reason.

Let’s take an example: there are many food delivery platforms, such as Ele.me and Meituan Waimai . In fact, when its 1.0 version was launched, you can find the earliest reviews in the app store and you can see how bad the experience of the early first version was. The reviews basically said that the takeaways were not delivered for hours, and some reviews said that out of ten orders, six were not delivered for various reasons...

So it is actually very normal for such situations to occur in early products. Yes, I even think it is very reasonable. Because in the early stage of the first version, you are sure that there must be many problems in your internal processes and collaboration. Including the first version of Didi Taxi , which received a lot of complaints. You couldn’t even receive a mobile phone verification code when registering. How bad is that, right?

So in the early days, the experience of this product will be very bad, so we need seed users, which is our first reason.

2.2 The cost of directly promoting new products is high. Accumulating word-of-mouth from seed users can help promote them and achieve better results.

So what is the second reason?

The second reason is : the cost of directly spending money to promote 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 some potential energy, then if we promote it, the effect may be better.

How do you understand this sentence?

Let’s analyze it from two perspectives:

(1) First, let me briefly introduce the concept of "the operating rules behind the product life cycle ". That is, users in the market can be roughly divided into several categories, and the first two categories are called innovators and early adopters.

These two types of people may be more sensitive to new and emerging products, and they are more willing to actively try to use these products when new products appear. These are the two categories of people, but the two categories in the middle are mass users, divided into early majority and late majority. These two categories of people may often be, for example, when a new product appears. The prerequisite for me to accept this new product may be that I must hear that someone in my circle of friends is also using this product, then I dare to use it.

For example: Just like products like Didi Taxi or Baidu Takeout, many mass users may have heard that a large number of people around them started to use this product, so they dared to try it, so this is a very important logic.

What can this logic actually tell us?

What I can tell you is that 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 for me to directly 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 first have the above two types of people. These two types of people are often what we call seed users. So from a standpoint, having seed users is 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.

(2) What is the other angle? We directly use this kind of image advertising method to attract new users, and the cost of convincing a user is relatively high.

What is the relatively low-cost method? A relatively low-cost way is to let existing users help us convince others, which is likely to be less costly.

Let me give you an example: For example, what you see on the screen now may be very familiar to many people. Many food delivery products, many taxi-hailing products, and many O2O products are actually using a similar red envelope mechanism, right? For example, let's say you've never heard of a product.

At this point, imagine two scenarios:

1. One is that one day you see an advertisement for a product, or read an article introducing it, but you have never heard of it before and don’t know what it does.
2. Another possibility is that one day your friend sends you a red envelope for a product, and your friend may tell you that he ordered a meal with this product, or bought something with this product, and he thought the experience was pretty good.

Imagine these two scenarios. Which one is more likely to make you a real user of such a product? Without a doubt, it must be the latter, that is, a friend introduces it to you, because people are always inclined to believe in the recommendations of people around them and the transmission of such information from their friends.

So from this perspective, if you already have a group of seed users, they can also help you with promotion, and the cost of attracting new users is lower than the cost of directly advertising and buying users. This is the second dimension.

Okay, so this is the second reason why we need seed users. With seed users, we can better help our products to grow user base. This is how it can be understood in simple terms.

2.3 Necessary conditions for platform and community products

What is the third reason?

The third reason is that some Internet products, such as platform products, community products, etc., naturally need a certain number of users to provide value and create an atmosphere.

Example: How do you understand this thing? Let me give you some examples.

The first example is Tantan , a product that many people may have used or seen. As we all know, Tantan is actually a social product that relies on facial recognition to gain social connections . So actually, as a user, when I first used this product, for example, if I was a man, how many photos of beautiful girls I could see on it, or what kind of photos I could see, directly determined my perception of this product.

For example, if all I see are pictures of beautiful women, I will think that this is a gathering place for beautiful women; if all I see are pictures of artistic or trendy people, I will think that this is a gathering place for literary youths or trendy people.

Do you understand? So in a large sense, the perception of this product to users depends on the earliest batch of users, what they did in it, and what content they uploaded.

So at this time, what Tantan is trying to convey to users is that I am here to find beautiful women and handsome men. My first batch of users must be some beautiful women and handsome men. Even my operations staff themselves have to find a group of such people first and upload their photos. So this is very important, otherwise this product may not be able to be launched at all.

Similarly, the second example product is called Mifeng. There is a module next to the product called Anonymous Gossip. Yes, this module actually contains all kinds of gossip information about major Internet companies. In fact, when this section first started, it didn’t have any content, so we also needed a group of people at the beginning, right? So he must first set up and produce some specific content in it.

For example, if what they produce is about changes in the strategic direction of an Internet company, internal gossip and news, etc., when people come in later and see this kind of thing, they may also tend to publish such content here. This is called atmosphere shaping for early products, and it is also in line with product positioning and early content production.

For example, the same is true for products like pp car rental. When you log in, you will find that the site displays the information of each car owner, including data and various clear profile photos, etc. These things are uploaded by the car owners. What kind of photos they upload directly determines how other users perceive the platform after they come in.

If the photos uploaded by everyone are very clear and bright, then we may think that this platform is a relatively positive and trustworthy platform. But if the photos uploaded by everyone are very blurry, crooked, and the tones of the photos are dark, then our first impression of this platform may not be very good.

So for a product like this, it is natural that you need a certain number of users in the early stages to complete the initialization of your product. Such a product must have seed users. It is absolutely impossible to attract a bunch of users when there is nothing at the beginning.

The above points are about what seed users are and why we need seed users. I hope this can help to inspire you on seed users. Thank you.

Source: Fengcheng Kuangke