How to use blockchain thinking to operate the Internet?

Many operators have a question in their hearts: after seeing so many user growth cases and practicing so much, why is it that the projects they are responsible for still have so few users and never take off?

Many people would attribute this to the fact that different companies have different products, markets, and users, and methods can only be referenced but not universally used. This statement is basically accepted by most people in the market, so after happily learning from other people's cases, they continue to painfully explore the growth path of their own products.

To be honest, I have been troubled by this problem before. Is there a universal method for growth and fission?

It was not until I started working on blockchain that I began to have a clearer understanding of this issue.

In the blockchain industry, any project can easily split and grow to an unimaginable size. The speed of splitting is several times faster than that of the traditional Internet field. For example, the EOS project gained millions of community users in three months during its most glorious period. It is no exaggeration to say that everyone had one EOS. Everyone firmly believed that it was a valuable coin with an excellent reputation.

This makes us wonder, what is the motivation for users to join and invite friends regardless of the consequences?

Blockchain projects are mainly operated through communities and groups . Therefore, its fission is more based on this ecosystem.

If a project has just been launched and needs to achieve fission, the common routine is: set up various cryptocurrency groups, give out candies for registration (candies are the tokens of the project party, which can be exchanged for RMB), and give out more candies for invitations. Then, with the help of cryptocurrency influencers and the media, we carried out extensive publicity to let everyone know what the project was about, followed by a press conference, roadshow, and listing on exchanges.

Throughout the whole process, the community , candies and messages are interspersed and coordinated. Every time an important news is released or a major progress is made, it will be announced to all community users, and candies will be distributed again to guide fission again. The whole process lasts from half a month to three months, and it keeps fissioning and spreading. EOS and TRX are relatively successful in this model. The most brilliant achievement is that the community has acquired hundreds of thousands of customers within half a month.

Take EOS as an example: when the team first came out, it benchmarked against ETH, the industry leader (the leader is Bitcoin , and its position is irreplaceable), and claimed that the goal was to replace ETH, which immediately attracted a lot of people's attention. Everyone wanted to know what kind of coin this was.

Then the team began to frantically promote Candy in major cryptocurrency groups, and combined with previous PR publicity, attracted many people to join the community. The team then began to promote their project extensively within the community, describing the technical highlights of their project, their development plan, and the substantial benefits it would provide to users every day.

After operating for a period of time, a certain group of loyal users began to form within the community. Next, EOS began to launch the community partner program.

This partner and the partner commonly mentioned in the Internet are two different concepts. The partners of the Internet are mostly part of the strategy of old customers bringing in new customers, while the partners of EOS are real user partners. Each user partner is responsible for tasks ranging from attracting new members to the community, operating, writing articles to external promotion.

Correspondingly, user partners will receive corresponding remuneration every month, and at the same time have priority to enjoy the quota in the next stage, that is, private placement at a very low price and hold a certain amount of EOS.

Since then, a positive cycle has begun to take shape. In order to increase the value of the EOS in their hands, user partners who have obtained EOS will inevitably publicize it heavily to attract new users to join. Under the recommendation of old users and the powerful PR publicity of EOS, new users are scrambling to become user partners.

This model grew bigger and bigger, and later EOS launched the node plan (you can think of it as voting to select partners). The current situation of EOS is: individual users have no chance to become nodes, and it is some big capitals and big Vs in the currency circle who are scrambling to get votes for themselves, hoping to be selected as EOS nodes.

After hearing this, you may have questions. How is this different from the traditional Internet approach to attracting new customers?

We also offer benefits when you sign up, and we also offer benefits when you invite friends to sign up. As for publicity, we also use major media to promote our brand , and we even do brand building, which is even better than blockchain. So, what are the points of blockchain that are worth learning for Internet practitioners?

1. Give users "real" sincerity and benefits

Although both industries offer benefits for registration, the perceptions they give people are very different. Currently in the Internet field, registration benefits have become a very common thing, but in the eyes of users, this "benefit" is more of a routine. They said they would give 200 yuan but instead they gave 20 coupons with a 10 yuan discount. They said they would give 50 yuan in cash but instead they had to pay 500 yuan to withdraw cash. This method is so common in the eyes of users that registration benefits have now become synonymous with routine in the eyes of users.

However, in the blockchain field, the rewards users receive when registering can be exchanged for real money and cash, which has been reached a consensus in the industry. Users also receive cash for inviting others, so they have an incentive to do so. More importantly, the users they invite are often also users in the industry. The invitees trust and recognize this approach, so a fission occurs.

Although the two methods mentioned above have the same routine, they are different in essence. When we get users to use a product, the first thing we need to do is to make them trust our company. If we break our promise to users at the very beginning, they will often lose the opportunity to come into contact with our products, and in the end they will often pay a higher cost.

So next time when we set up some rules and gameplay, please remember to give users real benefits. This benefit is not necessarily money. It may be an open class, or food tasting, etc. But no matter what it is, please don’t treat it as a marketing campaign . You must truly serve the users, and converting one or two leads is enough.

2. Be “truly” human-centered

When working in the Internet industry, we have always emphasized the importance of paying attention to humanity and user experience . It was not until I started working in blockchain that I understood the essence of “human nature”. It’s also about interests. EOS makes a huge promise, giving equity to users and binding the interests of users with the interests of the company.

Internet companies often give users some material things, such as an IPad , an iPhone, etc. Once users get the product, it’s gone and they won’t have any connection with the company. This has led to many Internet companies having to do an event all over again for the second time, and both the customer acquisition and retention costs are very high.

Therefore, when providing benefits to users, we must truly start from humanity and bind users to our company's chariot. If someone who has been taking advantage of you for a long time also speaks ill of you every day, it goes against human nature.

3. Leverage Thinking: Individual Combat and Industrial Combat

What inspired me the most was that the entire blockchain industry has formed an ecosystem for "user growth": many individual users set up their own groups for the convenience of invitations, and everyone who has a project can directly reach a consensus and register with each other. Many candy groups are built just to receive candy, and there are also many technical robots that are designed to attract people to join.

Of course, we are not talking about the good or bad of this matter itself. I just want to say that this matter has brought me profound inspiration. The Internet field has been developing for so many years, but there is rarely an alliance like user growth (even if there is, it is very weak). Everyone is fighting on their own, and it is difficult to connect the upstream and downstream of the same industry, let alone competitors.

I have seen a foreign company doing SASS in the B-end market before. One of its more successful cases is its collaboration with another bookseller. The company publishes books and the bookseller promotes them. The company itself also recommends many B-end marketing and technical books to its customers. As a result, both sides have achieved good results.

Therefore, sometimes, in order to increase user growth, in addition to relying on one's own strength to organize activities and events, external cooperation is also an effective and long-term method. The best state here is to establish your own alliance .

In fact, in the blockchain industry, every user is a resource, and every user is part of the promotion alliance (we call them nodes). SEO , community establishment and maintenance, article writing and other contents can all be completed by them. What the project party has to do is to establish rules and let users become our "employees."

4. Decentralized thinking: the most effective use of resources

The biggest difference between blockchain and the Internet lies in the difference in "thinking". The essence of the Internet is still centralized, so whether it is a company or an individual, everyone still considers issues out of their own interests. The central idea at the user level is how much money I have to pay and how many users I have to gain to be worthwhile.

However, the essence of blockchain is decentralization. Companies or project parties should consider more about how to let users, consumers, and even investors do more, and then unite more project parties and third parties to build an ecosystem together, where everyone shares resources and interests, so that greater effectiveness can be achieved.

Summarize

To summarize the usual methods of blockchain marketing:

First, offer some practical goods or benefits (real money) to gain users’ trust, and then promote the product with the help of established resource alliances. In the process, constantly rely on external media, partners, etc. to spread the word (invest real money) and operate your own traffic , and continuously enhance user trust from both the outside and inside (many companies ignore external forces).

Then, with the help of a win-win fission design, users are encouraged to do it spontaneously, no longer for the purpose of earning more profits for the company, but based on their optimism about the product and the more practical functions of the product, they form a community of interests with the company and promote it for their own interests .

When the community and products develop to a certain stage, we can also select KOLs from users to become our "partners" to maintain, promote and even participate in the entire product design with us.

In this way, a healthy and stable user ecology is formed. The highest state of operation is self-operation. Once the initial stage starts well, the resource investment in the later stage will become less and less, and thus a product will get on the right track.

After working in blockchain, I rethought and summarized my previous work and found that the two industries actually have a lot in common. They all attach great importance to user growth, care about PR, and are trying their best to study "human nature".

The difference is: the blockchain's own nature of "improving efficiency and reducing costs" and financial attributes enable it to better understand user psychology and human nature, and to better understand how to use "decentralized" thinking and "leverage" thinking to do a thing to the best of its ability with the lowest cost. I think this is something worth learning and discussing together.

Author: Wang Yuting, authorized to publish by Qinggua Media .

Source: Wang Yuting