How to achieve growth from 0 to 500,000 for an independently operated mini program?

It’s been a long time since I updated the article. I saw someone following me yesterday. Thank you very much for your trust. My original intention of writing the article was to keep myself clearing my memory at certain stages and to review and summarize my work.

1. Find market opportunities

1. Background thinking:

At the end of 2017, my job was basically in the final stages, and the mini program was just launched. As an operator , in order to stay sharp and observant, I also prepared to try to make a mini program. Through independent operation, I would test my abilities and see how far I could go.

At that time, Prince Wang's Rush to the Top conference was very popular, and Inke also quickly launched quiz apps such as Cheese Superman and Yixia Technology 's Golden Ten Seconds. The response was quick and the promotion was fast (promotion refers to the ability to quickly sign quiz hosts and launch cross-industry cooperation activities to bring topics and attention).

2. Concept stage:

At that time, I was thinking that answering questions has become a national craze. In addition to answering interesting questions about current affairs, are there other possibilities? (I admit that I didn’t think of guessing songs or idioms at this step, but I realized this point through my operational sense). In order to verify this idea, I immediately registered a program for answering questions.

I thought of a lot of names, and finally chose a name with a hot word based on factors such as memory, dissemination, and topicality. When I signed up for the quiz app, there was no quiz app on the market. Products like Guess the Idioms appeared after the failure of the competition, which created a gap in the market.

2. Build a team to verify the product

1. Background thinking:

After thinking of the name, I started thinking about the second step: how to do it? At first, I wanted to get the technical guy in the department to develop this outside of work, but the team project itself was in its early stages and demand development was tight. Moreover, according to the lean startup model, this small program was still in the idea stage, without such serious product market analysis and competitive product research and analysis. There was no clear goal for the future product positioning and profit model. It could only be said that they joined based on the interest of trying new fields and could not obtain real income, so it was difficult to convince others to participate, so I had to give up and go it alone. (Later, the product experienced a dramatic turnaround during its growth phase)

At that time, it was said that the mini program was intended to liberate individual developers and produce more valuable and meaningful mini programs based on the creations of individual developers. To this end, the threshold for mini programs was lowered to such a great extent that only an email address was required to register a mini program account. Therefore, third-party development platforms were applied (similar to outsourcing companies).

2. Design stage:

Without any technical support, I had to resort to using a third-party platform to verify the need for answering questions in this mini program. However, most of the third-party platforms that were launched in 2017 are still in the early stages and only support the integration of niche mini programs such as blogs and business cards. This is very restrictive, but I had to make compromises. How could this be coordinated?

I chose the blog category because, after comprehensive consideration, it tends to collect information. In addition, there were no less than five answering software at the time, and the question types were complicated. Many articles that assist in answering questions, predict question types, and review and summarize have emerged, including Sogou Q&A, which have begun to gather this wave of hot traffic . Then, blog-type mini-programs are easier to focus on this area, so I positioned the mini-program as a product for answering questions and exchanging information.

3. Operational Cold Start

1. Background thinking:

The product has taken the delivery step, which made me realize why the first version of any company's product, no matter its interface style or functional experience, is always rough and ugly. In fact, everyone hopes that the product will be of refined quality before it goes online, right?

Now we can fully understand: whether based on the product or PMF verification stage, we must base our decision on market feedback to decide whether to take the second step and expand the team's strength; the initial costs need to be strictly controlled, and everyone should be a jack of all trades, which is the optimal result from a company-level perspective.

So, at this time I have to think, the product itself is so weak that it can only rely on operations to break through, so how can I attract users' attention and convert them to the mini program?

Step 1: When you start preparing for a cold start for your product, first collect the earlier plans of your competitors in the market (such as PR publicity, events, channel cooperation, etc.), and study what they have done in the cold start and are still doing, so that you can avoid some detours; then combine what you want to do, summarize two or three plans, list the advantages and disadvantages through a mind map, and then brainstorm as a team to choose the best plan and implement it.

2. Positioning stage:

For example, I used to spend two or three hours every day reading the news about answering questions that day, summarizing what needs their content and titles cater to, what advantages of the product they want to promote to attract user conversions, etc.

For example: Why do you want resurrection coins! 1 answering tool to help you reach the top of Cheese Superman and Millionaire Hero

He is catering to some users who have less knowledge but also want to win prizes, so what does he need to do? The key words given by Sogou Q&A are: assisting in answering questions, giving answers quickly, and winning bonuses.

After browsing through it, I concluded that there are no articles on the question-answering service, such as: announcing the next question-answering time of each question-answering product, summarizing historical questions of different question-answering products, and similar behaviors.

I think this demand is relatively niche, but it happens to be my breakthrough point, because the mini program is launched through a third party, but currently I am the only one who maintains it during my spare time at work. It would be best if it can be the fastest, most clear, and most lightweight, which can also reduce my stress and energy.

4. Product Growth Stage

1. Cold start phase:

first step

I divided the mini program into four parts, corresponding to the four answering products. Every day, I collect Baidu answering news, clean and classify them, and publish them on the mini program. Conversely, I publish the articles of the mini program through forums and self-media accounts ( Baijiahao and Sohuhao are recommended as they have high inclusion rates) to accumulate content externally and attract traffic (with the mini program QR code at the end).

Step 2

Establish a WeChat quiz exchange group to circle players who come in by searching for the mini program keywords and users who scan the mini program from outside to form a small group effect; for example: every time the mini program updates its content (the content mainly reminds users of the start time of the next quiz product and the answer predictions. These two are demand points for this type of user, and more will become complicated), send it to the group, and they will share and forward it without the need for red envelope incentives.

Tips: There are ten keywords for the mini program in the early stage, which can be changed regularly. This is very important. Similar to Baidu search keywords, I have been updating them regularly, chasing hot words (answering questions, rushing to the top, etc.) and other related keywords (making money, Sogou Q&A, etc.). It has been proven that the traffic is considerable. The keyword WeChat in the mini program is not available during the adjustment. It can be seen that the rules were simple before and there were quite a few mini programs that directed traffic. I don’t know if you paid attention to it.

Step 3

As long as a certain social phenomenon or product becomes popular, QQ groups will also emerge. For example, the most obvious example is games , such as PUBG and Steam, there are many groups; PUBG assistants, there are also many groups; and now there is TikTok , etc.

So, if you create a group and there is no one there, who will join? Here I would like to introduce the omnipotent Taobao. Some of my operation classmates may know this routine, while some may not. Let me explain it briefly: for example, if you want to build a group, first buy a robot from Taobao and add 1,000 people. If you want to spend money on ranking, you can also do it. The path is: user search - your group has 1,000 people and it looks quite lively (follow the public psychology) - add them in - the robot replies to the group and adds people to the small group to answer questions - completed, effective conversion.

During this period, I have also tried and verified other interesting activities and promotion types, big and small. If you are interested, I can talk about three or five activity cases I have done later.

2. Verification phase:

Through the above-mentioned operation and promotion plan that I managed, until around March this year, the cumulative number of fans reached 500,000+, DAU was 3,000+, the cumulative advertising revenue was 30,000+, and the cost of the mini program approached zero.

Having verified the feasibility of the product, I announced at the end of March that I wanted to recruit a team of development partners to iterate and upgrade the product. During this period, I came into contact with different types of companies, individual developers, student developers who wanted to train and learn, etc. Different people have different purposes and different ideas, which is very interesting. It was not until now that I found the intended technical team (including development, UI and other positions), and I am currently developing the product. The process is very inspiring and thought-provoking, and I can write it down later.

Summarize

But at present, we have caught up with the first wave but not the second wave (the second wave was the emergence of various question-answering mini-programs after the peak and the decline of the previous wave, such as guessing idioms, songs, ancient poems, etc. The market is currently becoming saturated).

The content is based on personal cases, and the whole process is reviewed according to the lean startup methodology. The language expression ability is not as good as the operational cases of large companies, and there is no thrilling fission growth, but I hope that based on the entire stage from product conception to verification, it can provide you with an idea or inspiration. Let’s communicate together!

The author of this article @猫大仙 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games