From 0 to over 90 million users in 2.5 years, the operating methodology of Kuaikan Comics

After more than two years of entrepreneurship , I systematically summarized the content operation methodology of Kuaikan Comics for the first time.

I am a person who likes to tell stories. Without the "force" of Chaos University, I might not have thought of making such a theoretical summary. When I thought about it carefully, I found that Kuaikan Comics has accumulated more than 90 million users in two and a half years, and there are at least five key operating principles that are very worth sharing with everyone.

Before I get into the methodology, let me first introduce to you where Kuaikan comics come from.

Many people know my story.

When I was in college, I started drawing comics and posting them on Weibo. Before I created the Kuaikan Comics app, I had already accumulated 9 million followers.

After graduating from university in 2014, I decided to come to Beijing to start a business and make a comic app.

In the early days of our business, we rented a 120-square-meter house in Wudaokou for both living and working. We gathered a total of 12 entrepreneurial partners at that time. We lived and ate together. There were three rooms with four people in each room, and the beds were bunk beds. The room was very crowded at that time, and I could easily move from this bed to the bed opposite by just lifting my legs.

We use the living room as our office and the kitchen as our meeting room. Kuaikan Comics started in such an environment.

I still remember that once in a team meeting, I told everyone about my vision.

I said, "We want to be the best comics platform in China."
When they heard this, they all laughed.
I added: "We want to turn all comic works into games and film and television works."
When they heard this, they all laughed again.
I added: "We want to create an Internet product with 10 million users."
They laughed even harder.
I finally said, “We want to be the Disney of China.”
They said, "Let's go to bed."

This happened more than two years ago, and I can still remember it vividly. Today, many of the wild imaginations of the past are becoming reality, even beyond imagination.

Today, Kuaikan Comics has more than 90 million users and close to 10 million daily active users, which exceeds the sum of the second to sixth largest comics in the industry. Many of our comic works are being adapted into film and television dramas and games. We have a group of idol-level cartoonists and virtual IPs.

In October 2016, we held a book signing event for a new cartoonist. More than 10,000 people showed up, and the line stretched all the way to the underground parking lot, even alerting the police.

These young people spent hundreds of dollars on tickets and queued for up to eight hours just to get a cartoonist's autograph.

Regardless of whether you can understand the behavior of post-95s, I think we should still seriously consider two business issues:

First, what are the people born after 1995 crazy about?

Second, what did Kuaikan Comics do right?

Analyzing today’s young people and those born after 1995 is a big topic, and our approach today is content operation.

I think content operation is like a chef cooking. Only with good ingredients can you make a good dish. Having good content is always the prerequisite for good operations.

Therefore, my assumption today is that we already have good ingredients, so our question is: how to cook a good dish when the ingredients are relatively good?

The following are the five content operation methodologies of Kuaikan Comics.

In the era of appearance, you must not ignore the user's eyes

For today's young people, appearance is something they value very much . To capture them, you must continuously optimize the visual experience of your product.

In the past, it was believed that as a comic platform, it was enough to provide comics with good content. In fact, this ignored the visual needs of young people. Users reading content is like a blind date, and people with good looks have a greater chance. Therefore, the first step in content operation is to improve the appearance of the content.

For example, for the work "Take My Brother Away", we optimized the cover once, chose a more important character as the cover, and carefully crafted the font design and placement, which increased the user retention rate by 2%-5%.

After discovering users' visual requirements, we further upgraded the cover: for example, for the work "Snow Man", we chose the moment when the hero and heroine are about to kiss as the cover, and added the seductive copy "400-year-old ice prince transforms into a seductive model", which increased the click -through rate by more than 30%.

So, we slowly formed a cover structure: an exquisite cover is the foundation; on the premise of exquisiteness, we extracted key images that attract users' vision; finally, we added eye-catching copy to allow readers to capture the most critical information of this chapter at first glance.

In the era of top content, less is more

While the Internet brings convenience to our lives, it also brings about the fragmentation of information. Young people's attention is distracted and they are more eager for top content - not more, just the best. Therefore, the second step of content operation is to create top content.

There are currently less than 1,000 works on the Kuaikan comics platform, far less than some comics platforms that have tens of thousands of works. However, the daily active users of Kuaikan Comics are close to 10 million, which is more than the sum of the second to sixth largest comics platforms. This is a result of winning by quality. Our requirement for ourselves is to try our best to make every comic as refined as possible.

Since top content is so important, how can we better operate and distribute top content? Gathering resources is the foundation. Previously, the homepages of most domestic comic platforms would retain a lot of content for users to choose from, which led to the dispersion of resources.

On our APP, only two comics are displayed on each screen for users to choose from. In addition, we use artificial intelligence algorithms to recommend comic works that users may like. This greatly reduces the user's selection pressure.

Today's users prefer you to recommend the best content to them, rather than having a very large bookstore for them to choose from.

In the mobile era, new rules are needed to capture users’ attention

The biggest difference between young people and the previous generation is that the content carrier has changed - from PC to mobile. Today, when we do content operations, in addition to considering the appearance and quality of the content, we must also try our best to think about whether the content’s expression format conforms to the communication rules of mobile devices.

For example. On December 13, 2014, as a cold start promotion for the Kuaikan Comics APP, we released the comic work "Sorry, I Only Live 1% of My Life", which has been read 200 million times and forwarded 350,000 times. This caused the Kuaikan Comics APP to directly top the list of free software in the APP Store.

Why can a comic work help an APP quickly gain 1 million users in three days? I think there are 5 key points:

First, we choose pictures as the carrier of content, which has high information content, good reading experience and is easier to spread than text;

Second, we set a requirement for ourselves that users must finish watching the video within 10 minutes. Our comic originally had more than 500 frames, and our test showed that it might take users half an hour to finish reading it, which is not allowed. The last time we deleted more than 100 frames. At the same time, we compressed the amount of text to a minimum. When we look at this work again today, I can say that from the title to the end, not a single word is useless;

Third, we have a rhythmic sense of time. We set up plot twists in the 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th minutes of this work to continuously capture the user's attention;

Fourth, we chose titles that are more appealing to young people and trigger emotional resonance;

Fifth, we finally chose to release this work at a time when young people are mostly playing with their mobile phones - around 9 o'clock in the evening.

The above points all conform to the laws of mobile communication, and therefore achieve good communication effects.

In the age of symbols, who have you touched in the hearts of users?

In addition to form, "symbols" are also crucial to the dissemination of content.

What is a symbol? For Kuaikan Comics, symbols are characters. When designing content, many people will consider the huge world view and huge story structure, but forget about the characters.

Only when a character has a clear projection in the real world and can evoke certain emotions in the user's heart can this person become a symbol and leave a deep impression on the user.

Today is an era with increasingly abundant high-quality content. Symbolization is a shortcut to stand out from the vast amount of high-quality content.

For example. The original name of the work "Take My Brother Away" is "Funny Brothers and Sisters", and the author has less than 2,000 followers on Weibo. Why are we interested in this work? Because the characters in this work are very likable.

This work tells the story of a brother and sister who quarrel every day. The sister has a skill of throwing her brother over her shoulder and she always knocks him down. Why is this kind of character so likable? Because it changes the traditional brother and sister characters and is closer to brothers and sisters in our real life - often fighting with each other and getting tired of each other, rather than the stereotyped characters like the brother-con and sister-con in movies and TV dramas.

So, seeing such an interesting character, we decided to sign this work. After signing the contract, we carried out a series of content operations for this work.

First, we changed the color of the work from black and white to color, which improved the appearance of the entire work;

Secondly, we changed the title of the work from "Funny Brothers and Sisters" to "Take My Brother Away" to emphasize the symbol of the characters;

Then, we also re-opened a Weibo account called "Take my brother away quickly" and selected 9 chapters that best reflected the personalities of the siblings for release ;

Finally, when we ask big Vs to repost, we require that the reposting words highlight the sibling characters.

These two characters with distinct personalities have triggered a very popular communication effect. When I posted on Weibo using a brand new account, it was forwarded more than 90,000 times that night, received more than 10,000 comments, and was ranked in the top 5 of the hot search list and ranked 2nd on the hot topic list.

Strengthening "symbols" is the fourth step of content operation, which can enable users to quickly remember your content.

In the idol era, users are crazy about idols

This is an era of idols. When a character or an author becomes an idol, it will trigger crazy pursuit by users. Therefore, the last step of content operation is to create idols.

For example. Ye Ling is the protagonist of the comic book "Morning Flowers Cherish Time". This character has a very prominent and distinctive label of his own - when he wears glasses, he is a silent and calm high school student, and when he takes off his glasses, he is a bohemian nightclub prince.

This male protagonist fits the common characteristics of idols:

◆ Label highlights: dual personality;
◆ Mei: is a handsome guy;
◆ Positive energy: Born in a poor family, working in a nightclub;
◆ There is a growth path: from a poor, sensitive and silent high school student to gradually becoming gentle and tolerant.

Therefore, we strengthened Ye Ling’s idol characteristics through a series of operational activities. The effect was obvious. After the work was launched, it caused a very crazy pursuit. Whether it is selling the comic book "Morning Flowers and Time" or postcards, they will basically be sold out as soon as they go online.

Creating idols is the final step in content operation, as idols will trigger users’ crazy pursuit.

The above five points are my summary of the content operation rules of Kuaikan Comics. What I want to emphasize is that they are the basis for high-quality content operations, not a guarantee for creating explosive content.

The creation of explosive content first requires high-quality content. Secondly, it also requires you to be good at understanding human nature, have empathy with your users, and be able to deeply understand their spiritual world. Therefore, if you want to become a master of content operation, you need to continue to practice deliberately.