How to increase user growth rate? You have to learn to tease like this

The opposite of “our enemies know us better than we know ourselves” is: our users know our products better than we know ourselves.

A product becomes a product with soul only when someone uses it. Drawings and codes are just a shell.

——Zhang Xiaolong

The book that records the words of Jesus, the God of Christianity, is called the Bible, and the book that records the words of Confucius, the representative of Confucianism, is called the Analects. Zhang Xiaolong, known as the "Father of WeChat ", is a god in the eyes of a generation of product managers . The above passage was posted by Zhang Xiaolong on Fanfou on December 29, 2010.

"撩" is defined in the Chinese dictionary as: to tease and provoke. The reason you clicked in to read this article might be that you were “intrigued” by the title . The purpose of “intrigue” is to get to know and understand the other person.

The word "撩" here means chatting with users and understanding them at a deeper level.

1. Why do we need to understand our users?

Products are tools to meet people's various needs. Therefore, in the process of making products, we should focus on user needs and use them as the basis for decision-making.

The highest level of understanding users is to become a user yourself first, and then work hard to do things that make yourself satisfied. Of course, this is not easy to do.

In martial arts novels, "disguise" is not difficult, but the difficult part is to imitate the person's behavior and way of speaking. Because of differences in one's own perspectives and deviations in the starting point of decision-making, it is difficult to become a real user.

Zhang Xiaolong once said:

“Product managers should rely more on intuition and sensibility rather than charts and analysis to understand user needs.”

Later it was further explained that humanities is only one aspect and it must be based on user needs and rationality.

After the Spring Festival this year, WeChat’s monthly active users exceeded 1 billion, a year-on-year increase of 15.8%. WeChat, which has been in existence for 7 years, is still maintaining such rapid growth. It can be seen that growth is not achieved overnight, but is a long-term process of insight into user psychology and continuous improvement. Understanding your users can give your insights a clearer direction.

In " Growth Hacker " written by Sean Eills, the "father of growth hacking", it is stated that behind many amazing growth results, a full understanding of users laid a good foundation.

Of course, there are many ways to understand users, which can be roughly divided into two categories: qualitative analysis based on surveys and interviews, and quantitative analysis driven by data .

Chen Lin, product director of Toutiao, said:

“Many times, A/B testing helps us understand users, rather than helping us make decisions. It’s better not to look at the data when improving products.”

This sentence is very similar to "If you believe everything in the book, it is better to have no book." Therefore, this article would like to talk separately about the role of research and interviews.

At the same time, with the help of Sean Eills’ book Growth Hacker, we can see when conducting user research and user interviews can help us achieve substantial growth.

2. Understand at which stages of growth users play an important role

1. Customer acquisition: If you want to understand users, you might as well chat with them

Many people know the concept of PMF (Product-Market Fit). Similarly, growth expert James Currier coined the concept of “language-market fit” to measure how well the language you use to describe and promote your product can convince potential users to try your product.

This concept covers the language used in all aspects of marketing , including emails, mobile push, advertising and event materials. So when you express your product, you need to quickly let users understand why your product can benefit them.

One of the reasons viral news distribution company Upworthy was able to grow at lightning speed to become the largest media site is that its employees persistently seek the best language-market fit for every story they publish.

It's not that Upworthy's editors are naturally talented and creative, but that they don't let creativity be left to chance - they hack creation through experimentation.

First, they ask employees to write at least 25 different headlines for each story. In the end, the editorial director decides which ones to use for the experiment, and the fans decide which headline wins.

There is an old Chinese saying: Mud cannot be propped up against a wall. For users, a title that fails to impress them is just “mud”, and no matter how much you experiment, you cannot select the best one. To improve the overall level of these 25 titles, you need to know what kind of text can touch users.

There are a few sources you can use to find words and phrases that appeal to people, such as:

• Use user reviews of your product on social platforms;
• Call users and simply ask them how they would recommend your product and its value to a friend;
• Talk to the customer service team; you may also suddenly realize something they say.

Coincidentally, Mimi Meng , whose articles each have over 100,000 views, uses the "Level 4 Interview" to select topics.

Which four levels: First is a group interview with a core fan group of 5,000 people, then interviews with more than three small groups, interviews with 50 individual cases, and finally interviews with an expert advisory group.

For every topic, they must know what users already know and what they want to know. These are not something they imagined out of thin air, but come from the process of understanding users.

Online, you can impress people by testing the best copy , but for offline businesses, understanding users is more about gaining insights.

As the saying goes, " Starting a business is not just about throwing an app into the app store and waiting to collect money." If your product involves offline business, offline promotion may be a reasonable choice. The key is "who to promote it to? How to promote it?"

When WeChat Mini Program first wanted to promote the mini program song ordering service in KTV, almost no KTV was willing to do it. Later, through chatting with the owners of these KTVs, I found that this industry is very interesting. Although there are 200,000 to 300,000 KTVs across the country, there are only three companies that provide song-ordering systems, and the largest of them accounts for 50-60% of the market share. If we can take over this company, we will basically have the penetration of the entire market.

Of course, a 2B case cannot represent the whole. But you can see the huge role that chatting with users plays.

2. Activation: Whoever needs to experience the Aha Moment should start from there

In order to become an indispensable product, allowing users to experience the "Aha Moment" is an indispensable link.

If not, then you need to think about a seemingly normal question: What features are there that you haven’t used yet that might make your product more attractive?

Although sometimes product managers should rely more on intuition and emotion, intuition will not help you here. Whoever needs to experience the "Aha Moment" should start from there. Having in-depth communication with users will help you understand the real factors and obstacles to the success of the product.

Otherwise, making decisions on the spur of the moment may cause you to waste limited resources and time on very expensive and wrong things, such as adding more and more features that do not create core value and only make the product more and more difficult to use.

Therefore, we can find out the reasons that bring "Aha Moment" to users from the following three aspects:

• Conduct more user research, including interviews and field research;
• Conduct efficient testing of product changes;
• In-depth analysis of user data.

Here we focus on field research:

The e-commerce platform Etsy is a trading platform created for individuals or small handicraft companies, and its current valuation has exceeded US$1 billion. Daniel Marvell, a growth hacker at the company, said:

"Etsy did something very meaningful but often overlooked - it moved off the internet ."

Etsy held lunch with influential artists, crafters, and vintage collectors at craft fairs across the country to learn what aspects of the selling process were most important to them and what kind of "Aha Moment" would convince them to join Etsy.

Etsy has learned that many crafters have their own cult publications and blogs about crafting. By understanding them, Etsy not only convinced many of them to open online stores, but also built an online community.

Etsy found the key factor of "Aha Moment" through field research, and also achieved great results in customer acquisition - "almost without spending a penny". The natural traffic entering Etsy through social media , EDM, natural search, etc. accounts for 87%-91%.

The manifestation of “Aha Moment” will be different for different businesses.

Online golf retailer Revolution Golf requires users to fill out a questionnaire when registering, which covers questions such as gender, age, average driving distance, and average score over 18 holes. Growth hacker Neil Patel significantly improved activation this way, helping the company reach over $20 million in annual revenue.

Although it takes time for users to answer these questions, you let them know that you are interested in them as a person and are willing to do your best to provide them with the best service you can.

When you first register as a member of Bilibili, the largest 2D video website in China, you need to complete a test paper containing various 2D questions. On the one hand, the test paper screens a precise user group, and on the other hand, it also allows those who become members to feel "superior".

The “Aha Moment” here is more reflected in: you make users feel that they are more important in your eyes than your competitors.

Just like your girlfriend said to you: What she wants is not love, but preference.

3. Monetization: User feedback solves product pricing

When pricing physical products, we can refer to the cost of raw materials, but how do we price software products that are traded online?

Patrick Campbell, CEO of Price Intelligently (a price optimization software), gave his advice after extensive practice in pricing SaaS products. When you have no idea how to price your product, you can ask your users four questions in the following order:

• At what price point would you consider it too expensive and never consider buying it?
• At what price point would you consider it a bit expensive, but would you still consider buying it?
• At what price point would you feel the purchase is a good deal?
• At what price point would you start to doubt the quality of the product?

Through such a questionnaire survey, the ideal testing range for pricing can be determined.

Of course, user feedback is not the only criterion, because users always think about what is best for them.

But even among those who think that pricing can’t be determined directly based on user feedback, most agree that feedback from surveys and interviews can help you decide on pricing and understand which of your target users are willing to pay that price.

4. Growth Hacking Cycle

In addition to playing a key role in the AARRR link we mentioned, user research and interviews can be used to assist decision-making in all growth hacking cycles.

When it comes to growth, there is a very core concept: experimentation.

The more experiments you run, the more you learn, and the companies that grow the fastest are the ones that learn the fastest. While only a very small number of experiments lead to huge successes, some experiments only lead to small successes and fail to bring about substantial changes.

However, without the accumulation of small steps, one cannot reach a thousand miles; without the accumulation of small streams, one cannot form a river or sea. The huge success of growth hackers often comes from the accumulation of a series of small successes.

The Growth Hacker Cycle breaks down experiments into the following phases: analyzing data and gathering insights, generating experiment ideas, prioritizing experiments, running experiments, and returning to the analysis phase to review the results and decide on next steps.

The work of user research and interviews lies between analysis and generating ideas.

For example: Imagine you are responsible for the growth of an e-commerce app, and the North Star Indicator of growth is the monthly spending amount of each user. Then the growth equation is:

Growth = number of installations × number of monthly active users × number of consumer users × average order amount × repurchase rate

As the head of growth, you don’t have to rush to start testing. First, you can use a week to let team members brainstorm and come up with ideas.

At the same time, you can work with data analysts to deeply analyze the obvious characteristics of different user groups. While studying the data, colleagues in charge of marketing can conduct a series of user surveys and interviews.

• Survey 1: Obtain demographic and psychographic information of users;
• Survey 2: Asking users about their online and offline shopping habits;
• Survey 3: Users’ favorite apps and usage of mobile devices.

Combine data analysis with results from user surveys and interviews. You can roughly get a good idea of ​​growth.

Therefore, in the growth hacking cycle, the role of user research and interviews is to help you avoid self-satisfaction, return to users, and solve real problems.

3. Understand the "traps" in the user process

Since understanding users can play such a big role, does that mean all content that comes from users is correct?

In The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, Zhang Wuji's mother Yin Susu told him before her death that "the more beautiful a woman is, the more likely she is to lie." The same goes for user research and interviews. If you want to make good use of this, you must memorize the following content like memorizing martial arts techniques to avoid being "cheated" by users.

1. The accuracy of questionnaire survey depends on the number of

There is a very interesting and practical short comment on Zhihu:

"Anyone who talks about toxicity instead of dosage is just a hooligans."

Then, for the questionnaire survey, it becomes "determining user needs without considering the amount of data is also rogue."

The larger the number of users taking part in the questionnaire survey, the higher the accuracy.

To research a question, you need to collect at least a few hundred responses to ensure the reliability of the research. If there are only a few dozen responses, you might get the wrong information. If your user base is not large enough to provide that many responses, you will have to rely more on user interviews.

2. The user’s frank opinions cannot fully reflect his real needs

Users are very likely to be affected by the test environment, questioning methods, personal interests or other interference factors. As mentioned above, when deciding pricing through user feedback, users consider how to benefit themselves more, so the decision cannot be made entirely based on user opinions.

3. Analyze what users do

What users say is important, but more attention should be paid to analyzing what they do.

It's like asking 100 people if they are willing to go to the gym to exercise for their health. Maybe 90 of them will answer yes, but when it comes to paying, they will hesitate. Even if you spend money to get a membership card, only a few people can stick with it.

So the way to avoid being led astray by user opinions is to see if they are willing to pay for a certain feature. If it requires real money to pay but still does not stop their enthusiasm for using the product, then the weight of these users' opinions will be higher than that of free critics who "only talk but do nothing".

IV. Conclusion

In the movie “Hero” it says: “If you are unknown, just focus on practicing swordsmanship”, Alan, the founder of Growth Black Box, said: “If you are unknown, just focus on growth”.

The road to growth is bound to be long and difficult, but as long as you practice it according to the thinking of growth hackers, there are clues to follow.

Countless people may have talked about the importance of user research and interviews. Today, from the perspective of growth, I will help you summarize the links in which it can play a huge role, and help us clearly realize when it is more appropriate to use it in the process of growth.

Just like when you learn to use a ladder, you don’t have to worry about not being able to eat the fruit from the tree. I'll tell you where to place the ladder so that you can pick more fruits, and you, while you're busy eating the fruits, don't forget to share two with me.

User research and interviews are good things, and I hope you can make good use of them.

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

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