How to acquire the first 1,000 high-quality seed users at low cost within one month?

You have no money, no resources, and you feel overwhelmed just thinking about getting seed users to start with? You worked so hard late into the night to write content but no one reads it and you can’t attract any users? The users you attract only want to make money without giving back any contribution, and then run away after making money? There are thousands of seed users, but only a few of them can participate in product discussions and use the product in depth?

Before you start trying to acquire the first 1,000 high-quality users quickly and at low cost, let’s avoid some common misunderstandings.

Common Misconceptions

Purely based on material incentives :

Material incentives are a common way to acquire users, but I think relying solely on material incentives to acquire seed users is a lazy and ineffective method. Because if you only rely on material incentives to acquire users, you have no way of figuring out whether they come for the material incentives or are truly interested in and have demand for your products. If most people come because of material incentives, it will be difficult and not necessarily valuable to obtain effective feedback about the product from such a user group.

Focusing on quantity instead of quality:

Many products rush to increase user growth when they are first released. Think carefully: will the users introduced indiscriminately during the seed user period really use the product seriously, make suggestions, and help improve the product? If not, what is the point of such user growth in the early stages? Seed users have much higher requirements for quality than quantity, and only high-quality seed users will help your product grow into a towering tree.

Single user type:

For many products, the direction is often unclear during the seed user stage, and this is the period when they need to listen to more opinions and needs. If the user type is relatively single at this time, it is likely to lead the development direction astray. He who listens to both sides will be enlightened, while he who only listens to one side will be in the dark. During the seed user period, we need multiple types of users to listen to both sides.

What kind of users are high-quality seed users?

Multiple types of users who have real needs for products, can put forward opinions and demands on products, and grow together with the products.

You may say, it’s a nice thought, and I know that such users are high-quality users, but without material incentives and with so many requirements, why would they become your seed users and help you to avoid pitfalls?

Finding Hungry Customers

Don't be in a hurry, let's think about a case first. Suppose you open a small hot dog stand on the beach today, and there are other competitors next to you. If you can only use one method to fight against your competitors, what will you do? Would you choose a better location or better ingredients to make hot dogs? Would you rather have the most enticing advertising slogan or a very attractive salesperson?

Maybe everyone has their own answer in their mind, but the answer given in this case is to find hungry customers first. When I first saw this case, I thought, isn’t this nonsense? Everyone knows that you have to find customers first. But does that mean you can win the competition? But look at the answer carefully again. Did you notice the word "hunger" ?

The so-called hungry customers must meet two conditions: one is that there is demand, and the other is that the demand is urgent. Such users come with needs, and they can be easily converted by us when they have urgent needs. They will also have a higher tolerance for the products and will help improve the products.

Prepare high-quality content to satisfy customers

Now that we know where to find hungry customers, how do we attract them? Many people believe that good products will speak for themselves, but in most areas, if users are not attracted to take a look and try it out first, how can the product’s words reach their ears? We need to first fill the hungry users with high-quality content and let the product emit a little bit of aroma.

Many people also have misunderstandings about high-quality content.

Myth 1: High-quality content requires a lot of capital investment

wrong! Many high-investment contents have neglected the theme and become works for advertisers to show off their skills, but have not played a real role in promoting the product. For individuals and startups , they actually understand the products better, so they can produce truly high-quality content at a low cost. I once talked about the case of the foreign trade startup MiKe, which is a typical example of using low-cost forum marketing and blog marketing to acquire customers.

Misunderstanding 2: Ignoring the content of channel characteristics

If you observe carefully, you will find that many road signs on highways are beautifully made and have a lot of words on them. There are many such cases in video ads in elevators, which are well-produced and have long content. But what I want to tell you is that a lot of this kind of content doesn’t have much of an effect. People tend to just glance at road signs on highways and stay in elevators for a very short time. If the content placed here cannot grab people's attention within a few seconds, it is considered a failure.

Misconception 3: Outsourcing the entire content process to others

It is difficult to create high-quality content in this way, especially for more complex products. No one understands your products better than the people within your company, and no one understands the advantages, disadvantages and selling points of your products better, so it is not a good idea to expect others to help you create high-quality content.

So what is considered high-quality content?

First, the content must be suitable for the channel . It is easy to understand the right channel, but many people ignore it. Before releasing content, it is very important to understand the characteristics of the channel. Being suitable for the channel is a prerequisite for high-quality content. Different channels have different audiences. For example, some communities welcome high-quality serious discussions, while others prefer light-hearted and humorous content. When preparing content, you must not ignore the characteristics of the channel and think that one piece of content is applicable to all channels. This will often result in poor results.

In fact, as long as you find hungry customers and use the right channels, you can achieve good results in user acquisition even if the content is not outstanding. Many good products, in the initial stage of acquiring seed users, simply use recruitment techniques, are straightforward and clearly explain the product features, and many users actively participate. This is the reason.

But we still want to keep improving, and higher content quality will improve our efficiency in acquiring high-quality users. Let’s first take a look at some common optional forms of high-quality content.

The simplest form of high-quality content is providing high-quality solutions to problems. If you search for the keyword "how to XXX" in the search engine , you will find that many people have asked various questions. If these questions are not answered or are not answered well, then your opportunity has come. Cover these questions with high-quality answers. As long as the answer is helpful to the questioner, there will not be much objection to promoting some of your own product solutions in the answer.

Good stories are also a common form of high-quality content. It is common to introduce the company, product history, founder's experience, etc. in the form of stories. Stories build a personal brand, and trust in people will lead to trust in products. In the case of MiKe, the founder posted a story on the forum. Two years ago, the post "Sorry, I Only Live 1% of My Life" on Weibo was also a classic example of marketing through storytelling.

The reason why high-quality content can attract users is that it presents the value that the product can provide in the form of content, allowing users to preview part of the product value in advance! Therefore, the optional content forms provided above are only for reference. The specific content form you choose should be based on the value that your product can provide. The content must be closely related to the value provided by the product. For example, if you are doing training, then some high-quality open courses are a good form; if you are making physical products, some unknown product usage skills are also an optional form.

Get User

Content that is suitable for the channel and valuable to users does not require too much cost investment, but requires real effort. With these truly thoughtful contents, we can use the contents to attract hungry customers and enter the user acquisition stage.

Acquiring users is divided into two stages. In the first stage, we need to cover the channels that can acquire users. In the second stage, we can retain our seed users through the form of communities .

The channels that cover users are divided into online and offline. The low-cost channels we can choose online include SEO , QQ, WeChat , Weibo, Zhihu, vertical communities, etc. Our content is mainly prepared for online channels. Common offline methods include exhibitions, door-to-door promotions , etc.

SEO can be divided into leveraging large platforms and building your own website. The effect of building your own website is slower, but it can attract traffic in the long run. For products that want to acquire accurate and high-quality seed users in a short period of time, it is easy to acquire users by leveraging the platform. For some well-known and high-authority websites, it is easier to obtain high-quality traffic as long as we put the content we have carefully prepared before into circulation. And in this way, we don’t need to have a very deep technical background. The key is to choose good keywords, which is more suitable for individuals and start-up companies.

QQ is also a very accurate and good channel. The most valuable point of QQ for acquiring seed users is the various interest QQ groups. As long as you can get the group owner on QQ, it is easy to acquire users. It would be more appropriate if you can first fit in with the atmosphere of the group, share some relatively high-value content, and then contact the group owner after gaining a certain degree of recognition in the group.

Various vertical communities are also common places where hungry customers hang out. These communities are hungry for high-quality content, and it is easy to acquire users by placing high-quality content on these channels. Moreover, as a public environment, the community is more efficient in acquiring users. In communities with a larger number of users, it is common for a popular post to receive thousands or tens of thousands of clicks. Before posting content in a community, you need to first study the characteristics of the community's audience. Carefully studying the top-ranked hot posts in the community is a quick way to learn.

WeChat and Weibo, by delivering high-quality content on these two channels, if the content really resonates with users and triggers dissemination, it will greatly improve our efficiency in acquiring users. However, the quality requirements for content that can be spread in this way are still relatively high. If it is difficult to produce such content, you can also use activities to attract users, but remember not to rely too much on activities and fall into the misunderstanding mentioned earlier of relying purely on material incentives.

Zhihu, as a content community, is also a very good channel. It is a very common practice to insert a little advertising into a high-quality answer. The problem-solving content we prepared before is more suitable for placement in question-and-answer communities such as Zhihu.

In fact, if we expand our thinking, there are too many channels on the Internet for us to acquire users. For example, you can give a short lecture on Fenda , or hold a Live on Zhihu; if you want to gain accurate music fans, you can go to the comment section of NetEase Cloud Music , start a live broadcast , etc. Channels are not the core of online promotion, content is. With high-quality content, we can expand channels and use high-quality content to exchange for high-quality traffic.

There are even more offline channels, and the ones I am more familiar with are exhibitions and door-to-door marketing. Exhibitions may be more suitable for Class B customers or professional users. Class C users are more difficult to acquire through exhibitions, and ground marketing is more suitable for acquiring Class C users.

Connect users with communities. How can we retain users acquired through these channels? If you are an Internet product, importing it to your own product is an option, but during the seed user period, I still recommend that you import it to channels that users are familiar with and use frequently, such as QQ groups and WeChat groups . Because these commonly used channels have higher user opening rates, are very familiar to users, are easy to import, and have low communication costs. Moreover , if the seed users are gathered in a community and the community atmosphere is well maintained, the participation and interaction of users will be contagious, thereby driving the atmosphere of the entire community and retaining users.

Feedback Optimization

During this process, it is recommended to monitor and analyze data on user acquisition through various channels and eliminate channels with poor results. Through data monitoring and analysis, you will find out which channel brings you the most and highest-quality seed users. After running for a while, you will understand which channel to focus your efforts on. With this data, what you need to do is to optimize the channel. With limited energy, cut off channels with poor results. Concentrating all your energy on excellent channels will enable you to achieve your goal of 1,000 high-quality seed users more quickly and effectively! The simplest and most brutal method of data monitoring is to manually count and analyze the data using Excel spreadsheets. If it is a website, link, etc., if you are familiar with Google Analytics, you can also set up monitoring links for statistics.

Many people tell you how to go from 0 to 1, but few tell you how to go from 0 to 0.001. For resource-rich individuals or large companies, 1,000 high-quality seed users may be a piece of cake, but for ordinary individuals and startups, it may be the difference between success and failure. Clarify the misunderstandings about user acquisition and content, use high-quality content to cover high-quality channels, and through data optimization and adjustment, select core high-quality channels for coverage. It will not be so difficult to acquire 1,000 high-quality seed users within 1 month.

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This article was written by @Trevor and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map