Cold Start | How I ignited Huajiao Live without spending a penny

Cold Start | How I ignited Huajiao Live without spending a penny
At the end of 2015, the night when Wang Sicong posted a Weibo in support of 17 Live , Weipai’s core team and I stayed up all night because I saw from WeChat Moments that beautiful internet celebrities on Weipai were imitating Wang Sicong’s Weibo, taking screenshots of their own 17 homepages and posting them on WeChat Moments, begging for fans’ attention. It can be said that my circle of friends was flooded with 17 live broadcasts. That night, I realized that the live broadcast had reached the breaking point and it would be too late if I didn’t catch up. At that time, there were two key indicators: the penetration rate of 4G had reached 70%, and the penetration rate of large-screen mobile phones had reached 40%. The biggest demand of users of large-screen mobile phones was to watch videos, and the battery of large-screen mobile phones also provided the possibility for long-term live broadcasts. 17 Live, which takes a borderline approach, has completely ignited this market. But I think it is impossible for Taiwan's 17 live broadcast team to win this market, mainly for three reasons: First, the Taiwan team is not familiar with the political atmosphere in mainland China, which is a fatal flaw in the field of content operations ; Second, the Taiwan team was unable to control the hot culture in mainland China. Through analyzing the Weibo and WeChat Moments of several angel investors who invested in 17 Live, the 17 team was not mentally prepared to establish a large-scale operation team. Although the core technical leader of the Third Team 17 is from Microsoft, his background is not in large-scale high-concurrency, so the team will definitely not be able to handle the possible large-scale influx of users in a short period of time. These are all opportunities left for the mainland team. 

 However, the biggest problem for the Weipai team was that they had no technical platform for live video streaming . At that time, Tencent Cloud was the only open third-party platform on the market. After a simple evaluation, we felt that it was not mature enough. YY's Joyy Cloud also did not agree to connect us, and only agreed to connect with Lei Jun's team. NetEase's Video Cloud had not yet been officially released. In a short period of time, I also dealt with all the mobile video product teams that have been launched in China. Teams such as Weibo and SuiBo hope to gain shares simply through technical support. They do not have enough time for business processing and do not want to provide services through third-party video clouds. At this time, there is almost only one option left on the market, which is 360's Huajiao Live , because its backend is the seemingly more mature 360 ​​Video Cloud. At this time, a friend introduced me to Zhou Hongyi to see if Weipai could cooperate with 360 on Huajiao. To be honest, Weipai's development has not been smooth due to various reasons. I also wanted to learn from Zhou Hongyi through this cooperation and see where the problems were in running my own company. I also felt that the time window was tight, so I simply proposed some business conditions and agreed to it without any hesitation. During the same period, Xue Manzi was also interested in investing in an internet celebrity operating company, but his decision was made one day later than Zhou Hongyi, so the Weipai team was later split into two, one part supported Huajiao, and the other part maintained Weipai while trying to establish a new company, Hongma, to jointly operate internet celebrity e-commerce live streaming with Taobao. That is another story. The above is the preface and also the opening. The strategy at that time was to imitate 17 Live first, which was actually imitating the design of Instagram, because Yingke had not yet emerged. At that time, the Huajiao team had nearly a hundred people from the outside, but when you look inside, there were many problems. The main problem is that the team's resources are dispersed, and product development according to the model of large companies is extremely slow. The first step of the strategy was to stop the development and design of all non-Apple clients and concentrate on developing the Apple client first, because 100% of the producers and internet celebrities use Apple phones, and Huajiao’s main focus at the time was still on Android. In this way, all design and background work are concentrated on supporting the Apple client, increasing production efficiency by more than ten times. The second step of the strategy is to first improve the background live broadcast review system. For various reasons, most of the backend designs of live broadcasts today prefer to use image review, ignoring the fact that the essence of live broadcasts is video content. Therefore, the content recommendation team should be allowed to watch the live broadcast content directly to determine the quality of the content. In the early stages, this will not increase operating costs. The strategy for the third step is to minimize the development unit, simplify the testing steps, and only test the user's main usage process. The previous testing process was to test all interfaces and processes of development, which slowed down product release. My goal at the time was to release one major version per day, and later on I was able to release one major version per week on average. Apple’s review process is extremely slow. You can look for the magical Taobao, which has service providers that can accelerate the review process and pass it on the same day. 

 Operational pitfalls Having talked about the product and the background, let’s now focus on the pitfalls of operations. This is the key to solving the cold start problem of a social product. First of all, everyone needs to learn a word: memes. I define it as a basic unit of user behavior patterns. In layman's terms, it is the smallest element of popular culture that the group will unconsciously imitate, copy and deform. Therefore, if you want your community to have a certain culture, you should increase the exposure opportunities of similar content and user behaviors to accelerate the generation and spread of similar content. To translate this into live streaming, if I want beauties born after 1990 to be the mainstream of content production, I will recommend more live streaming content of beauties born after 1990 in the most prominent position on the homepage. After seeing this, the audience will think that similar content is encouraged and recommended, and similar content will be generated and fed back to the system, thus creating a positive cycle of content. Here comes the second problem, the outbreak of memes. If you want similar content and behavior to explode in a short period of time, you need to show such content to the groups with the highest physical and logical density to create a bandwagon effect. Physically, it is art schools, etc., and logically, it is the group of post-90s models. During its years of operation, Weipai has accumulated China's most advanced group of post-90s internet celebrities. Their WeChat Moments, groups and Weibo are the breeding ground for memes. Here is a brief summary of the post-90s pioneer internet celebrities or anchors gathered through Weipai. By analogy, we can analyze what characteristics the ideal users of a product should have. 
  • Most of them are young women between the ages of 18 and 26, who have no historical habits or baggage and can quickly accept new products and new things on the Internet.
  • Their phones are frequently updated with new apps and social products, and they are early adopters of similar products. You can easily find them among the early adopters of similar new products, rather than those of already popular mass-market products.
  • Most of them have not had a very happy family and personal upbringing, so they can overcome numerous obstacles and use all kinds of controversial products. Children from happy families usually follow trends rather than set them.
 So after I perfected the Huajiao product, I recommended it to the famous Weibo celebrities, which immediately triggered a chain reaction. It can be said that I had no choice but to let them use it. Here are some details to share with you. First, where does Yingke’s explosive growth in angel users come from? Yingke introduced guests from the program "Perfect Match" of Guizhou Satellite TV. These guests are all male. By chance, they were introduced by the producer and moved into Yingke in batches. They also brought in fans they had accumulated on TV and Weibo, as well as wealthy people who gave them gifts. Here I would like to recommend producer Hu Shu's perfect team . I think they are the best team among domestic traditional TV media doing Internet digital media operations. Unfortunately, their later cooperation with Huajiao was not successful due to various reasons. Here we can see that they have the characteristics of logical density and cultural unity. At the same time, these are not the channels and users of traditional shows. Mobile live streaming was still a very new thing for them back then. Their existing social network chains exploded when fans discovered they could interact with their idols through live streaming. The second is Yingke’s circle of friends sharing strategy. At that time, the activity level of Weibo declined significantly compared to that of Moments. Therefore, when Yingke starts broadcasting, the default setting for sharing is WeChat’s Moments. At the same time, the sharing icon is deliberately designed to be gray and turned on by default, which causes users to share a large number of videos to their Moments when the broadcast starts. The Moments of these people have a high degree of overlap, so when their friends are browsing their Moments, they feel that Yingke has become popular all of a sudden because they can see many people sharing at the same time. After being swiped many times, any user will download it to see what kind of app it is, so it is very important to have a concentrated burst of angel users. Third, in the early days of Inke, there were many robot accounts with names like Wang Sicong , which led users to think that the product was very popular and that Wang Sicong was playing it. They would take screenshots and share them to their own Moments and fan groups, further increasing the probability of users sharing. Fourth, Yingke has opened payment stores on Taobao and Tmall . Users can bypass the cumbersome Apple payment and go directly to Taobao to recharge their Yingke accounts. Fifth, Yingke’s operating staff took the initiative to give gifts to some special celebrities, creating the illusion that there are many wealthy people. At the same time, the number and amount of cash withdrawals by anchors are restricted every day, resulting in cash being trapped within the platform and a large amount of funds being deposited. Finally, after a concentrated explosion of users, Yingke rushed to the top of Apple's rankings and was removed from Apple's shelves many times. Each time it was removed, Yingke released a homophonic account or even an enterprise version to reduce the losses caused by the removal. It is a great pity that Huajiao did not use public relations means to block Inke during this period for various reasons. Because Huajiao started later, Inke exploded about two weeks earlier. While we accelerated development and improved the system, we responded to Inke's strategies one by one and made many improvements and enhancements in operations. By purchasing data services from TrustData, we can see that Huajiao's monthly growth rate is 6 times, which is higher than Inke's 5 times monthly growth rate. The average next-day retention rate of 50% and daily usage time of 38 minutes are both higher than Yingke’s average next-day retention rate of 45% and daily usage time of 32 minutes. The core improvements are mainly the improvement of the recommendation system and the design of the sharing reward mechanism, as well as the most important community operation. At that time, Huajiao's daily growth reached 10%, and there was no time to design a complete recommendation mechanism. Manual recommendations were mainly used to overcome the lag in research and development. A video recommendation wall is designed here where 5,000 live broadcasts can be viewed simultaneously. One person can check 5,000 concurrent live broadcasts in five minutes and verbally recommend the live broadcast ID to the recommendation team, who will manually enter the live broadcast ID to ensure that high-quality live broadcasts appear in a priority position in the square in almost real time. At the same time, the review team ensures that after a new live broadcast starts, the review and recommendation to enter the new live broadcast pool is completed within three seconds to ensure the retention of new users and the distribution of traffic. The sharing mechanism is designed so that fans can share on WeChat, which will reward the anchor with pepper beans and increase his ranking in the competition. There were two competitions, one for gold bars and one for BMW mini cars. It can be said that they instantly triggered a sharing frenzy among Huajiao users on WeChat Moments. The original plan was to develop Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce next, but due to various reasons, these plans were not continued. However, these two sharing competitions led to the rise of many internet celebrities such as Xu Dabao. Based on the experience of Weipai, Huajiao also designed private messages on the official live broadcast screen. That is, when the anchor is broadcasting live, they can see the private messages sent to them by the official backend, but the fans cannot see them. The content of the private message is mainly to add my WeChat, which is the official operation manager, to create a group for management. Community operation and management is another big topic. I would like to emphasize here that this is the top priority of operations, and very few people in China have done well in this. 

 Regarding the salary and reward operations of anchors, when I first went to Huajiao, the operations team adopted the most traditional operation method, which was to sign contracts with the anchors. First of all, the contract was very complicated. Secondly, it had too many legal rules and regulations, and the anchors could hardly understand it. After several rounds of negotiation, a month had passed, which is equivalent to a year in the mobile Internet industry . There are three main points of improvement here: First, tell the internet celebrities that as long as they start broadcasting, they will give them a gift worth 100 yuan, share it on their Moments and send them a WeChat red envelope worth 100 yuan. In this way, I was able to open 200 live broadcast channels in just one hour on the first day. Internet celebrities have experienced the thrill of live streaming and they can’t stop themselves from doing so. This means reducing the granularity of time and money costs of decision-making to the smallest possible level, to 100 yuan per minute. Second, most internet celebrities have various sources of income, and a copywriting with a guaranteed monthly salary of 2,000 yuan cannot attract the attention of high-quality internet celebrities. Therefore, most of our contracts offer an annual salary of 500,000 to 1 million, which can basically cover the attention of all mainstream Internet celebrities, but there are many incentive and penalty clauses to restrict the acquisition of this 1 million. The income from gifts for good anchors quickly exceeded 100,000 per day, and the annual salary, which was a lot of constraints, was no longer that important. The third one creates a legend. That is, the operations manager must concentrate traffic and gifts on the main internet celebrities in a short period of time, so that their income from a single live broadcast may exceed 100,000 yuan. This news immediately had an explosive effect in the internet celebrity circle, achieving great word-of-mouth spread, which is far higher than distributing traffic evenly among the anchors. This is very effective in the early cold start. Summarize To sum up, qualified product experience plus precise promotion to first-time users brought in fans cultivated by China's early Internet celebrities through platforms such as Weibo and Weipai (mainly concentrated in WeChat groups and Moments), pushed product downloads to the top of Apple's rankings, and triggered downloads by early adopters. The design of the sharing reward mechanism and sharing process allows the influx of traffic to expand exponentially, pushing the product to the top of the rankings and entering a positive cycle of user growth. At this time, you can pay to introduce celebrities, KOLs with tens of millions of fans, and communities with different cultural attributes to bring the product to new heights. However, at this time, due to various reasons, the business consultant cooperation between Weipai and Huajiao was terminated. Times have changed, and the overall situation of live streaming has been determined. I hope that the sharing of this product and operation strategy and techniques can serve as a starting point for other products.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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

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