How to become an operations expert, user growth system

Let’s first understand the difference between user stratification and user growth system:

• User stratification is a hidden line . It is what we do to users, but the users themselves are unaware of it.
• The user growth system is a clear line , which we make public to users and hope and guide them to do.

User stratification allows us to drive users more effectively; the user growth system allows users to drive themselves more effectively . One external factor and one internal factor are the two main lines that drive our user operations .

In fact, user growth systems are very common in our lives. Almost every mature product has a relatively complete user growth system. Such as the level system, points system , wealth system, task system, badge system, and there are many ways to grow, such as consumption, daily check-in, completing tasks, posting and replying to posts, interacting with activities, etc. If all these types and functions are listed, there may be hundreds or thousands of them.

However, when we actually want to build a user growth system, we find it difficult to start. Unless we quickly imitate a product with the same business model , we will find that:

• We cannot be sure whether those methods are useful.
• Even if we are sure that it works for others, we cannot be sure whether it will work for us.
• Even if we are sure that it is useful to us, we cannot be sure which ones are useful to us.

The Internet has been developing for so many years, and the user growth system is actually very mature in terms of "form". However, this is exactly the most difficult part of what we do, and it is also the trap that we are most likely to fall into at work.

Because there are already enough "forms" out there, it is difficult and unnecessary for us to come up with a completely new set of things. But because it already exists out there, our thinking will be inadvertently solidified, and then we will imitate it, but the final result is often only the form but not the spirit .

Having said that, we must first think about the strategic positioning of the user growth system from top to bottom. In fact, there are two main types of strategic positioning of the user growth system, and the two are clearly distinguished:

The first type: auxiliary type, which is manifested in the following form: user behavior leads to user growth.

How to understand this sentence? It means that user growth is a product of the user's behavior towards the product, rather than an inducement to stimulate the user to behave towards the product.

For example:

• We buy things on Taobao and earn points. If we have enough points, we can get a gold membership.
• We took a Didi taxi and earned points. With more points, we can get a platinum membership.
• We watch videos on iQiyi and gain growth points. With more growth points, we can become a VIP user, etc.
• …

In the above situation, we will find that user growth is only the product of user behavior , not the inducement. In other words, we will not shop just to get Tmall points, nor will we take a taxi just to get Didi points. But when we get those points, we love it.

Do you remember what we said in the structure section? For most companies with their own core products, the strategic positioning of the user growth system, or the biggest mission it undertakes, is to "increase the user's cost of leaving." (Please refer to the Structure Section | How to Become an Operations Expert (Part 4): Operations at a Glance). Just like we won’t take a taxi specifically for Didi points, but under the same conditions, because we have Didi points, we will prefer Didi taxi rather than other taxi-hailing tools .

The second type: product type, which is manifested in: user behavior triggered by user growth.

This one is completely opposite to the above one, because the user wants to grow, and this desire for growth triggers his behavior. In other words, user growth is the inducement for users to take action.

For example:

Games , because we want to become stronger in the game, so we pay to buy game coins and equipment.

QQ level, because we want to obtain more rights and interests, so we will recharge yellow diamonds, blue diamonds, etc.

Forum, because we want to be moderators, so we will be online for a long time and keep posting.

…

You can see that in the above cases, it is the user growth system that induces user behavior. In fact, at this point the user growth system itself is part of the product. In this case, the strategic positioning of the user growth system, or its biggest mission, is to "bring benefits to the company."

Here, we need to explain the company's earnings. A company's revenue does not just refer to money, it refers to what the company's products gain from users. It includes three things: money, time, knowledge and resources. Of course, for a commercial company, the latter two things will eventually turn into money through other outlets. :)

The above are two completely different strategic positioning of the user growth system. In fact, many companies will have both systems at the same time. For example, the credit card we are familiar with, the credit card points system is the first type, and the credit card type and credit limit system is the second type.

Okay, now we have understood the two strategic positioning of the user growth system. Only when we have clarified the strategic positioning of our user growth system can we know what we should do next and how to do it?

Please review our "Thinking Chapter | How to Become an Operations Expert (Part 4): Compound Interest". The author has always believed that compound interest is a core thinking that seems to be the easiest to understand, but is the easiest to overlook. Do you still remember the formula: A produces B, and then B can be transformed into A. Let’s look at the two types above:

The first one: user behavior generates user growth. What we need to do is to transform user growth into user behavior.

Here is a real case:

Once, a friend who ran a chain of beauty salons came to me. She thought she had built a pretty good user growth system but the results were not good and wanted me to give her some advice. So I took a look at her stuff: it used a well-known third-party WeChat SaaS software, and had a pretty complete set of points rules. You can get corresponding points when you spend to a certain level, and when the points reach a certain amount, you can become a gold member or a platinum member. There is also a points mall with a pretty nice page, which contains some daily necessities and dry goods from the north and south. Different membership levels can enjoy different discounts, and points can also be exchanged for cash. It seems pretty good overall. What do you think her problem lies?

Let’s take a look at her user behavior trajectory: user’s offline beauty behavior -> user growth (increase in points) -> resulting in the purchase of daily necessities and dry goods. A produces B, and B runs to C. This is the biggest problem.

I had to explain to her like this:

• This cannot be said to be wrong, but what you are doing is "cross-border" or "cross-industry cooperation", not called "user growth system", the two are completely different.
• The number of users has grown, but they have all been focused on the daily necessities, which has not been helpful to the main business at all and has also increased a lot of operating costs.
• There is no increase in user leaving costs. Because even if users don’t come, they can still exchange them for some daily necessities to take home.
• This is a waste of the best opportunity to promote your product.

Following my suggestion, she exchanged daily necessities and dry goods for free trial qualifications for new beauty projects and preferential discount rights for various beauty projects. The effect was immediate. Don’t think that this kind of mistake is low-level. In fact, there are really quite a few companies around us, especially some small and medium-sized companies, that blindly imitate the practices of those large ecological companies, and there are quite a few such mistakes.

The second type: user growth triggers user behavior. What we need to do is to transform user behavior into user growth.

How to understand this sentence? It means that if a user pays or spends time and knowledge because of his desire for growth, then we must give him a very obvious sense of growth after his payment. This is the only way to continue to guide him to make the next contribution. Converting "behavior" into "growth" is the concept of gamification. It is also the most valuable part of a user growth system. It contains many human and psychological techniques, which we will talk about later.

Okay, now we know the strategic positioning of a user growth system. Next, we can build it step by step. Let’s first take a look at what elements a user growth system includes? There are two basic components:

1. The level of growth
2. Upgrade and downgrade conditions for each level

So how can we build it scientifically? We can find that in the whole thing, we have five problems to solve:

• How to formulate a reasonable series?
• What are the key indicators for upgrading/downgrading at each level?
• What are the user behaviors with respect to key indicators?
• How to quantify and link user behavior and key indicators together?
• How to induce users to complete these user behaviors?

In fact, these are the five steps we take to build a user growth system:

Step 1: Determine the level

There are no standards for setting grades. Generally speaking, for the first type of "auxiliary type" we are talking about here, there is no need to set a lot of levels, such as Tmall, Didi, etc., and the rules do not need to be too complicated. As for the second type of "product type", there will be relatively more levels, such as games or some UGC products, and the rules can also be more diverse. This is determined by strategic positioning.

The little trick here is " the entrance cannot be too difficult, and the exit cannot be too easy ." This is easy to understand. From the perspective of most people's thinking habits, if the entrance is too difficult, some people will be directly turned away; if the exit is too easy, some high-quality active users will quickly reach the peak and have no pursuit, and will easily leave. Here you can refer to the golden ratio sequence (also known as the Fibonacci sequence), which is an exponentially increasing sequence that meets our requirements.

Of course, in actual work, comprehensive considerations are still needed. For example, when a product has many users who have reached the middle and late stages of the system, if the difficulty remains at the middle and late stages, it will dampen the enthusiasm of many people. At this time, it is necessary to increase the number of levels and reduce the difficulty of some levels in between.

Step 2: Set key indicators

There does not have to be only one key indicator, but it must have a weight. For key indicators, please refer to the previous data article "Data Article | How to Become an Operations Expert (Part 1): Data in Operations".

Key indicators are very important, and everyone may not know how to determine them. In fact, as mentioned above, a product needs three things from users: money, time, knowledge and resources. What we think is most important to us is our key indicator.

It’s like if we are an e-commerce company or an offline restaurant, and we want to build our membership growth system, the key indicator we look at is the consumption amount. If a user does not make any purchases, we will not give him a discount even if he hangs out in our store or stands outside our restaurant every day. We may even think he is using our Wi-Fi for free and kick him out.

Similarly, if our key indicators are the number of users, daily active users or the amount of content. The user’s actions just now are very useful to us, and we are willing to give corresponding rewards (i.e. user growth) for those actions.

Step 3: Plan user behavior

After we know our key indicators, we need to plan out various user behaviors around this indicator.

For example, the number of users is one of our key indicators.

Well, many user registration behaviors are very useful to us, and we should also take such behaviors of users into consideration in their corresponding growth system. We can list these behaviors, such as: completing user information, binding mobile phone, binding email, completing avatar, etc.

For example, daily active users are one of our key metrics.

Then some user behaviors that reflect activity must be taken into account in the growth system. For example: login, sign in, continuous sign in, like, comment, favorite, forward, etc.

For example, the amount of content is one of our key metrics.

Then some user behaviors that add content must be taken into account in the growth system. For example: posting, writing, posting short videos, online live broadcast time, etc.

If, sales is our only key metric.

In fact, none of the above are that important. The main consideration is how much money is paid. Some of our usual agent policies, WeChat business franchise policies, etc. all belong to this category.

Step 4: Behavior Quantification

At this stage, what we need to do is to quantify the user behavior we have planned, and then match the quantified values ​​with the upgrade values ​​in the growth system. We will go through several steps:

1. First, unify user behavior into a number, such as points, experience points, growth points, etc.
2. Then we set each user behavior to a numerical value based on our weight, such as 1 point for signing in, 2 points for posting, etc.
3. Then simulate a user's behavior path and calculate the number of values ​​obtained per day. That is, simulate a user's actual operation to see what the minimum, average, and maximum values ​​can be obtained in a day.
4. Based on our product cycle and how often we expect each user to upgrade, we determine the value of each user behavior and the standard for the upgrade value. For example, through the third step we calculated that the maximum score we can get in a day is 50 points. If we hope to reach a certain level in about 10 days, we can set the upgrade requirement for that level to 500 points.

Since this article is too long, I won’t give an example. We only need to grasp two key points:

1. Different weights should be set for different user behaviors based on our actual needs.
2. Control the upper limit of the value.

Especially the second point, as we all know, inflation means that if there is too much money, it will become worthless. Similarly, points and growth are worth nothing. If they are too easy to obtain, users will not cherish them. Therefore, whether it is points or growth values, especially for the second product-type user growth system, how to grow is not the most important thing. The most important thing is to create value for users after growth, to create incentives for users, to give users the motivation to continue to grow, and to make users willing to continue to pay money and time for it. This is the most important thing, so let's move on to the next step.

Step 5: Induce users to complete these user behaviors

This step is also the core part of the user growth system. As mentioned before, if it is an auxiliary user growth system, it is actually very difficult to complete this step. This is determined by the business model. If it is a product-based user growth system, this step is the key to the success or failure of the product.

In our previous article “Structure | How to Become an Operations Expert (IV): One Picture of Operations”, we talked about the concept of “cost and acquisition” of a user. Similarly, in the user growth system, if it is self-driven growth by the user, then when the user wants to grow, he will also consider two things: the cost of growth and the acquisition of growth.

For example, in the game, a user spends 500 yuan to buy a weapon and gets a growth. "500 yuan" is the cost, and "this weapon" is the acquisition, but the weapon itself is not the only acquisition. "The thrill of galloping in the world after having the weapon, the envy of the crowd, the improvement of status in the game, etc." are the real gains for users. Only when users perceive that acquisition > cost, will they pay the price to grow.

What we need to do is to increase user perception and reduce the cost of user perception. We need to consider it from two user perspectives: attributes and human nature.

(1) Attributes

Every product has its target group, and what each group expects to obtain is completely different. The same pair of limited edition sneakers given to a person who likes sports and a person who doesn't like sports will result in two completely different perceptions of the same thing. This is also what we often call " user portrait ". We have talked about it a lot in other chapters, so I will not repeat it here.

(2) Human nature

The use of humanity is truly the most useful method in operations, but also the most difficult to describe. In essence, all user operations exist to meet the human needs of users. Here I borrow a book called Actionable Gamification written by an American author Yu-kai Chou. The author proposed eight core driving forces of human nature from the perspective of games:

• Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning and Purpose
• Core Drive 2: Progress and Accomplishment
• Core Drive 3: Creative Delegation and Feedback
• Core Drive 4: Ownership and Possession
• Core Drive 5: Social Influence and Relatedness
• Core Drive 6: Scarcity and Desire
• Core Drive 7: Uncertainty and Curiosity
• Core Drive 8: Loss and Avoidance

When we set up a user growth system, the model we built for each level is as follows:

If we further refine it, it is as follows:

And what we need to do in the end is to make the right side > the left side. After completing all of the above, we have built an effective user growth system both strategically and tactically. This is also one of the core methods in our operations.

summary

User stratification and user growth system are two ways to drive users, but both of them are the relationship between us and users. Each of us is a social being, and social interaction is a rigid need for each of us. If we can enable users to connect with each other to increase user activity and stickiness, can it help us improve our operational efficiency more effectively? The answer is of course yes.

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

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