The secret behind the rapid growth of Airbnb and YouTube users...

Why is YouTube the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley history?

There are many theories to explain why YouTube has become the fastest-growing company in Silicon Valley history, but Julie Supan says the reason is simple: "Because we sell emotions."

When she became YouTube's first marketing director in December 2005, the first thing she did was to discuss with her partners what kind of company it was - or, rather, what kind of people they were. Unlike the hundreds of other video sharing sites at the time (most of which have been forgotten), YouTube used Flash technology to build its site (other video products required users to download software), did not sell professional long videos, did not cooperate with celebrities, and they did not even pay special attention to the quality of the videos.

▲ YouTube didn’t stop using Flash as the default until 2015

Instead, they want to make YouTube a "place where everyone can participate" — especially those who want to have real emotional experiences, to laugh, to share their talents, and to learn something.

Our team is committed to showing people what they want in a video format, rather than just telling them. Whether the video is of otters holding hands, a young woman singing in her bedroom, a veteran sharing his World War II stories, or teaching users how to repair a sink.

What we care most about is how to arouse users' emotions.

We all know what happened next. Celebrities and brands flocked to open accounts on YouTube, and it was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion. YouTube introduced the world to a new kind of virality, but what truly defines YouTube are its individual users.

So when Supan left YouTube in 2009 and became Silicon Valley’s most sought-after branding expert, her first step in positioning each of her companies—Airbnb, Dropbox, Thumbtack—was always to identify the company’s target user: the high-expectation user.

What are high expectation users?

“High-Expectation Customers are the most discerning people in your target audience. They are also the ones who are most likely to appreciate and use your products and services.

High-expectation users are people that others want to emulate because they are seen by others as intelligent, judgmental, and opinionated. Identifying high-expectation users is critical because it is this group of users who can help a startup build word-of-mouth.

▲ Users with high expectations will make consumption decisions after investigation

High-expectation users have good consumption habits, they understand the market and are able to make correct decisions.

They do research and search online when they consume, and they explore new products in order to save money, be healthier, and be more efficient. If your product makes them happy, then other ordinary consumers will also be very satisfied.

Why are users with high expectations not necessarily early adopters?

It's easy for a company to think that your high-expectation users are the early users of the product, but this is not the case. It is important for startups to make this distinction.

Take FlightCar, an airport car-sharing startup that pairs car owners who are out on the road with tourists who have just arrived in the city. The company's early users were monthly subscribers - these car owners were often on the go, and for them it was very tempting to earn an income during the time when their vehicles were idle. “Our early ads had the logo of money on them,” Supan said. She helped FlightCar transform its marketing strategy and product transformation last year.

▲ FlightCar is one of the most important startups in the sharing economy in the United States

Although these early users expanded the vehicle supply very quickly, they did not deeply identify with the startup's philosophy. “We built our entire model – business model, operating model, marketing model – on a target group that does not identify with the sharing economy. These users do not consider themselves believers in the vehicle sharing economy, do not believe that they are helping a larger group to be self-sufficient, and therefore they do not care about the company’s development.

When something goes wrong, they immediately write an angry review on Yelp. They are not interested in helping companies optimize their policies and are unable to accept changes brought about by new business models and more efficient operating systems. In short, this group of early users lacked goodwill, so when the company expanded from one airport to 17 branches in the United States, users left in large numbers because they lacked confidence in the company. ”

At the same time, another user group has grown naturally and healthily from the beginning. They are a very different group of users - standard users. They were attracted by the product's reputation and were determined to become early adopters of the new concept of the sharing economy. They are excited to save on parking fees when they travel and earn some extra income by renting cars to tourists. They are users with high expectations for the product.

“They were the users who could have helped create the right growth rate, helped us market the brand, built word-of-mouth for the product over the next few years and encouraged other people to come on board. But the business model wasn’t structured for them,” Supan said. “The business model evolved with paying users at the core, and the entire team spent a year rebuilding the FlightCar product experience. Ultimately, the team decided to sell its rebuilt technology platform to Mercedes-Benz North America Research and Development Center to become part of its Innovation Lab’s global mobility business.”

Find your high-expectation users

For young companies, founders need to systematically define high-expectation users. “You need to do a lot of user research to deeply understand what people love, what annoys them, what they see as your biggest challenges and values, and what they want to achieve in the long run,” Supan said.

▲ Collecting user data can help founders better understand high-expectation users

She suggested that startups collect data from these users: happy, unhappy, recent, long-term, active, inactive, and from different regions.

“You may also need to create new channels and product features to capture data about people as they use your product,” she said. There are some things to avoid. “Don’t ask users questions about functionality or UI design. Tools like Usertesting.com are not useful for surveys.

Paid beta testers are more polite but also less enthusiastic about the product,” Supan said. “If you can predict the answer to a question, don’t ask it. You don't have to shorten the interview or questionnaire, but you do need to be considerate of the other person's time. I recommend letting users know that you’re conducting a survey to better understand how they feel about the product, and that you’ll be using the survey feedback directly into company strategy. ”

Calibration data. Don't rush - this can sometimes take the team several weeks. By collecting feedback from various platforms, we can see what common themes they have.

Use these data to outline the characteristics of users with high expectations. Define specific personality traits that represent your target users. If your questionnaire is well designed, you can often get a glimpse of the user's own words. "My favorite question is 'How would you define the type of person who would benefit most from this product?'" Supan said. “When they answer, they often start describing themselves. This is a great way to ask ‘who are you’ and make them feel like they are describing someone else when they answer.”

Then calibrate again. Before wrapping up your research, Supan recommends asking a few final questions to make sure you’ve found real-life high-expectation users:

Consider the way your users think

To get the most out of your high-expectation customers, you also need to consider their prior experiences — their consumer ecosystem, and their biases toward your product. In other words, you need to consider whether the user has a growth mindset or a fixed mindset.

If it's a growth mindset, that's great. “These users have an open mind. They’ve never tried your product and didn’t know it existed. When people first discover one-of-a-kind accommodations on Airbnb, they think, ‘Oh my god, I can stay in a mill for a night?’ Because it’s unimaginable, they’re very excited and surprised,” Supan said.

▲ Airbnb benefits by giving users more than they expected

If users have fixed mindsets, your product needs to inspire and encourage them to reimagine what’s possible and make it happen.

“Take Thumbtack, the leading online marketplace for local service professionals. Many users come to the site with the thought that contractors won’t return your calls and are hard to reach. I have to make 11 calls before one is available,” Supan said. Thumbtack was aware of this situation after doing a lot of user research in its early days. Their team's positioning took a "you can do it" strategy, using statements such as Thumbtack to help users complete millions of projects quickly and easily. ”

Because of early research, Thumbtack can surprise users when they need professional services. “When users get a quote in a timely manner from a professional with a strong reputation, rather than having to make a lot of calls or do it themselves, they have shifted to a growth mindset and feel supported and valued by the product,” Supan said. “We won the user.”

Convince your team

The relationship between you and your high-expectation customers is often a personal one, and you have to like this "person". You and your team must buy into this relationship, too.

“Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky once said, ‘You have to become the person you design the product for,’ ” Supan said. “

Your entire team has to agree that this person is worth your time, and to a large extent, the entire team should be motivated to become high expectation users.

▲ Make everyone in the team a high-expectation user

Starting a business is a grind. “Some companies will restructure their strategy for a customer they’re not excited about. Some companies don’t like or can’t relate to their high-expectation customers,” Supan said. “That affects the culture of the company, it affects recruiting , it affects the spirit of the team — their focus and their determination.”

On the other hand, satisfying users with high expectations often breaks the deadlock for startups. “You can see the team’s reaction in action: a renewed energy if they buy in and participate in defining the target customer. You can see a greater sense of urgency and focus.

High-expectation users can help you recruit more targeted. “Everyone who works at Lululemon looks like Ocean,” Supan said. “When you interview at Airbnb, you’re hugged and welcomed as soon as you step out of the elevator. Their definition of a high-expectation customer is someone who is caring, cares about others, and wants to be a citizen of the world, and you feel the same way when you walk into the office.”

It is not enough for employees to just share emotions; you need to go to great lengths to make your high-expectation users a common and familiar presence in the office. “Create a PowerPoint or quick reference card to share with the entire team, provide a tutorial for new employees, or create a scorecard to show how well the current product exceeds user expectations. Mention your high-expectation users in company town hall meetings. Use focus groups or “user councils” to gather feedback from a certain group of high-expectation users and invite them to provide strategic suggestions and feature ideas.

Down-to-earth execution

Of course, your journey is not over until you have identified high-expectation users and prepared your team.

You need to build high-expectation users into the DNA of your business — that is, strategy, product roadmap, execution, and marketing. “It can take six to eight weeks to get this done properly and discuss all the aspects that need to be addressed to exceed the expectations of high-expectation users,” Supan says. “In the companies I’ve been involved with, we’ve been able to review our product roadmap with a keener eye, kill some features, and in most cases build new features that are more aligned with the new positioning and high-expectation users.”

▲ No matter how many ideas you have, solid execution is needed

When it comes to marketing, the good news is that doing the work up front can quickly focus your strategy and messaging.

Free yourself from the "tracking everyone" mindset. That way, you can invest all your sales and marketing dollars into acquiring and retaining a single group of users, and they’ll do the rest for you. "Having users share their love and enthusiasm for a product is obviously much more objective than advertising and promotion. As a result, the company can achieve longer-term growth with less money," said Supan.

Likewise, don't worry about leveraging HXC's own language directly. Since you have spent money to collect mobile phone user data, you must maximize the use of these user voices that can resonate with you. “When users hear that something they said was used, they say, ‘Wow, that’s the product I want.’”

Pay careful attention to nonverbal messages, too, including your product's appearance and usefulness.

“For example, if Dropbox wanted to convey the message ‘Dropbox just works,’ it had to be designed to work on every platform, everywhere, to exceed HXC’s expectations,” Supan said. “Their design vision had to be consistent with how their target customers felt about the product. One of Dropbox’s brand values ​​is ‘our backup is your backup.’ And their product had almost no UI.

Dropbox just sits there in the upper right corner of your screen. You rarely use it. It's plain and simple, but you know it backs up everything. ”

Making your brand message targeted doesn’t mean going the one way or the other. “You need to do some decentralized testing to determine whether this positioning is acceptable to customers,” Supan said. “Look at every touch point with the user. You don’t have to check them all in one day, but when you go to implement it, you want them to be in order and complement each other.”

High-expectation customers are the essence of viral marketing .

Do a good review

Ultimately, your HAVs represent real people in your life, and you must reach out to your target audience regularly and repeatedly to make sure you’re still hitting the mark.

Supan urges entrepreneurs to keep a close eye on changes in their company or the market and to review them constantly. "(Review) maybe every three or two years, when you have seen a certain amount of growth. At some point in the future you need to ask yourself again: 'How has the world evolved, what are my customers expecting now, and how have they grown'."

▲ Twitter, once a popular platform, is now looking for a buyer

“Take Twitter, for example. It’s not that they got their positioning wrong. I think they skipped the step of constantly reviewing,” Supan said. "Early on, Twitter decided to target celebrities and other media heavy users who wanted new ways to gain followers. From a PR perspective, this has been a successful strategy. Celebrity users have indeed achieved considerable brand returns. But Twitter's slow growth tells us that while ordinary people like to peek at celebrities' updates, this does not mean that they will actively use Twitter themselves."

“No one can copy Justin Bieber on Twitter. He has come a long way since he was 12 years old posting homemade videos on YouTube,” said Supan. “And yet I looked at Twitter’s product and said, ‘That path is right for him but it’s not right for me.’ He’s setting the bar so high that you can’t even touch it. That kind of high-expectation user is not the type of person you want to emulate or fantasize about being like.

Although it’s easier said than done, it’s worthwhile to continuously research and interact with users.

“Hire people with creative and analytical skills who can manage multi-channel research and work closely with the product team,” Supan says. “Also make sure you’re constantly calibrating insights that are counter to your high-expectation users. I’ve rarely seen a company completely replace a group of high-expectation users, but it’s really important to allow them to evolve with the world around them.”

The first goal is to reach a consensus, and the second is to keep in touch with users with high expectations. “What you’re always looking for is for the market, the company and the users to reach a consensus on who you are and why you’re important,” Supan said. As your company evolves, your high-anticipation customers will serve as a litmus test to ensure that you are on the right track and your plans are working.

“The biggest benefit of identifying high-expectation users is that everyone, including employees and users, gains a stable mindset. Your users will understand the product and understand what your product means to them. You will be able to significantly reduce the cost of acquiring customers and have a clearer development roadmap. By eliminating bias, your team will become more creative,” said Supan.

“You need to repeatedly engage with high-expectation users and calibrate against their ideas, and keep studying them. If you do this, they will lead you to a consensus - what your company is and what it is not.”

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

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