Learn the correct approach to cold-starting content-based products from Douban!

Douban's cold start was quite successful. Of course, this was closely related to excellent product design and precise algorithm push. At the same time, the community atmosphere established during Douban's cold start was also the key to Douban's early success. Through Douban, let's take a look at the posture of content-based product cold start.

Build a content operations framework

The first thing to do for any content-based product cold start is to build a content operation framework. Usually, you can start from the three aspects of "content consumer positioning", "content source confirmation" and "content standard establishment".

Content consumer positioning

If you want to figure out the positioning of content consumers, you first need to have an accurate positioning of your own products, what the content of the products is, and what the criteria for screening content are. Then, the audience positioning is determined by positioning the product: what is the audience's user profile, where can they be obtained, and what are their requirements for content. The comprehensive consideration and measurement of these factors is the complete definition of content consumers, rather than just making a user profile based on the general characteristics of the target users.

Confirmation of content source

"Confirmation of content sources" is divided into two parts: "content collection" and "source channels"; in fact, content collection is a horizontal description of the content source, and source channels are a vertical description of the content source. Specifically, content collection mainly studies whether the content is original, authorized for reprinting, or user-generated; while source channels study where the content comes from, how it comes, where the content producers get it from, and how to enable them to continue to contribute content.

Establishment of content standards

In addition to filling content, content-based communities also need to have a certain evaluation mechanism to judge content and screen and present good content. At the same time, they also need corresponding incentive mechanisms to provide long-term and effective incentives to content producers to ensure the continuous supply of high-quality content.

The specific process of product cold start is actually the process of introducing the first batch of seed users based on the pre-built content operation framework. The specific relationship diagram is as follows (click to view the enlarged image):

Content-based community from 0 to 1

The following uses the example of Douban cold start to present the whole process of a content-based community cold start from 0 to 1:

Content padding

Douban CEO Abei is a well-known Pascal programmer in China and has a great influence in the Pascal community. The programmer community, especially those active in the Pascal community at the time, had a wide range of interests, including philosophy books, high-quality literature books, and humanities books. This group actually had many similarities:

They usually prefer literature, have a stronger desire to express themselves and create, etc., and at this time "books" become the key point that brings everyone together. This is in line with Douban's initial positioning of using "books" as a bond to create a gathering place for literary and artistic young people; at the same time, most of them also have the habit of writing technical blogs, have good UGC literacy, and have the habit of compiling long articles. This makes them a very good source of seed users in Douban's early construction stage. It was this group of users who completed the initial stage of content filling of Douban.

Establishment of content standards

Douban's early positioning was very clear: to create a gathering place for young people with books, music, and movies as the bond. Most of Douban's early seed users came for this purpose, so the users themselves have a lot in common. In addition, Douban's product architecture is also born to create a "similar circle":

Functions such as group functions, tags, Douban Mail, and the use of algorithms to accurately push topics and circles that may interest you, etc., through layers of screening and filtering, make it very easy for users to find circles and people on Douban who share similar interests and hobbies.

And this also makes this kind of circle very "pure" from the moment it is formed: it has nothing to do with fame and fortune, nor any external noise, but is purely gathered together because of some common characteristics and attributes; finally, there is another very important point. From the product design at the beginning of its establishment, it can be seen that they have always implemented the view that decentralization is the soil for cultivating high-quality content. It does not have a homepage design like Jianshu, nor a hot search list like Weibo. Douban advocates finding people with similar interests, highlighting the position of users, focusing on personal experience of users and positive interaction between users; therefore, this series of designs, while creating an ultimate and pure place for users that fits their own attributes, has also become an important driving force for early Douban users to continuously produce high-quality UGC, and the subsequent launch of the likes and "useful or useless" functions have further strengthened this incentive mechanism and also played a role in digging out high-quality UGC;

Douban's content display mechanism is also fully based on the connection between users and the content they are interested in. Users judge whether it is the content they want through the tags of the content and other users' comments on the content. This principle is also very consistent with Douban's principle of "everything is based on interest". In addition, some non-popular high-quality content often appears on Douban. At that time, the only way to discover these high-quality content was to rely on the spread of the crowd. Douban's good content production and dissemination cycle promoted the rapid aggregation and divergence of long-tail content, catering to the needs of "personalization", and the long-tail content exploded with amazing influence.

From these two points, we can see that Douban's content display is actually more based on users' active exploration and dissemination on the basis of having a general direction. This is completely different from communities such as Zhihu that mainly rely on timeline to expose content.

Find and retain as many seed users as possible

In fact, this point has already been integrated into the previous two points. First, determine the rough early user portrait. Specifically for Douban in its early days, it should be young literary people and petty white-collar workers who like to read books and watch movies. Most of them have relatively rich material conditions, but lack a place that matches their rich spiritual world. This is the user portrait of Douban's target users. However, because seed users not only serve as website visitors (i.e., content consumers), but also need to be responsible for the production of initial content, on the basis of the target user portrait, they also need to have the habit of writing UGC. Therefore, programmers in the Pascal community have become a high-quality source of seed users in the early cold start of Douban.

The retention of seed users is closely related to the design of the product, especially in the early days of Douban. After Douban introduced the first batch of seed users, there was almost no other official operation, and it was entirely driven by the product itself. However, the design of the product itself is very consistent with the psychological demands and friendship needs of its target users, and as the number of users gradually increases, the atmosphere in the community gradually takes shape. At the same time, as a community, Douban's decentralized operation makes it possible for everyone's film reviews to be discovered by the public, generate interaction, and generate incentives. This positive cycle greatly promotes users' creativity and sense of responsibility, so Douban can continuously gather high-quality content and active users.

These points are also the key factors for Douban's high user retention rate in the early days.

In addition to the above three points, Douban’s cold start success (or the success of Douban in its early days) is also inseparable from the era in which it was located;

• Douban has always been a technology and product-driven product. On the technical side, it uses algorithms to provide users with accurate push notifications, and on the product side, it focuses on user experience, even sacrificing many opportunities that were thought to be Douban's business model at the time. Therefore, both the technical recommendation mechanism and the ultimate pursuit of user experience were very rare in the Chinese Internet circle in 2005. This is also one of the important reasons why Douban stands out.
• At the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005, the threshold for Internet access was still relatively high. Users who were interested in literature and art and had the ability to access the Internet for a long time were relatively well-educated and had higher quality. Therefore, this condition naturally filtered out a part of users, which also played a great role in the formation of a good atmosphere in the early Douban community.
• In the blog era, the right to speak and attention are concentrated on celebrities and hot figures. The concept of UGC has not yet become popular. UGC communities that allow netizens to interact and communicate are relatively rare. Literary UGC communities divided by interests and groups are even rarer. The corresponding market is almost blank, and there are almost no direct competitors.

In short, Douban's cold start was quite successful. Of course, this is closely related to excellent product design and precise algorithm push. At the same time, the community atmosphere established during Douban's cold start was also the key to Douban's early success. As for the problems that Douban has been struggling and the community atmosphere has been much worse than before since entering the mobile Internet era, these are no longer within the scope of discussion in this article.