From 0 to 450 million users, how did the mobile transmission app "Kuaiya" promote itself?

Wang Xiaodong, the founder of Kuaiya, researched several technologies in Silicon Valley, one of which (which can be seen as the prototype of Kuaiya) received very good responses and spread locally, so he brought two friends back to China to start his own business .

After returning to China, Wang Xiaodong discussed user needs with several friends: The advantage of Kuaiya is that users can share mobile phone content with people around them point-to-point without connecting to the Internet or using data traffic (by rewriting the hotspot protocol that comes with the mobile phone system). However, his friends said that the company has free data traffic and the office also has WiFi, so this thing is not needed.

Later, Wang Xiaodong and his team thought carefully and concluded that there is still a demand for Kuaiya (don’t mistake having no demand as a false demand). The users are ordinary people, and for them: traffic is expensive, content resources are scarce, and large file transfers are difficult.

After choosing this direction, Wang Xiaodong felt that Kuaiya must make a very down-to-earth product. Since several of them were not good at researching technology abroad, they must have an equally down-to-earth team. So he found a team from Kingsoft, a company he was more familiar with, that understood Kuaiya’s target users and helped Kuaiya take off as soon as possible.

Kuaiya started out as a transmission tool product, and Wang Xiaodong positioned it as a "viral product that meets urgent needs."

It is precisely because of the precise positioning of the product that the foundation is laid for the product promotion strategy .

1. Difficult initial promotion: scenario-based

Even if the team thinks the product is useful, it is not easy to promote it in the first wave and acquire the first 100 users. At first, they tried to promote their products in schools where users gathered, but found that it didn't work and the response was mediocre.

So the team thought of another way: to post on the Xiaomi Forum and Jifeng Forum for promotion. Suddenly, a post with 20,000 replies appeared. You have to know that in early 2012, these forums were basically gathering places for geeks. As a geek, there are often girls who don’t know where to download music or games and come to ask for help. Tools like Kuaiya just hit the nail on the head and quickly become a hit.
2. You can’t not spend money, but you have to do everything you can to spend it.

The founding team of Kuaiya had no experience in making apps, so they had no idea about the scale of users. However, the company's promotion money is "spent as efficiently as possible."

When the product was first released, they had to shoot a promotional video. The quote from the outsourcing company was too expensive, so they asked part-time students from Beijing Film Academy to shoot it, write and direct it themselves. Due to limited conditions, it had to be shot in one go, and one video could be shot from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. But the effect was very good, with more than 1 million views on Youku.

They have also done Weibo promotion . In order to save the agency fees, they sent people to infiltrate the joke tellers. In this way, Weibo posts related to Kuaiya entered the top ten of Weibo's popular list several times and gained millions of users.

3. Make tools content-based and create products

A while ago, it was popular to “get XX million users without spending any money”. In fact, promotion definitely costs money. What we need to do is to combine the characteristics of the product itself to do promotion and make good use of the money.

Now, the product has also begun to cooperate with celebrities such as Huang Xiaoming, Tong Dawei, and Zhao Wei to shoot promotional videos and promote exclusive footage on KuaiYa. Internalize the influence of celebrities into product marketing power.

From January to August 2015, 12 million users streamed Zhang Jie's songs, including 238,000 in Kunming. A fan in Liupanshui, Guizhou, sent Zhang Jie's music (manually) to 90 friends. These heavy fan groups will become different "focuses", turning Kuaiya into a huge communication tree.

It is logical and natural for Kuaiya to move from tools to content. But how to do it, I don’t know. Later, Mango TV took the lead.

When the producer of Mango TV first found Wang Xiaodong, he felt that there was not much point in cooperation. But the producer traveled all the way to Beijing to meet with him, and after talking from the afternoon until midnight, he finally figured it out. Although the two seem to be worlds apart, one is a TV station and the other is an app, but in terms of user groups, 13-24 years old almost account for 80%, which is a perfect match!

Moreover, both parties reached a consensus: in the future media, centralized organizational forms will disappear, and high-quality content will be self-propagated more through decentralized media channels.

One of Mango TV’s programs has 140 million viewers, which is a huge number, but as a TV station, it cannot really reach users and cannot interact with them. Products like Kuaiya can just complement it. Firstly, it is for publicity and promotion, and secondly, it is equivalent to conducting a real user survey at a low cost. In Kuaiya, users vote for content by their transmission and downloading behavior.
4. Promotion is a combination of efforts by all departments

Kuaiya also has its own way of promoting the new version. Simply put, it's a combination of departments - product research and development, marketing , and operations - all working together.

Specifically, before each new version is released, the marketing department will intervene in the product and everyone will work together to polish the final version. Frank even made up a motto for this purpose – products should focus on “urgent needs”, R&D should thoroughly explore “functional points”, operations should identify “focus points”, and the market should thoroughly explain “promotion points”.

If you download Kuaiya now, open it and take a look, and flip through it casually, you will find that Kuaiya is more than just a transfer tool. In addition to content resources transmitted and downloaded between users, there are also the most popular rankings, what you may like, tooth powder recommendations... and from the perspective of content segmentation, it includes mobile applications , videos, games, novels, etc. Of course, "people" (especially celebrity tooth powder) are also an important part of the content.

The extension from a simple transmission tool to content is a natural and logical step. However, after the tools reach a certain scale, they must be transformed into content. Tools are to attract people, but to make users happy after they come, the product must have the value of consuming and collecting content.

In Kuaiya's transmission network, point-to-point and person-to-person resource exchanges first formed countless small networks. In this process, Kuaiya not only acts as a "bridge", but also can settle the content and refine the operation. But this function will not be done by Kuaiya. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, P2P returns to P2P.

What Kuaiya does is to help grow the user base with content transmission (production) capabilities, thereby stringing together the scatter plot into an interwoven, flowing network (please use your imagination) , in which the celebrity fans are the "focuses" of the network, and Kuaiya's promotional users benefit from the distribution of Kuaiya's big data.

Finally, here’s the legendary product video that was self-written, self-directed, and shot in 18 hours at one time. Take a look.

APP Top Promotion (www.opp2.com) is the top mobile APP promotion platform in China, focusing on mobile APP promotion operation methods, experience and skills, channel ASO optimization ranking, and sharing APP marketing information. Welcome to follow the official WeChat public account: appganhuo

[Scan the top APP promotion WeChat QR code to get more dry goods and explosive materials]

This article was compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion) by @张颖. Reprinting this article requires the consent of Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article!