How to find accurate seed users? Attached with classic practical cases!

Analysis ideas for finding seed users :

The following 7 questions are all important, and I hope you can try to write down the answers to these questions one by one.

I will give some examples later to illustrate this analytical approach.

1. What is the product positioning?

Products are the starting point of operations . First, make it clear what pain points the product will solve, what needs it will meet, and how it will differentiate itself from other similar products.

2. Which segment of the population will be most interested in this product?

Among all the people who have needs, there must be a group of people who have a particularly strong need. We need to find them out from this group of people and try to describe them with some words, clearly defining and describing what they are like.

3. What are the characteristics of this group of people?

What are the characteristics of this group of people in terms of gender, age, region, education level, etc., and what unique habits do they have? What is the spending power?

4. Where do they like to appear?

What apps would they like to use? What kind of public accounts and Weibo do you follow? In what offline occasions does it appear more frequently? Users are not created, they have always existed, they are just active in other people's places.

5. What kind of things are they interested in?

What do you like? What do you hate? What kind of values? What kind of article can impress him? What are some words that only this group of people can understand?

6. What methods can be used to attract them?

How to combine the core features of the product with their preferences, and what can they get as the first users.

7. How can we screen out unsuitable people?

In order to prevent inappropriate users from entering and ruining the atmosphere, you can screen out the users who are most in need through methods such as invitation codes, application review requirements, and payment requirements.

Let's take an example to understand the analysis idea

For example, a healthy slimming salad takeaway meal focuses on controlling weight through healthy eating, even without doing a lot of exercise. The differentiated advantage is that for users, there is no need to exercise too much, they just need to spend money to buy it and eat it. The form is takeaway, and the coverage area will be wider than that of stores. Due to the high cost of ingredients and matching, salad meals will be more expensive than general takeaways.

As for the division of segmented populations, it still comes back to the positioning of the product. The need that the product satisfies is "weight loss". At first, I thought that "weight loss" should be a need for all fat people, but in fact, not everyone who wants to lose weight has a strong demand for this healthy meal, especially when this product is relatively expensive. Therefore, this segmented population should be white-collar women in first-tier cities who have the need to lose weight.

Their characteristics are that they love beauty and dressing up, are not satisfied with their weight, have good spending power, and have certain pursuit of quality of life. You may have tried fitness but failed to stick with it; you may have thought about taking diet pills but were afraid of side effects and rebound.

They may pay more attention to public accounts related to fashion and quality life, such as Business Fan, Shiliupo Report, Yitiao, etc. Most of them use iPhones, and the apps they install may be Beauty Camera, Secoo Luxury, Keep , Meila, etc. In addition to going to CBD and Science Park on weekdays, they also often go to shopping malls and love to buy fashionable clothes and bags. If you want to create a public account to attract this group of users in the future, you need to study more about the public accounts and apps they like and find out what content is particularly likely to be liked by them.

This group of people pursue making themselves more beautiful, and deeply identify with such arguments and values ​​as "love of beauty is women's nature" and "beauty is women's capital". They also pay attention to various easy ways to lose weight. If you have a certain pursuit for quality and aesthetics, the appearance and pictures of the products must not be too bad. If there are open classes related to weight loss, they may be interested in them.

Therefore, you can write some very easy-to-read and professional soft articles and post them under topics like Zhihu, such as "How to lose weight effectively and healthily?", "How to be an elegant woman?", "How to lose weight if you work overtime and have no time to exercise?", "What is the experience of successful weight loss?", "How to stick to weight loss?". If the articles are accompanied by stories, experiences, photos, and a little chicken soup, it is easy to attract a group of users to be interested in it.

Having a certain threshold will make users more accurate. For example, by cooperating with a step counting software, users who take more than 10,000 steps in a day can use 1 yuan to redeem a healthy salad worth 30 yuan.

People who care about health and weight loss will pay more attention to step counting and ranking. Since there are two thresholds, "10,000 steps" and "paying 1 yuan", a group of correct users can be acquired.

For pedometer software, some benefits that can stimulate and promote user activity are also welcome. As a feedback for cooperation, you may also consider attaching a delicate little card of this pedometer software when preparing meals in the future as a feedback promotion.

Knowing that this group of users likes shopping, we can discuss cooperation with some brands that they are likely to visit. When they spend over 800 yuan in their stores, they can get a free trial card for a healthy meal. The store does not need to pay any cost. Some customers may also buy more goods in order to get the free trial. This kind of cooperation is relatively easy to negotiate.

You can also go to places where users appear precisely and distribute flyers directly for marketing , such as beauty salons, nail salons, and gyms near mid- to high-end residential areas. Offering tastings or limited-time discounts will also help you gain a group of users.

There are many specific ways to attract seed users, and I will not list them here. Not every method will be effective immediately. Operations, like products, also require rapid trial and error. If it is effective, it will be strengthened, and if it is not effective, it will be adjusted.

In addition, by constantly studying users, understanding where they hang out and what their preferences are, it will be easy to think of various ways to attract users.

With a certain number of seed users, we can collect their feedback, optimize and improve the salon's reputation and features, turn it into a product that this group of people likes more, and then start promoting it to a large number of users.

I have not made this salad product, and most of the examples above are just my guesses. Some of the descriptions of users may not be accurate. I mainly want to give you an idea of ​​this kind of analysis. I believe that if I delve deeper into this industry and do more research on this user group, I will be able to get closer to users in terms of user characteristics, preferences and how to attract users.

So, you can see that the above 7 questions are closely linked to each other. It is easy to understand why it is so difficult for products with unclear positioning to find seed users.

Some stupid ways are also good ways

For products with high quality requirements for initial users, manual invitations are not an impossible method, and sometimes they are more effective than other methods.

For example, for some products where product atmosphere and tone are relatively important, the quality of the first batch of seed users is very critical and will affect the direction of subsequent products. Therefore, we actively screen and invite targeted users, and only select users who best meet the standards of initial product seed users. For example, the early users of Zhihu, which we are all familiar with, were all friends in the technology circle who were invited by the founder through emails.

When MeiLa, the leading beauty community, was first established, in order to invite some beauty experts, in addition to the regular online invitations, some important people were not invited, so the CEO flew over directly to invite them in person, and eventually invited a group of high-quality initial users.

The first batch of driver users in the early days of Didi were helped by the staff to install the system one by one. The drivers themselves had low educational levels and were not very receptive to new things. They had never seen such a precedent before, so they could only use this method to start with. Although it seemed like a stupid method, it was the most effective one at the time.

Invite with sincerity and care with true heart

After we find the target users, we can send them invitations. It can be a public soft article or a one-on-one private message invitation.

Since the product is not well-known at the beginning and cannot provide users with visible benefits immediately, it is even more important to do the following when inviting people:

• Respect, sincerity, but not servility
• Highlight the differentiated benefits of using the product
• Let users feel lucky to be chosen
• Bonus benefits for joining early

The details of the invitation should also reflect sincerity. Even if it is a group message, use a one-on-one tone, such as changes in the person's name:

Mass message: "Hello everyone, this is a gift from the company"
↓

1 to 1: "Hello, this is a gift I prepared specifically for you."

It is not enough to just invite seed users. We need to treat them with care and respond to their demands in a timely manner. At Zhong Ziqi, all employees, whether CEO, CTO or COO, should participate in the interaction with seed users, put aside their airs and chat with them, respect their opinions, respond to their demands in a timely manner, quickly iterate products that satisfy them, and keep them with sincerity.

When I was involved in the entrepreneurial product Zhong Ziqi, in addition to actively interacting in the group, I would also invite seed users to the office and sit around several founders and directors. I prepared fruit snacks and treated the users like treasures. I would listen to them talk about the scenarios, troubles, difficulties, and expectations of using the product, and answer all kinds of questions for them. I exchanged sincerity for sincerity and obtained a group of very high-quality seed users.

Sources of seed users for some well-known products

The sources of seed users for these products vary and can be used as a reference.

Out-of-town attendees who cannot stay in hotels on Airbnb

Jumeiyoupin founder's post on Renren about BB cream

Popular student union activities on campus , register to grab tickets

Didi Taxi (driver side) Taxi driver in the suburbs of Beijing

Uber China (passenger side) Foreigners in Sanlitun

Course grid goes deep into campus for ground promotion

Facebook Harvard students
Hot mom helps distribute flyers for a maternal and child health care hospital in Shenzhen

Search for beauty products on Meila APPSTORE

Fashion community P1 Fashionistas in Sanlitun

Douban Programmer Pascal Community

Dropbox users who watched the introduction video and made an appointment
Zhihu founder’s friends in the tech circle

Still can’t find the seed user?

If you still can't find seed users, or if seed users come and quickly leave, you should think carefully about whether you don't understand your users well enough? Is the demand itself a false demand?

If the segmentation is very detailed, it is impossible to attract users with clear products. Even if you have more promotional resources and channels, how many users can you attract?