What should you do when your user growth stagnates?

All product teams, without exception, worry about one thing - " user growth ". Many of these products have successfully captured the market's attention since their launch. However, their final fates vary greatly: some products show sustained and stable growth in the market environment; some products only show sharp and high growth in the short term; and more products lose their development direction and ultimately end in failure.

I noticed that almost every entrepreneur often falls into confusion during this process: Why can’t product improvement and research and development be like “law enforcers sweeping away gangsters” and directly locate the “points” where product problems occur? Having this "point" can directly clear the obstacles for product growth.

To do this, they turn to various growth strategies to try to optimize their marketing funnel. For example, many entrepreneurs are very keen on "pre-entrepreneurship advertising", even if they have not yet figured out what the product is or who the target audience of the product is. This can certainly lead to explosive growth in the short term, but it confuses your potential customers and misses the core value of your product.

Blindly trying various product growth strategies is like throwing spaghetti at a wall. Mismatched audiences will lead to all kinds of useless efforts. Before the product appears, entrepreneurs should re-examine your target user group, evaluate your product and goals, and determine the user's purchasing process. Below I will introduce some product growth techniques to help you uncover how to achieve product growth.

Draw your "key user behavior map"

When entrepreneurs start designing products, they should plan the user experience framework and user behavior map in advance. If entrepreneurs don’t think about how to get users to use the product and what the value of the product is to users, then the product will most likely fail.

If you want to complete the "key user behavior map" of the product, you should focus on one user case. This case has clear goals and takes into account various factors that influence users' decisions.

For example, Pinterest’s product goal is to help users find creative pictures that suit their style. A typical key user behavior map should start by browsing a large number of directories of different styles on the website, and then find pictures that match the user's own style. This process allows users to plan and create their favorite fashion albums, set their own style layouts, and make the user's purchasing process seamless and smooth - whether users can directly click on the picture to contact the picture seller and finally complete the purchase.

Obviously, the most perfect key user behavior map is that all user behaviors are completed on one platform. Pinterest has continued to grow over the years and has become a large business.

Figure 1 Pinterest guides users to complete purchases through browsing, screening, planning and self-building

In short, entrepreneurs must draw a clear map of key user behavior and figure out how the product will guide users through the entire process step by step.

Measure your “key user behaviors”

All successful entrepreneurs know that there should be a set of core indicators to test whether the key user paths are scientific, and they know how to use the corresponding tools to make this testing work visual. When it comes to actually getting down to business, it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in vanity metrics — monthly active users, aggregate metrics — where they hope to measure user behavior that’s occurring, such as retention or churn.

Figure 2 Some startups choose vanity metrics to measure business growth (Image source)

Instead, businesses should choose a few actionable key metrics to measure every step of your user behavior. I think we should start with two key indicators:

1. User acquisition metrics. At the top of the funnel, user acquisition metrics can measure how many users sign up and whether those users take further action.
2. User engagement metrics. After the user enters the funnel, until the user completes the entire product purchase process, a series of user participation indicators can measure the user's participation in this process.

The combination of the two indicators measures the activity level of a product from new users to old users. Based on these two indicators, you can gradually add more indicators to measure and verify your products and user purchasing process.

In short, the more targeted an indicator is for your user behavior analysis , the better it can guide you to make scientific decisions.

Use powerful “promotion levers ” to stimulate user adoption

Many startups choose the first key metric. That’s right, the first key indicator is extremely important for the company’s current entrepreneurial stage. This indicator is above all else at the current stage of the company’s development and is the number that requires the entire company’s full attention. However, this indicator does not really play a role in the company's specific project promotion and work processes. In fact, the first key indicator can only work if you choose and determine the right "Product Levers" to push your users towards the planned purchase process.

What are “Product Levers”? That is, in the project your team is working on, specific things that are flexible, measurable, and actionable for the first key indicator. For example, at one Initial Capital portfolio company I worked at, the team closely monitored its first key metric, L7 Engagement, which was the number of days users were active on the product over the previous seven days. Under this macro indicator system, they set the "product lever" to understand what specific behaviors each user has on the product. To this end, they are constantly narrowing the scope of measurement, such as focusing research on which functions users actually use, such as investment advice, product promotions, and push contextual follow-up notifications, and cutting out unnecessary functions based on this. After several “experiments,” they found that their first key metric, L7 Engagement, had improved significantly. After that, the next step is to continue to develop more "Product Levers" to serve the first key indicator.

Blindly adding product features will confuse customers

Another common mistake startups make is to continually add features to their products in order to determine which features or characteristics are more aligned with growth. This trial-and-error approach is difficult to measure scientifically and does not lead to scalable growth for the product.

For example, at a portfolio company I worked at, the company developed a large number of features for its product to meet user needs. They paid attention to a lot of indicators for this purpose, however, the "growth" was not satisfactory, declining month by month and eventually stagnating.

After careful review, the company has developed a huge number of product functions to stimulate user application or purchase, like a complex product system composed of a series of "flows". Each of these "flows" contributes a "small amount" to the company's total revenue, so the company has no choice but to continue to enrich the content of the "flow".

However, they themselves can’t figure out which “flow” effectively maintains user retention ? Which “flow” causes user loss ? In the end, the company became like a machine that made a fuss out of nothing, and from time to time it “spitted out” users of unknown origin.

Therefore, companies need to streamline product function research and development, build a systematic process around a core "flow" to encourage user application, so that user conversion rate can gradually increase. When the product becomes simplified, on the one hand, it reduces the user's complex familiarity cycle with the product, and also helps product personnel understand where the user is "stuck" in this process funnel? In which areas should improvements be made?

Reflect on this now: Should your product be simplified? You might as well try to focus your limited energy on the research and development of limited product performance.

Let the product’s “heavy users” show you the way

This seems obvious, but there are many obstacles to achieving it. For start-ups, they should focus on the heavy user behavior of the product, including exploring the reasons behind the heavy user behavior and their purchasing path.

You need to find your heavy users and look back to figure out what behaviors they experienced on the product on the first day, the first week, the first month, or even longer periods of time. After identifying the behavior paths of heavy users at key moments, you can try to understand and guide the application behavior of subsequent new users and ordinary users.

For example, if you learn that heavy users go through four steps in the first week, their activity will be very high in the second week, product personnel can prioritize these four steps and guide new users to apply these four steps in the first week. In this way, when you know the behavior and purchasing process of heavy users, you can try to guide new users to copy this process. Product people also need to measure and monitor how many users follow your guidance in their purchasing process. In addition, of course, we should also understand the user engagement of each link as a whole.

To sum up, the "Key User Behavior Map" is just a beginning. It is an early guide for users. Product personnel use it to guide new users on what they should do at each step. At the same time, product personnel must choose the right product means to create sustainable growth. When the above conditions have been put into practice and have achieved good results, they can be expanded to multiple user purchase processes, thereby expanding product applications for existing users and reaching new users more comprehensively.