The following content is compiled from the live sharing between Tian Xingzhi, founder of the third-term alumni "Pengpeng", and alumni at the April founder gathering of Microsoft Ventures Accelerator.
"Pengpeng" is a gamified social product that was officially released in May 2014 and now has 30 million users. We have been working on applications that are a high degree of hybrid of H5 and native, so that we can easily share our applications on WeChat, Weibo, and QQ. This is also our main means of attracting users. One of our H5 applications, "Do You Understand Me?", reached a peak daily traffic of 180 million PV on April 9, becoming the H5 application with the largest daily traffic in the history of WeChat. Last year, everyone had heard of the game "NeuroCat". Its peak number was 100 million per day. Our number was almost twice as high as its number. This is the power of viral transmission of social applications. "Do You Understand Me?" is a game about friendship. Everyone can come up with 6 questions about themselves, and then send these questions to friends in the circle of friends to test how well they know you. It is a psychological game without cool pictures or animations.All 2C companies face two challenges: one is cold start; the other is user stickiness and activity. No matter how big a founder you are, how awesome your capital flow is, or how great your product is, you all start from scratch. Launching a product is not a matter of spending money, because money cannot buy high-quality users, so it is best to attract users through social relationships. Social networks are a huge source of user dividends. Our cold start was around June 2013. In fact, the explosion of many apps does not happen instantly, but is a process of continuous polishing. At that time, "Do You Understand Me" had just released the first version, and recently it is already the fifth version. The core has always been to measure how well your friends know you, and there have not been many changes, but there have been many optimizations in the UI and interaction details, which determine how far this game can go and how well it can explode. There's no trick here, just a little bit of testing and fine-tuning of a lot of details. From June to August last year, our WeChat authorized users reached 10 million, which brought the first batch of seed users for our App downloads . We first spread the word externally to continuously attract new customers, because spreading a link is much easier than users downloading an App. Therefore, the external H5 traffic is the most important point of cold start. It enabled us to reach the fourth place on the social list in July with zero promotion cost. In Malaysia, we ranked second in the overall ranking, which was also the best result achieved by a Chinese social application overseas. So now we are also moving into Southeast Asia. Good viral promotions are free, with 0 cost and high traffic, but the retention rate can reach 65%. However, when we were the first to launch with Xiaomi and 360, and spent money to buy high-channel users, the retention rate was less than 50%. I can share with you some key principles of viral design.First of all, it must be entertaining. It doesn't necessarily have to be a clickbait title, or just for the sake of eye-catching. For example, if the title is "XX cheats", all the links we send will include everyone's name, rather than simply using a catchy title, because the name combined with the specific person you know will have a very strong emotional overtone. For example, if the founder of an Internet startup company cheats, it sounds commonplace, but if it is Lei Jun who cheats, friends will be surprised. Any sentence, as long as it involves someone familiar or acquainted with you, will be extremely attractive. Second, play with friends, not alone. Now 99% of H5 games on WeChat, including those that allow you to receive red envelopes, can be played with friends, so they can be linked together. Sharing is not an added value, but an inevitable link, and there must be a strong motivation to share. This is why Do You Understand Me can have higher traffic than NeuroCat, because you can play NeuroCat by yourself, but you must play Do You Understand Me with other friends. Third, it allows everyone to visually see other people playing together. My questions have been out for 4 or 5 months, and some friends are still playing them. They said that more than 80 of your friends have already played them. I know this person. You can play his questions by clicking on his avatar. It is a sustainable system, and everyone can choose the time to play according to their own habits. You can play today or tomorrow, and you can discover new things every time. Fourth, there is a term called social closed loop. For many small games, you can just send them to your friends and no feedback is required. But we will notify users. When a friend plays the game, we will notify you through the official account to inform you that someone has played the game, for example, who has successfully deciphered your top secret question and how close you are to him. This is a huge benefit of WeChat public accounts , because everyone wants to know what questions others are answering, which draws you into our game again. At the same time, we will also ask each other in time, your intimacy is 0, are you brothers? Therefore, the most important thing about social games is to arouse topics and discussions. Discussion and social interaction are very important parts of the game, not just playing games. In addition, you must strictly analyze your funnel, send volume, click volume, completion volume, including secondary send volume, before you can find and optimize your segment points. Anything that comes out has countless breakpoints. We have been optimizing the game for a year and there is still a lot of room for optimization. As long as you optimize and track, and your target secondary sending volume is greater than the sending volume, you can explode and sustain it. So we are very confident now that our future games will also be a hit. Many applications such as Faceu suddenly became popular, but no one knows why. After the explosion, the traffic is great, but the key is how to continue to explode in commercialization and continue to explode in different products. Continuous detonation is not magic. In fact, it is based on principles and data. As long as the data optimization is done well, it can be detonated. What should we do next to continue to increase activity? We do all sorts of different activities. Including the qualifiers for the Anime World Cup and various anime character PKs, everyone can vote and discuss, and play. They are all made in H5. The same set of H5 content can be played in WeChat, Weibo, and QQ Space without downloading. Again, sharing a link is 100 times easier than sharing an app. After users install my "Pengpeng", the key point is to increase activity. If I see an application of Pengpeng while using WeChat, Weibo, or QQ Space, I can be pulled back to increase activity. We also created a Friend Star, where we select friends. It’s not a particularly innovative idea, but its H5 format can connect to various social networks. Including the selection of big stars and where to go during the National Day. We held an event during the National Day. You could choose to go to any place and then immediately join a group to chat with people who were going there and people who were already there. The effect was very good. Ten thousand groups were established within three days, and many of them are still active. So we developed more than 40 H5 social applications and activities in December, so that we could have traffic and users. It was hard work, but the result was 30 million users at almost zero cost. After we have these users, we will consider how to expand the promotion. From a win-win perspective, joint social promotion is very effective. Because no matter how big an app is, everyone wants to promote it, so why not do it together and co-brand it. Our first collaboration in January was with Beaver Home, which brought us a surge of 150 million in mid-January. We changed the skin of the "Do You Understand Me?" game and replaced the content with Beaver's brand model and method. When doing a manicure, one hand is occupied and the other hand is usually used to look at the phone. We asked the manicurist to tell the customer to play our game. Moreover, our content is more suitable for women, and the scenes trigger traffic. We also cooperated with " Meilishuo ", and promoted each other on "Meilishuo"'s service account and our service account, reaching tens of millions of pages. Our cooperation with Tianfang’s course grid has just begun, and the results are very good. So it is a win-win situation. In just one week, Beaver Home’s total exposure exceeded 300 million PVs, with zero cost. This is an incredible thing for them, and they didn’t spend a penny. For us, both sides gained users. Dozens of companies have approached us for our subsequent joint promotions, including group buying companies, movies, magazines, online dramas, e-commerce, and mobile apps. In fact, we found that it can be used almost anywhere, and can be combined with our various games so that everyone can play games together. The premise is that the game itself already exists and is not developed specifically for you. It only requires changing the UI, skin and content. And this game has been verified by users, because making a playable game is difficult and requires a lot of debugging. Finally, I would like to say that future promotion should use social networks, which are played between users. In the past, when we did promotion and marketing , we worked directly with brands and stimulated sharing through benefits. This can bring millions of P exposures every day, but it is expensive and requires raffles, etc. Now almost 99% of our social marketing promotions are actually done in this way. But I think the future should be to use social networks. Social networks themselves are played between users. We have seen that inserting audio ads is definitely not acceptable. Users will definitely be disgusted. This includes traditional ads in Moments. We should change our thinking and let users play with each other. It should be driven by pure social fun, with the brand being soft-driven. The key is how to combine the brand's content and the services provided with the scenes and content. We spend a lot of time adjusting the UI, content and copywriting for each collaboration, very carefully, because we know that it is not easy to make something, and it is not easy to collaborate. This can have tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of PV exposures every day, and at zero cost. So I think the future will definitely be designed marketing. Now it is still in the simple and crude way of using clickbait titles to send red envelopes and use money to buy users. There is a lot of room for optimization and innovation, we have just made a start. If you want to try to cooperate with us in the future, please feel free to contact me. Or if you want to try some H5 applications yourself, we can also share some experiences in more detail. Thank you everyone! 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