The detonation formula makes your APP game the next "explosive"

In the mobile Internet field in 2014, "Moman Camera" is a product worthy of attention. Although it does not have the support of major resources such as Tencent, Baidu or Alibaba, this application has developed rapidly in the Chinese market since its launch, with daily downloads exceeding 800,000 times and a peak of 3 million times in one day. Similar results were achieved with another lightweight application, Faceu: the product was launched in April 2014; a wave of user downloads swept through in May; one day in June, the number of users who activated the downloads reached 5 million, breaking the record set by "Magic Camera".

"Hot-selling" products represented by these two mobile Internet applications have been growing rapidly since the moment they entered the social network. This momentum has also created a unique phenomenon. Huang Guangming, the founder of "Moman Camera", mentioned that when the product first became known, about 30 entrepreneurial teams in the industry appeared to copy it, but three months later, all the competitors disappeared, leaving Moman Camera alone. The "80/20 rule" that we are all familiar with seems to be invalid here. A popular app often achieves huge success within a few days to weeks, occupying at least 90% of the market share in its niche, with no rivals able to compete. In other words, high-quality products or services are driving their own "tipping point" to arrive quickly.

1. Every product can be a hit

Regardless of whether one has the resources, experience, and funding, every product or service can have the ability to quickly explode, and this is the bonus provided by social networks.

On the surface, there are only a handful of mobile Internet products that can quickly become popular. Many people believe that this is the combined result of platform resources, R&D technology, product strength and external conditions. But among the "explosive" products we are familiar with, some come from entrepreneurial teams that have persisted for many years, and some come from traditional industries or grassroots individuals. These cases show that regardless of whether or not one has the resources, experience, and funding, every product or service can have the ability to quickly explode, which is a bonus provided by social networks. In fact, the huge impact of social networks on products and development teams can be divided into the following stages.

1. Even distribution

Social networks first changed the way people obtain information. The relationship chain, which is intentionally or unintentionally ignored by people, plays a huge role in this: the information people obtain largely comes from the "sharing" of friends or followers. This information is frequent and subtle, and is as endless as dust. At this stage, building a sharing system is the basis for product explosion.

2. Rapid growth and reaching users

At this stage, the supply of information is so abundant that there is massive waste. People have become accustomed to "discarding" applications, services or information, and are more reluctant to invest their time and attention. In this case, "cheap entertainment" that takes up the least time, economic and action costs of users has become the most direct profit area.

3. Change the application development model

In the era of social networks, users have less patience and are easily bored with the old and fascinated by the new. Mobile application products often face a life cycle of rapid birth and death - within 3 to 5 days, a "hot product" completes the entire process from explosion to demise, and this situation is not uncommon. Correspondingly, the application development model is also changing: dozens of teams can develop the same type of application without prior agreement, test it on different groups of people, and quickly iterate and upgrade by learning from each other.

2. Detonation is often zero cost

"Hot products" often have two things in common: low user cost and high motivation to share.

On the mobile Internet, products with sharing power will drive the rapid spread of information within the user's relationship chain. In applications and services that are “explosive from the start”, most users play an important role, and every time they share, they can bring in more new users. The proportion of converted users of "hot products" is higher, which also means that the loss of information flow, sharing and conversion is very low. Therefore, acquiring new users is almost cost-free for developers.

1. The lower the cost, the more people like to use it

To achieve the effect of "detonating from the starting point", the developer's first task is to reduce the user's understanding cost, that is, to reduce the time and steps users spend on participating in an application, activity, or service. In addition, the user's consumption cost also needs to be considered, that is, whether the user can use a product or participate in an activity smoothly and simply. The ease of use of a product is usually one of the most important factors that entrepreneurs and product managers pay attention to.

When sharing the practices of Moman Camera, Huang Guangming said: "Keep everything simple and easy to use." This is in line with the "2-second rule" proposed by mobile Internet practitioners: if an application cannot make users understand what it is and how to operate it within 2 seconds, it will be abandoned. In fact, if users spend one more second on a certain link, the user churn rate at that link will increase by 8% to 10%.

Both the understanding cost and the consumption cost are closely related to the social environment. In the PC era, users could spend tens of minutes or even hours on the Internet, but in the mobile Internet era, the time people spend opening and closing an app may be as short as a few minutes. The more easy-to-understand an application is, the easier it is to stand out from the overwhelming number of similar applications and become popular quickly. For developers, they should follow this principle to grasp every contact point between the product and the user and design the usage process to be simple and easy to operate.

2. User benefits drive sharing

The acquisition of the entire social dividend depends to a large extent on the active sharing of users.

Where does the motivation for users to share come from? When people use an app, a service, or participate in an activity, they consciously or unconsciously hope to gain some kind of benefit: it can be the value brought to themselves and others, or the spiritual or material rewards for helping others. Another major driving force behind sharing is "entertainment", such as the pleasure brought by the product, and the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when completing a task.

Cost and benefit are the yardsticks for measuring a product or service on the Internet. As long as the operation is simple and easy enough (cost), and users feel happy and want more after using it (benefit), a product is more likely to achieve explosive growth.

3. “Detonation Law”

"Hot products" often have many things in common, and they also reveal to us the most direct law of detonation.

1. The shorter the use time, the easier it is to detonate

A "hot-selling" product is often not the first application developed by a team, but rather the result of a breakthrough achieved by the team after many attempts. Compared with the previously unknown old products, the gameplay of these products is simpler and is more closely related to user behavior on social networks. In the view of Qin Chuan, the developer of "Surround the Nervous Cat", social networks have always lacked lightweight products that can allow users to quickly gain a pleasant experience. Most mobile gaming products are somewhat "heavy" and take a long time to play. The sudden popularity of “Surround the Nervous Cat” has brought the feature of “short time” to the extreme.

2. The more innovative the gameplay, the faster the explosion

The direct result of the explosion is the rapid acquisition of a large number of users. At the same time, it will also cause information sharing among friends to quickly become homogenized and desertified. Therefore, it has become worthless to completely copy "explosive products" and other successful products, and you need to come up with original new ways of playing.

3. The more engaged users are, the greater the impact

Today's users are accustomed to a lot of information waste. Information or applications that "flood" the Moments are likely to be easily ignored. However, users' spontaneous involvement will change this situation. By spontaneously forming communities, actively providing information, sharing experiences, or helping others solve problems, information dissemination can radiate from strong relationships to more weak relationships and strangers.

4. The lower the adhesion, the faster the decay rate

For entertainment apps with low stickiness, users abandon them as quickly as they fall in love with the product. In the "starting point is detonation" curve, we have seen a steep downward curve without exception.

4. Detonation = User Benefit × Entertainability × Hotspot Coefficient × Trust between Users and Enterprises/Participation Cost

Although we cannot accurately predict who will be the next "hit product", we can extract such a "explosive formula".

● User benefits refer to the service quality, information, skills and pleasant experience that users can obtain, as well as the sense of existence and identity they gain. When meaningless inspirational quotes and quotations are rampant, Luo Zhenyu's Luoji Thinking can bring greater benefits to users by providing valuable high-quality information and ideas.

● Entertainment refers more to “cheap entertainment”, which means getting the fastest pleasure with the least investment. From the "Guess which celebrity I resemble" that was popular on the early Weibo platform to "Jerking off" and "Surround the Crazy Cat", after experiencing and showing off, users will look for the next product that brings them pleasure.

● The hotspot coefficient is included in the formula as a key index because hot events can add a lot of points to the explosion of products or phenomena.

● Participation cost refers to the time a user invests in a service, information or application. A product that cannot provide quick and direct responses and requires multiple steps and repeated operations is doomed to be abandoned by users - after all, preventing users from getting pleasure in the shortest time (cheapest way) is no longer appropriate in this era.

It can be seen that the popularity of a product can itself become a hot event and drive the next wave of craze. If the team can combine user benefits with hot events and the entertainment attributes of the product, the explosive index in social networks will be even more amazing - the "Ice Bucket Challenge" is the best example. No matter from which angle you observe it, the essence of social dividends is to promote the value return of products. That is, the better the product and experience, the greater the motivation for users to recommend and share it. In this atmosphere, companies are actually managing their own fans and continuously accumulating users' trust. Therefore, the level of trust between users and companies has also become a very critical index.