Campus mobile Internet: a tough piece of fat to swallow
| In the minds of entrepreneurs in the mobile Internet vertical field, the university market has always been a piece of fat meat that they have been eyeing. However, due to the closed nature and particularity of university communities, both large platforms and small companies will still find this piece of "fat meat" difficult to chew in actual operations and promotions. In my country, there are currently about 20 million college students of all types. Their annual expenses, including education, entertainment, and making friends, average out to 4,000 yuan per person per year, which means there is a college market of more than 80 billion yuan. In addition, college students spend relatively more time using smartphones, and the student period is a period when a person's product usage habits are formed. Therefore, in the minds of entrepreneurs in the mobile Internet vertical field, the university market has always been a piece of fat meat that they have been eyeing. However, due to the closed nature and particularity of university communities, both large platforms and small companies will still find this piece of "fat meat" difficult to chew in actual operations and promotions. The diverse functional services required by universities are difficult to replicate The needs of college students are rich and diverse, but different universities have different "personalities", management methods and operating environments, making it difficult to provide unified services. Take the example of a Nanjing startup team that is currently focusing on this field. At the beginning, they conducted a pilot operation of the "Hello Southeast University" APP at Southeast University. Since the "check running exercises" (number of times) function provided by the product was a rigid demand of students, 5,000 new users were added to the single page after only 3 days of release. However, not all schools need to check running exercises, and the same function may not be applicable at all in other schools. Let’s talk about the “takeout ordering” service. Some schools have student teams that provide takeout delivery services, while others do not. Some businesses around the campus can provide delivery, while some markets are stable and saturated and do not need takeout. The quality of these food delivery services varies greatly, which makes it difficult to integrate and monitor the services. If you set up your own delivery team, not only will your operating costs increase, but you may also be killed by wealthy and willful tycoons like Ele.me and Meituan Waimai. It is easy to enter a niche field, but it is not easy to build a platform Don’t college students have any common needs? The answer is of course no. There are at least two common types of needs. One is the teaching tools such as "checking class schedules" and "checking grades", and the other is life services related to college students such as "finding a part-time job" and "booking tickets". The former has already begun to show signs, but the latter has no representative products in the industry yet. In terms of promotion, tool-type products can indeed quickly expand their user base when they first enter a campus, but this is hardly the future development trend. In the fiercely competitive mobile Internet industry, if you want to form core competitiveness, you need to build a complete service system behind your products. It is foreseeable that although the overall demand for life services among students is huge, due to the large number of industries involved, it is unrealistic for startups to "eat a big fat man in one bite" and build a platform. Therefore, entering into a certain vertical service field may be a good choice. In response to the current situation of chaotic part-time job market supervision and opaque part-time job information, the original "Hello Dongda" team launched the "Classmate Help" APP, which mainly provides college students with reliable part-time jobs and supporting guarantee services. After trying it out, the author found that all part-time employers are certified businesses and all they offer are direct recruitment positions, fully guaranteeing that students can get first-hand salaries. However, no matter which sub-field you are engaged in, it is just the tip of the iceberg of campus life services and can only serve a small number of students. If entrepreneurs want to become platform products and take over the entire "fat meat" of the university market, they still have a long way to go. Make the product perfect and cooperate with students to operate At present, there are quite a few mobile Internet startup teams focusing on the university market, most of which are student teams, and their products are generally of poor quality. There are also campus e-commerce companies that rely on social platforms such as Weibo and WeChat, and their service objects are also limited to their schools or surrounding schools. Despite their shortcomings, most of these teams do provide benefits to students. Therefore, if startup companies outside the school want to enter in a rough manner, they will face the dilemma of being "out of touch with reality". So do startups still have a chance? If we can leverage our R&D and product advantages, maximize user experience, and make good use of the above-mentioned campus resources, we can still develop strong competitiveness. The fastest way is to find relevant student organizations or key persons in charge for a certain category or function, establish differentiated cooperation models based on their willingness, scale and capabilities, and let student teams or individuals be responsible for their categories. On the one hand, for some students, they are happy to prove their abilities in this way; on the other hand, for companies, it not only reduces the operational burden but also can quickly expand effective users. It is worth noting that finding the right cooperation opportunity requires the right time, place and people. Once a student does something unreliable, users will only complain about the product itself. Emphasis on the relationship with users to create word-of-mouth communication The most important thing for general APP promotion is the ranking in the application market, search engine optimization, etc. However, for the university market, due to its relatively concentrated geographical location, traditional ground promotion will be more accurate and effective. But even so, it may encounter "force majeure" - mainly reflected in the intervention of university administrative power, so offline channels also need to pay attention to methods and approaches. In this regard, the "Classmate Help" team also shared their promotion experience: implanting products by sponsoring campus activities, or recruiting part-time students to go door-to-door and distribute orders, is more cost-effective and risk-controlled than doing ground activities on campus. Word-of-mouth marketing is also a point that is easily overlooked by entrepreneurs. College students have a strong herd effect. Compared with other marketing methods, they trust recommendations from acquaintances or quasi-acquaintances more. Therefore, if an APP product wants to enter this group, the most effective way is to first make friends with potential target users through various social media, let a small number of students use and identify with it first, and then maintain user relationships through online and offline activities, so that they become the source of word-of-mouth communication. Of course, user operation is a meticulous job that requires more than just patience, and sometimes personal charm. Summarize Campus mobile Internet is a piece of fat meat that makes many entrepreneurs drool, but how to swallow it completely is a headache for each entrepreneur. For now, it is better to focus on specific areas rather than going it alone. Since small companies cannot swallow it whole, they might as well sit together and learn how to eat it up. However, entrepreneurs need to note that the day they get the fat meat may be the day when giants emerge from behind the scenes. |
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