How did you get your first 1,000 users? Start with the stupid things!
| The story begins with hotmail. In 1996, two engineers wanted to start their own business, but they were afraid that their emails would be seen by their boss, so they created a web-based email system, which was the predecessor of Hotmail. As a result, this product made in spare time immediately received investment, but when it was actually launched on the market, the response was mediocre. At that time, most companies promoted their products by spending a lot of money on large billboards and radio advertising space. Hotmail did not use the usual method, but automatically signed at the end of every email sent by Hotmail: "Dear, you can also use Hotmail's free email account like me." This action, which seems quite common now, was a very innovative viral spread at the time. In the next few days, the number of hotmail users exploded at a rate of 3,000 people per day. The first one million users were accumulated in just 6 months, and the second one million was achieved in the following 5 weeks. How amazing was the growth at that time? One of the stories is that the founder Bhatia sent an email to a friend in India, and three weeks later the Indian market had accumulated 300,000 users. This rapid growth momentum continued, and when it was sold to Microsoft a year and a half later, the number of Hotmail users reached 12 million. Keep in mind that the number of Internet users in the world at that time was only 70 million. From then on, all startups would mention Hotmail when talking about product launches and user growth, hoping to replicate its success and quickly detonate the market with just one function, one tactic, or one method. Everyone thinks that a startup company will either explode rapidly or die in its early stages. However, the failures of all startups are the same, but the success of all startups is not replicable. The advice that Uncle Paul Graham gives to entrepreneurs in the YC incubator the most is - Do things don't scale. In the early stages of a startup, you can't wait for users to come to you. Instead, you have to actively win customers one by one. Startups should start with the “stupid” things. Whether abroad or at home, the methods many successful startups used to acquire users in the early days seem so "stupid". These "stupid" methods are usually only carried out in the initial stage of acquiring seed users. They cannot be promoted on a large scale. They seem slow, laborious, and costly... These things seem "stupid", but they can turn a company from 0 to 1. Without this earliest 0 to 1, there would be no subsequent 1 to 10 and 10 to 100. Airbnb: The pictures taken by the landlord are too ugly, so I rented a camera and went door to door to take pictures In 2007, a design conference was held in San Francisco, and local hotels were fully booked. Two design school graduates who were living in their home suddenly came up with the idea that they could rent inflatable mattresses and provide breakfast to designers who couldn’t find a hotel. This is also the origin of the name Airbnb, breakfast & bed. Within a week, they had three tenants and made several thousand dollars. What if ordinary people’s homes could be turned into hotels? Now you know that Airbnb is worth $10 billion, a very impressive company. But at the time, the idea sounded so stupid. The company was once on the verge of bankruptcy as the founder could not find money. The 2008 presidential election happened to be approaching, so the company designed two AirBnB-branded breakfast cereals with cartoon portraits of presidential candidates printed on them to get through the difficult times. The founder ran from Silicon Valley to New York, slept on the sofas of friends' homes, then knocked on strangers' doors one by one, slept in their living rooms, took photos and uploaded them to his website. It was the presidential election rally at that time, and there were many people who came to New York to vote but couldn't find a hotel to stay in. They also became some of the earliest users of Airbnb. After that, they held many parties to win the hearts of these early users. Such personal contact and communication with the founding team also turned some users into true fans. It was these people who brought the Airbnb concept back to their respective cities after leaving New York. The number of users on the website has gradually expanded from a few blocks in Manhattan to various communities large and small in New York, and then to all parts of the world. In 2009, Airbnb's weekly revenue was only US$200, and the company's development encountered a bottleneck. The founder said, "I found a pattern. These 40 rooms listed are all very similar and have no good pictures. The landlords just took pictures casually or from the same angle. Tenants will not be interested in these houses that look the same." They tried to tell landlords the importance of beautiful photos, and they also thought about writing a manual of photography tips to improve the landlords' photography skills, but it didn't work. Finally, they used the dumbest method - they rented an expensive camera, contacted the landlords on the website one by one, went to their homes to take pictures of their rooms, and then helped them replace the old photos with beautiful pictures. A week later, the site's revenue increased from $200 per week to $400 per week, the largest increase in revenue the company had experienced in eight months. Strikingly: Meet super fans for coffee and write your own stories for each media outlet Strikingly started out by focusing on finding a hundred “super fans” and making a product they would truly love. The method of screening super fans is very simple, just ask users, if Strikingly's products no longer exist tomorrow, how would they feel? If a person answers that their life would be greatly affected and they would be willing to help keep the site going, that person is a super fan. At the beginning, the team found student organizations and startups in all the schools around the company and asked them to use Strikingly to build a website. Several founders added the first 2,000 users to Facebook and chatted with them on Facebook every day. I also invited them out for coffee one by one and we became friends in life. These super users not only provide a lot of valuable suggestions for the product, but also actively introduce the product to other people. One day, Strikingly saw a user on Facebook complaining angrily about problems with his page. He sent emails but no one responded, so he demanded compensation from the team. Just as the team was trying to find the problem and thinking about how to appease the users. A "super fan" volunteered to respond to the user's complaint, telling him that Strikingly's customer service was very prompt and that the user must have been dealing with an urgent issue at the time, so he came to help the team solve the problem. The two people communicated back and forth on the web page for more than ten minutes until the team joined the discussion and solved the problem together. Finally, the angry user expressed that he was very touched by such an enthusiastic group. Everyone became friends and he became a super fan. When Strikingly had exhausted all its friends and friends of friends, the site's growth reached a bottleneck. At this time, the team found some relatively vertical and small technology media and entrepreneurial media to tell their story. These media were also more willing to publish product-related information and introductions. After getting the first round of PR, the team turned their attention to mainstream mass media. But the mass media are generally reluctant to report on such an early product. The team did not give up and used manual methods such as Google search, Google API and MTurk to find a lot of media contact information. Contact each media outlet one by one, write very personalized emails to each one, and tell your own story. Finally, the New York Times was willing to report their story. After being reported by the New York Times, it became much easier to contact other media outlets. In this way, they appeared in more than 50 mainstream media and gained the first 20,000 users. Quora: Answer questions yourself when no user answers them The question-and-answer community Quora has become a major platform for people to obtain information on the Internet, and it contains many high-level answers. However, in its early days, it faced the chicken and egg problem that all platform-based websites encounter - there are users only when there is content, and there is content only when there are users. What Facebook used to do was to allow new users to quickly follow ten people in a short period of time. The content generated by these ten people was enough to attract a new user to open the site again. As the former CTO of Facebook, Quora's founder D'Angelo was initially worried that no one was asking or answering questions on his website, and these questions had to be of high quality. What they finally did was that the founders and earliest employees asked questions themselves and answered them themselves. With the existence of these earliest high-quality questions and answers, many users stayed. They then continued to invite some test users to ask high-quality questions and give high-quality answers. Only when the content of the website was rich enough and the community was popular enough did they open the entire website, allowing all users to start asking questions, producing content, and maintaining and modifying content. Wufoo: Online competition prizes include a giant axe and handwritten cards for every user From the beginning, Wufoo was determined not to be just another online form company, but a company that could grow and succeed with its users. Wufoo hopes to be a loving company and create products that users love. Wofoo initially organized a programming competition to allow users to participate in the creation of their APP in order to create some momentum in marketing. When other Internet companies hold online competitions, they usually give out prizes that can be easily purchased, such as iPhones and XBoxes. In order to show the geek spirit of itself and its users, Wufoo found an anime peripheral company to customize a giant axe (really big) as a prize. This axe ignited the passion of all geeks. Originally, Wofoo just wanted to use this competition to increase user participation, but they didn't expect everyone's enthusiasm to be so high that it attracted many programming experts. As a result, they successfully got users to help them write iOS and Android versions of the APP. Wufoo also regularly writes thank-you cards to each user by hand. Every Friday, the entire team sits down together and writes cards one by one. The card is simple and has no special design, but this personalized handwritten touch makes the user particularly touched. And the team members also got closer during the time of writing cards. Users are no longer just cold "users" behind the screen, but living "people". They always believe that the 100 millionth user should be treated like the first user, so that every user can fall in love with their product. This has become the magic weapon for their start-up and ultimate success. Twitter: Go live at the show As one of the major Internet media platforms today, Twitter has recognized from the beginning that the media can greatly promote its development. When a company is in its early stages, any media exposure is an important opportunity for growth. One of Twitter's earliest events was the SXSW conference held annually in Austin, Texas. Co-founder Evan Williams is also a geek. He has attended exhibitions and everyone would wait in the corridor bored until they were ready to enter the venue. So he created some special features for this conference so that everyone attending the conference can go online and follow some "Twitter ambassadors" on Twitter to get news and information about the conference. They rented a large plasma screen directly from the conference organizing committee and placed it in the hallways of the conference to broadcast live all the posts sent by participants on site. Later, the screens in the venue were not enough, so they brought in their own TVs to complete the live broadcast. Another attempt was to work with local telecom providers to create a unique channel for the conference (there was no # keyword at the time), allowing users to text "join swsx" to a designated 40404 number. In this way, once someone successfully sends a text message, his message will be displayed directly on the big screen. In this era when smartphones and mobile networks were not yet popular, Twitter used the simplest method to enable users to interact with the website. Hundreds of people in the venue began using Twitter to comment on all the products in the exhibition, and everyone participating in the exhibition also posted news about their own products on Twitter. Speakers at the conference repeatedly mentioned the site, and many well-known technology bloggers who attended the conference also promoted it online. This conference gave Twitter a lot of media exposure, which also led to its first traffic peak, with the number of tweets increasing rapidly from 20,000 per day to 60,000 per day. Jumei: A grown man registered a vest to pretend to be a senior BB cream expert Before founding Jumei, the three co-founders were working on another game advertising project. After about a year, the angel investment money was almost used up, and the game project did not make any progress. The three men were looking for new opportunities when they were in a slump. At that time, group buying was beginning to become popular, so they slapped their thighs and decided to get into group buying of cosmetics. After quickly designing the logo and building the website in two days, they discovered that the company no longer had the money to hire influencers to promote the company, or even to hire people to do marketing activities. So these guys, who were originally working on Internet products, started to study the experience of using cosmetics. Co-founder Dai Yusen registered an alias on Renren.com, pretending to be a senior expert who had used BB cream for several years. He wrote a post telling everyone what BB cream is, how many types there are, what people think of these products, and so on. This article went viral. Tens of thousands of people shared it and hundreds of thousands of people read it. At the end of the article there was a purchase link from Jumei, and this post brought them their first few hundred thousand in sales. There were also many cosmetics B2C websites at that time. Their competitors have more experience with cosmetics and more supplier resources. Therefore, Jumei needs to recommend only one product every day so that all customers can focus on that one product, improve conversion rate, increase purchase volume of a single product, reduce costs and increase profits. They found that most cosmetics websites simply grabbed a product picture from the brand's official website, and the pictures were often unclear and untrue. But women are visual animals, and the appearance of something greatly affects their desire to buy. So they set aside a separate workstation in the office, set up white partitions, bought a camera, fixed the position, and photographed all the cosmetics in this small "studio". They spread out product photos in large size on the website and add detailed, colloquial product descriptions, which really makes it seem like they are recommending a good product to a friend. So even if you only sell one product every day, the conversion rate is very high. Beast Party: Listen to every story patiently and make a different bouquet for each story At the beginning, The Beast Flower Shop only sold its products through Weibo. It had no website and no physical store. There are only two prices, a small bouquet is 150 yuan per bouquet, and a medium bouquet is 300 yuan per bouquet. In order to reduce inventory and lower costs, The Beast Flower Shop does not have ready-made bouquets, nor does it have a wide variety of flower choices. Customers can choose from seasonal flowers after making a reservation. Since the choices are limited and the bouquets cannot be selected in person, The Beast offers its customers tailor-made services - when ordering flowers, you can simply tell them whether you want something gentle, cool, or cute. Fauvism’s disadvantages are also its advantages. She patiently listens to every customer's detailed requests and makes different bouquets for each of them. The owner of The Beast also started to tell the flower shop's stories about life on Weibo. "The customer said: 'She is a few years older than me. When we met, she already had a boyfriend who was about to get married. We didn't even flirt with each other. But I fell in love uncontrollably. Even if it was impossible, I wanted to try regardless of the pain. I heard that she had decorated her wedding room, so I hurriedly proposed to her while sitting on the broken bus after get off work. But she said she was afraid that she would not be able to live well after the relationship...' The plump flowers are like the mature girl that the innocent boy looks up to. She can't say I do, she can only say sorry." "A customer ordered a succulent bonsai as a gift for a man born in the year of the ox, and requested that there be a cow inside. The florist asked the purchasing department to help find... This morning the florist called me in a hurry: 'I received the cow, but why is it a dairy cow?!' " "The customer requested that, in order to commemorate a relationship with little hope, he should buy flowers but not take them away. He should store them in the store and let them wither and rot naturally. He could send him photos after a year." " The customer said: 'She is going to be transferred. We have always been ordinary colleagues. Although she always complains about not finding a good man, I don't have the courage to even ask her to have lunch alone (I am a little shorter than her). I hope to have flowers that can be kept for a long time and send them to her on her first day at work in her new company. Can she guess it's me?' ... All the flowers are made into vase flowers with preserved flowers. We will sign the card for you? The flower language of reed is: love with self-esteem and inferiority complex." The various stories told by customers resulted in each Weibo post being forwarded hundreds or thousands of times. The Beast also has its own website and now has 6 physical stores. As The Beast said on its website, “Thanks to those people with stories, The Beast has become a warm and loving little world.” Campus Network: A bus will take students to the train station every day The co-founders and early employees of Xiaonei.com were all engineering majors who were good at product design and coding, so they focused on product research in the early days. At that time, Xiaonei.com wanted to be a social networking site for real relationships rather than a social networking site for strangers, so it hoped that seed users would fill in detailed and real information. They need a tipping point. Wang Xing and Wang Huiwen both graduated from the Department of Electronics at Tsinghua University. They thought of a pain point they had when they were in school. The Department of Electronics holds a Student Festival every year. It is a large department with thousands of people, but the auditorium can only accommodate a few hundred people, so tickets for the Student Festival are always hard to come by. Usually, six people in a dormitory can only get two tickets. We contacted the Student Union of the Department of Electronics on campus and offered them sponsorship, buying 100 tickets for only 1,000 yuan. Then use these tickets to participate in the lottery on the campus website. Taking advantage of the Electronics Department Student Festival ticket draw, they required all registered students to upload their real headshots and fill in their email address, name, and major. In this way, they got their first batch of 800 seed users. They started meeting with investors to discuss financing, and the investors asked them how they did promotion. They didn't have any ideas, so they answered that the students were about to have winter vacation and they were planning to organize an activity. One of their own early employees often rented a bus to organize hiking with friends. So they thought, why not rent a bus to take students from school to the train station. Because Beijing's public transportation at that time was not as good as it is now and there were not so many subways, many students had to go to the train station in the middle of the night and wait until three or four in the morning to catch the train. So the campus network launched an activity, asking students to fill in their real information, including their school, name, major, and which train station and train they were going to take. As long as 50 people can gather at the same place and at the same time, the campus network will provide a free car to take everyone to the train station. In order to be able to take the bus to the train station, the students took the initiative to promote the campus network and attract people to register on the website. The rental cost of a bus was 500 yuan a day, and the campus network spent a total of 14,000 yuan to attract 8,000 new users. Moreover, this activity of taking the bus to the station is only available at Tsinghua University, Peking University and Renmin University, so the early registered users were all students from these schools. With the halo of a prestigious school, students from other schools also began to register on this website. Course Grid: Buy course information on Taobao, 100 people go to hundreds of schools to post posters Li Tianfang returned from Silicon Valley to start a business. At the time he was working on a calendar project. But he found that many college students were using activity calendars, so they spent a week making a simple course schedule where students could put their speeches and club activities. At first this was just a side project, but the user growth of this product exceeded their expectations and far exceeded their main product, Calendar. They realized that this might be a larger vertical demand, so they put more energy into it. At the beginning, they had no course data, so they hired temporary workers to manually add course information for each school and major. Later they found an Excel file with school course information on Taobao, and they could buy course information for many schools for only 10 yuan. The campus is a very closed place. If no one uses a website, then really no one uses it. It is difficult to go from 0 to 50 users, but it is easier to go from 50 to 500 to 5,000 users. At that time, there were only a few people in the company, so they went to Peking University to distribute posters and flyers themselves, and gradually figured out when was the most effective time of the day to put up posters. You can also go into campus and communicate with students. Later they recruited a student representative to intern in each school, called campus ambassadors. They provided the student representative with some small items such as T-shirts, pillows, small cards, card holders, and notebooks, and used these small items for activities. Li Tianfang said, "Every time I talk to friends in Silicon Valley about CourseGrid's ambassador system and marketing strategy, they are always surprised and skeptical: 'You have 1,000 campus ambassadors!' 'Go to hundreds of schools to post posters?!' 'That sounds like a headache, can't we use technology to automate or rely on UGC?' Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like to use technology to solve problems and don't like to do offline operations. However, if CourseGrid hadn't done these heavy and slow offline operations in the early stage, it would not have been possible to bring in the first 50 users in each school." Yuanmai Mountain: Holding food tasting sessions in office buildings around each store Yuanmai Mountain waited a full year and two months before opening its first store, but knew it had succeeded within the first hour of opening. The size of the bread sold at Yuanmai Mountain is five to ten times that of other bakeries. This is not simply because the dough is made bigger, but a new category of bread - soft European bread. The appearance is as rough and simple as European bread, but the inside is soft, chewy and natural. Before opening the store, they were worried that customers would not be able to accept such large soft European bread. So before opening the store, they checked every company in every office building around the store and held free tasting sessions in each company. Many customers were already looking forward to the store before it even opened. The founding team spent the three months before the store opened, waiting for the store to open, and they were all bored. The founder said that as long as there is an event where people get together, whether it is 20 or 200 people, we will hold a food tasting! So they go to any food events, Taiwan-related events, and food book launches to give out free bread. Although everyone who has eaten it says the bread is good, thinking it is good and being willing to pay for it are two different things. It was not until the day the first store opened that a long line formed in the store in the first hour. The founder finally breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the business was accomplished. Two months after opening at Shangdu SOHO, it ranked first among the 100,000 restaurants in Beijing and first in the dessert category on Dianping.com. Yuanmai Mountain is very confident that anyone who has tasted its bread once will want to eat it a second time, so it provides free tastings in the store. But the store manager was not very happy about the tasting because if any bread was wasted, it would cause a drop in his sales. In order to provide large and rich bread tastings in the store and to ensure that customers will not be looked down upon by the store manager and staff, Yuanmai Mountain has set a KPI for tastings in each store. 2% of each store’s weekly revenue is the KPI for tastings for the following week. Many customers even complained that the samples could be cut less big and why they were so generous, as they were already full after eating a few samples in the store. There are even some customers who pour themselves a glass of lemonade, take a few pieces of sample bread and sit at the wooden table to eat it for free, and then leave after eating, and no one will chase them away. Soft European bread is relatively large in size, and most Chinese people do not have bread boards and bread knives for eating such large breads at home. Yuanmai Mountain provides bread cutting services to every customer, allowing customers to experience high-quality Taiwanese service. They added waiters who specialize in cutting bread, giving customers the option of having their bread cut into two to five pieces. In addition, they never tire of reminding customers how to store bread, and have made tip cards telling customers not to put bread in the refrigerator, where it is most likely to age, but to put it in the freezer, then take it out to thaw at room temperature or heat it in the oven or microwave. It is precisely because these stupid methods exceeded customers' expectations that the monthly turnover of the two stores in Zhongguancun and Shangdu SOHO exceeded one million, which is three or four times the average turnover of bakery shops. |
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