Didi, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu... Reviewing the growth path of 10 phenomenal products
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Product Life Cycle Before reviewing the product, let’s first clarify the concept of product life cycle: The product life cycle theory was first proposed by Raymond Vernon, a professor at Harvard University. Vernon believed that products have their own lives just like people, and each product will go through a cycle of exploration, growth, maturity, and decline. Different products will have different durations in each stage due to various reasons such as the product itself and operating strategy. So how to keep your product alive and delay its decline is a question every product person needs to think about. This article will focus on analyzing the first three stages of the product life cycle: exploration, growth, and maturity, and discover the key points of different stages from the perspective of product and operations. ▌Product Review Regarding the selection of 10 APPs, the book "The Road to Unicorn" was referenced here. Students who are interested can read the specific content. For each type of product, at each stage of the product life cycle, we will analyze the focus from two dimensions: product and operation. ▌ O2O products O2O, or Online to Offline, is a business model that combines offline services with the Internet. When talking about the earliest O2O in China, we have to mention the Hundred Groups Campaign when group buying websites were popular, and then a series of new O2O products and services such as takeout, car washing, and door-to-door manicure appeared. However, after a wave of O2O closures, there are many things we can learn from the remaining products that have not died. Two products selected here are Baidu Takeout and Didi Chuxing. 1. Baidu Takeaway 1.1 Product perspective during the exploration phase: As a food delivery product, the core business logic is that users place orders through the APP, merchants receive orders through the APP, and after the food is prepared, the delivery team delivers the food to the user to complete the entire business closed loop. Baidu's product team focused on polishing the core functions of the product in the early stages of Baidu Takeout's launch to ensure that users can use the product smoothly to complete their takeout purchases. Operational perspective: The success of a food delivery product depends on two aspects: high-quality merchants on the one hand, and a sufficient number of users on the other. If either of these two aspects is missing, the business will not work. In the early stage, Baidu Takeout attracted a large number of merchants to settle in and users to purchase through merchant subsidies and user subsidies. At the same time, when Baidu Takeout was first launched, it already had two strong competitors, Ele.me and Meituan Takeout , but Baidu Takeout still occupied a large market share. This is because Baidu Takeout has solved the pain point of the delivery team's quality very well. From the beginning, Baidu Takeout has cultivated its own delivery team to ensure fast and timely food delivery. By providing good user experience and perception, Baidu Takeout quickly acquired a large number of users from the other two major competitors. 1.2 Product perspective in the growth stage: At this stage, Baidu Takeout continues to improve its core product functions and related functions surrounding the core functions, with the sole purpose of making it faster and easier for users to order takeout. Operational perspective: O2O product operation is a very expensive thing. At this stage, in addition to red envelope subsidies, Baidu Takeout continues to increase brand exposure through hot events and activity operations, attracting more users and achieving exponential growth in user volume. 1.3 Mature product perspective: After the product entered a period of steady growth, Baidu Takeout began to enrich its product gameplay for takeout based on user demand and competitors' competing products. On the one hand, it continued to enrich its takeout service categories, such as delivery of flowers and medicines, to increase user choices. In addition, based on the difficulty users have in choosing food, a takeaway recommendation function is provided to help users make decisions. Operational perspective: During this stage, Baidu Takeout reduced red envelope subsidies, increased user stickiness by adding membership card functions, and increased event operations in conjunction with hot events and special holidays. 2. Didi Chuxing Didi Chuxing merged with Kuaidi and acquired Uber China to become the leader in domestic shared travel since its birth, and has gradually grown into the world's largest shared travel brand. There are many things worth learning about its product iteration and operation. 2.1 Product perspective during the exploration phase: The emergence of Didi has largely solved the problems of passengers having difficulty hailing a taxi and drivers having difficulty soliciting passengers. Regarding the function of hailing a taxi, Didi's products in the early stages mainly ensured that users could use the APP to hail a taxi and complete payment smoothly. For example, in order to address the registration bug issue in the early stage, Didi directly opened up the service to users without registration, ensuring that users can fully experience the core functions of the product. Operational perspective: Didi's early driver users were taxi drivers. In order to ensure that users could find more cars and drivers willing to pick up their cars, Didi provided high subsidies in the initial stage to allow more drivers to use the Didi APP to accept orders to ensure that passengers had cars to ride. At the same time, in order to demonstrate its advantages over traditional taxis, Didi also used a red envelope subsidy strategy for passengers, allowing more users to use the APP to hail taxis and giving drivers more orders to take. It can be seen that O2O products all have one characteristic, that is, the products target two groups of people. One is the service users, which are traditional users, and the other is the service providers, which are the food delivery merchants and drivers that appear in the above products. Only when there are enough of these two groups can a product survive. 2.2 Product perspective during the growth stage: During the growth stage, the product is gradually used by more users. During this stage, Didi’s product team begins to focus on improving product-related functions, such as enriching payment methods and adding more third-party payment functions, improving product performance, and optimizing driver order acceptance through underlying algorithms. Through a series of product optimization and iteration, we create products with high-quality user experience. Operational perspective: As the product gained market share in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the operations team began to promote it in second- and third-tier cities, providing red envelope subsidies while running events in collaboration with other brands. Expose yourself through subsidies, activities, etc. and increase the number of users. 2.3 Mature product perspective: After polishing the core functions, Didi began to add more services, such as Didi Express, Didi Private Car, Didi Bus, etc., to provide users with more choices by enriching product types and gameplay. At the same time, it also allows more users to start earning money by becoming Didi drivers. Operational perspective: After the product entered a stable period, Didi began to reduce the intensity of red envelope subsidies and provide user incentives through other means, such as sharing Didi with friends to win red envelopes, random red envelope reductions, and giving away other game points to attract users. At the same time, we also continue to accumulate and retain users by cooperating with third-party brands and launching various activities. ▌Content products When it comes to content products, we have to start with the earliest large portals such as Sina and Sohu. From providing news information to providing a wide variety of content today, content products have developed from a single type to the current diversity. Among them, we selected two relatively niche and unique products: Bilibili and Jianshu. 3. Bilibili’s two-dimensional world is a concept that was gradually born with the development of the times. Although Bilibili is not the originator of domestic two-dimensional products, it has grown into the largest gathering place for two-dimensional users in China through its own efforts. 3.1 Exploration product perspective: The founding team of Bilibili invested in Station A (another two-dimensional product), so they are well aware of the pain points of the target user group. Therefore, in terms of products, the Bilibili team created a community that provides content for two-dimensional users, allowing this group of like-minded users to have an online gathering point. Operational perspective: In terms of the method of selecting target user groups, Bilibili has set a precedent. It did not adopt the traditional open registration mechanism or invitation registration mechanism. Instead, it conducted a questionnaire test for users who wished to register. The content of the questionnaire was two-dimensional knowledge, and only users who passed the test could become registered users. This method makes the quality of B station's users higher, because only users who truly understand the two-dimensional culture can successfully register. This has a significant effect on reducing user churn and improving user stickiness at B station. 3.2 Growth stage product perspective: At this stage, the B station APP optimizes and improves the core functions of the product, such as optimizing comments and search functions to improve user experience. Operational perspective: At this stage, Bilibili focuses on operating active users and opinion leaders, and by inviting users to participate in offline operational activities, it increases product exposure and attracts more users to join. 3.3 Mature product perspective: Products begin to enrich their gameplay, adding live broadcast functions and more video functions, giving users more things to play and increasing user retention time. Operational perspective: By organizing activities with third-party brands and conducting activities targeting hot topics and time periods, we can continue to increase users. 4. Jianshu Jianshu can be said to be another Douban among content products. It is a bit high-end and niche, but with the development and operation of the product, it is gradually developing into a popular product, and is getting better and better. 4.1 Product perspective during the exploration phase: Jianshu provides a platform for a group of users who love writing and reading. It improves the writing experience through the Markdown mode and improves user readability through a wide variety of topics. Operational perspective: Jianshu started from the PC side. In the early stage, it mainly directed users from PC to APP. At the same time, it optimized the PC functional items for the mobile side, and further attracted new users through registration and comment red envelope cashback. 4.2 Product perspective in the growth stage: Targeting mobile usage scenarios, continuously optimize and complete the user experience of core functions, and improve related functions around the core reading and writing functions. Operational perspective: At this stage, Jianshu has opened up the management of topics. Users can create and maintain their own topics. At the same time, the official topic editors also want to open up to users, establish corresponding user communities based on topic categories, and create opinion leaders and loyal users around users. 4.3 Mature product perspective: While improving the core functional experience, enrich product gameplay, add short message functions, and move towards the social direction. As a content product, social relationships between users can be cultivated. In the mature operation stage, Jianshu began to think about expanding into new functions and areas. Operational perspective: Through early exploration of user self-operation models for content, continuous creation of user communities, and continuous accumulation of users and content, more users are attracted to participate through new methods such as brand word-of-mouth communication and Jianshu Publishing. ▌Social products Regarding social products, here we have selected the workplace social product Maimai and the more vertical couple social product Xiao Enai. The two products are relatively vertical in direction and create more distinctive social products through verticalization. Many of their models are worth referring to. 5. Maimaimaimai is a social product focusing on workplace gossip and a recruitment application that started out with gossip. Compared with other recruitment products, Maimai is not like other recruitment products where users leave after using it. Instead, it retains users by using gossip as a pain point. 5.1 Product perspective during the exploration phase: Maimai features gossip and creates workplace social networking and recruitment. In the early stage of the product, the main functions are community gossip, workplace status sharing, and job hunting and recruiting, and the core functions of the product are optimized and improved. Operational perspective: For a completely new social product, it will face two problems at the beginning of its launch: the number of users and user activity. Maimai grasps people's gossiping psychology and attracts users by focusing on workplace gossip. On the issue of activity, Maimai also uses gossip, a high-frequency function, to drive another low-frequency function of recruitment, which effectively solves the problem of user activity. 5.2 Product perspective in the growth stage: At this stage, the product further strengthens the social circle attributes around workplace social networking, while continuing to optimize and improve the core function of recruitment. Operational perspective: In conjunction with the recruitment season, Maimai carried out large-scale advertising operations in crowded areas, successfully attracting a large number of users through time and location. 5.3 Mature product perspective: Maimai, which has entered a stable period, has begun to enrich its product service content, providing corporate services, entrepreneurship services, etc. for B-end users, and career development, career consulting and other services for C-end users. Operational perspective: During this stage, Maimai began to experiment with commercialization, exploring the monetization path for workplace social products by operating core users and providing user consultation, guidance and other services. 6. Xiao En'ai Xiao En'ai is a highly vertical social product that focuses on couples. Although this type of product has a strong social closedness, the target user group is relatively vertical and has a higher level of activity. 6.1 Product perspective during the exploration phase: Aiming at the social needs of couples when they are not together, the product focuses on functions that allow couples to interact with each other, such as couple distance and couple anniversaries, and creates functions around the need to increase interaction between couples. Operational perspective: Xiao Enai is also a product that has been switched from PC to APP, so not much was done on user operations in the early stages of the product, and the main focus was on directing traffic from PC to APP. 6.2 Product perspective in the growth stage: During this stage, Xiao Enai mainly focused on optimizing product functions, and at the same time created related functions such as couple games around the core demand of couple interaction. Operational perspective: During this stage, Xiao Enai began to attract new customers on a large scale by organizing online and offline activities , making commemorative couple dolls, and cooperating with third-party brands to continuously increase exposure and attract new customers on a large scale. 6.3 Mature product perspective: At this stage, the product begins to be commercialized and is developed and optimized around the couple mall function. Operational perspective: In terms of operations, operations are carried out on the user community within the product. In addition to products, operations are carried out through third-party cooperation and activities. ▌Starting as tools + social tool products and then extending to the social field, the two products, Changba and NetEase Cloud Music, have completed a good transformation and development. 7. Changba The emergence of Changba has made it possible for KTV to be available anytime and anywhere. Through Changba, users who love karaoke and listening to music can find a new direction. 7.1 Product perspective during the exploration period: Changba was created to allow users to experience the feeling of KTV through the APP, so that users can get the Karaoke experience at a low cost. In the early stages of product launch, Changba focused on polishing the smoothness of the core function of Karaoke by mobilizing the KTV process. Operational perspective: The novelty of the Changba model, the smoothness of its core functions, and the high user experience have enabled it to accumulate a large user base without large-scale operations in the early stages. This shows the importance of a product's core functional experience to the accumulation of user base. 7.2 Product perspective in the growth stage: Focusing on karaoke and listening to music, Changba continues to improve related functions such as private chat and gift functions, adding new experiences for users who listen to and sing music when using the APP. Operational perspective: Relying on large social platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, Changba allows more users to access the product through music sharing and quickly accumulates users through social networks. 7.3 Mature product perspective: At this stage, Changba began to enrich the functions and gameplay of the product, such as adding KTV room mode and MV mode, and improving user activity and stickiness through rich gameplay. Operational perspective: During this stage, Changba began to attempt commercial monetization by cooperating with offline KTVs and third-party brands such as Super Girls to operate Changba, but the path to commercial monetization was not clear. 8. NetEase Cloud Music is a rising star in the music industry. When NetEase Cloud Music was launched, the industry already had a large number of star products such as Kugou and QQ Music, but Cloud Music still stood out. The direction of music social networking played an important role in this. 8.1 Product perspective during the exploration phase: As a music product, any music product must have the function of allowing users to find music. However, Cloud Music has accomplished this by allowing users to find the music they want better. Through user UGC playlists and user personalized recommended playlists, users can find their favorite music. Operational perspective: The initial operation of the product mainly revolves around guiding users to create playlists, accumulating more UGC content for playlists and attracting users through word-of-mouth communication. 8.2 Product perspective in the growth stage: As a unique music product, Cloud Music, which focuses on music social networking, continues to improve and optimize its community functions to bring together like-minded music lovers. Operational perspective: Cloud Music increases its popularity and exposure by organizing operational activities such as the Campus Singer Competition and the Cloud Music War. 8.3 From the perspective of mature products: Regarding the function of recommending playlists, Cloud Music continues to improve the background recommendation algorithm, striving to make the recommendations accurate, while creating a good community atmosphere and increasing user activity. Operational perspective: While maintaining user operations, Cloud Music's commercial monetization path adopts the form of music copyright payment, providing users with paid purchase services for some music content. ▌Social + e-commerce is different from traditional e-commerce platforms. The two products, Xiachufang and Xiaohongshu , combine community with e-commerce, allowing users to go from simply buying things to finding things, buying things, and sharing things. 9. Xiachufang Strictly speaking, Xiachufang is a tool + e-commerce + social product that makes cooking possible through recipe query, recipe sharing, and ingredient purchase. 9.1 Product perspective during the exploration phase: According to the product positioning, Xiachufang consists of three main functions: recipes, community discussion, and market purchase. The product was initially designed around these three core functions. Operational perspective: For community recipe UGC content, Xiachufang accumulates and consolidates content through user operations, and at the same time enriches content categories by enriching recipe types and themes. We conducted commercial exploration on e-commerce functions, but the results were not ideal. 9.2 Product perspective in the growth stage: Due to the unsatisfactory early business exploration, at this stage, Xiachufang mainly iterates and optimizes the functions of tools and social attributes, focusing on meeting users' needs for finding and sharing recipes. Operational perspective: Maintain user social relationships and increase product exposure by sharing recipes on social platforms. 9.3 Mature product perspective: In the previous versions, the two major attribute functions and experiences of tools and social networking were improved. In this stage, the mall operation was restarted, mainly optimizing and iterating the e-commerce shopping functions to improve the user purchasing experience. Operational perspective: Optimize the shopping mall purchase review content to improve user perception and increase user activity and stickiness. 10. Xiaohongshu Xiaohongshu is an overseas shopping sharing + e-commerce product. When it comes to overseas shopping, many users don’t know what to buy and are worried that the products they buy are not good. In response to this pain point, Xiaohongshu helps users choose and purchase products through the UGC content sharing plus e-commerce model. 10.1 Product perspective during the exploration phase: When Xiaohongshu decided to create an overseas purchasing agent community, it did not directly target the world at the beginning. Instead, it chose Hong Kong, a shopping location with a larger consumer base and a larger consumption amount, to verify the product concept. Only after obtaining real demand through early verification did it begin large-scale global product community sharing. This is a typical application of rapid trial and error in the early stages of product launch. Operational perspective: In the early stages of community operations, Xiaohongshu focused on the accumulation of high-quality UGC and the operation of community influencers, allowing new users to discover more high-quality content when using the product. 10.2 Product perspective in the growth stage: The accumulation of the UGC community in the exploration stage provides a good foundation for the transition to e-commerce. During this stage, Xiaohongshu develops and optimizes functions and experiences related to the product purchasing environment to ensure the user's purchasing experience and allow users to complete a closed-loop process of finding and buying products on Xiaohongshu. Operational perspective: Maintain an active community atmosphere, focus on sharing high-quality content, and increase user purchasing enthusiasm through flash sales in the mall. 10.3 Mature product perspective: This stage mainly focuses on optimizing mall functions, such as order inquiries, to ensure that users have a happy shopping experience. Operational perspective: During this stage, Xiaohongshu used anniversary celebrations and hot events to expose its products and engage in word-of-mouth marketing , continuing to attract more users. ▌Three stages of product life cycle Looking at the 10 products reviewed above, in fact, in each stage, although the product categories are different, they all do the same thing. Product perspective during the exploration phase : Based on product positioning, improve the design of the product's core functional processes, iterate and optimize versions around the user experience of the product's core functions, and avoid adding new features frequently. Complex functions and poor experience will only lead to faster user loss. Operational perspective: Products in the exploration phase will face the question of where the first batch of seed users will come from. If your product is transitioning from PC to mobile, then your users can be attracted to the mobile terminal through diversion. If you have a new product, you must pay special attention to the selection of seed users and the first batch of users, because the tone of your initial users determines the future development and direction of the product. Product perspective during the growth stage : At this stage, the product already has a certain number of users. Optimizing the core functions of the product, adding or deleting functions related to the core functions based on user feedback on the product (Apple store reviews, questionnaires, etc.) is the key to operation during the growth stage. Operational perspective: Use large-scale social platforms (WeChat, Weibo, etc.) to spread information among users, increase brand exposure through event operations or advertising operations during hot events or special time points, and quickly increase the number of users. At this stage, attracting new customers and retaining existing customers are key. From the perspective of mature products: As the product enters a stage of steady growth, the core functions of the product should be more fully polished. You can consider enriching the gameplay of the product, adding product functions, and increasing user retention time and user stickiness by enriching the functions. Operational perspective: Event operation and brand communication are still the focus of this stage. Operations for internal product users should focus on controlling product atmosphere and user activity. At the same time, for products with commercial monetization needs, it is most appropriate to consider it after the product enters the mature stage. ▌Thoughts on all products being social If it is too absolute to say that all products are social, then 80% of current Internet products, whether strong or weak social, will have social elements added. Why? Think about this question: who is the target audience of the product? It is the users. If a product is only used when the users want to use it and they don't want to use it when they don't want to use it, then such a product has no appeal and will soon be replaced by new products. Imagine if this product had a social element? Users will stay in the product for a long time because of the social relationships in the product, and the social relationships will stimulate their enthusiasm and activity in using the product. Even if new alternative products appear, users will consider the social cost of switching products, unless your product is rotten to a certain extent. Through the 10 products reviewed above, we can find that, except for social products, other products will add social elements or extend in the social direction when they reach a certain stage of development. Of course, different products require different social elements depending on their positioning. The key lies in how to combine your product with social media. Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow This article was compiled and published by @记小忆(Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! |
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