How to do a good cold start? How to find 1,000 seed users?

Based on my entrepreneurial practice and observations over the past few years, I would like to talk to you today about how we should do a good cold start and how to find our own 1,000 customers first.

01. How to find 1,000 customers first

1. Mobilize the power of all teams first

As long as the products you make are not particularly niche, high-end, or B2B oriented, from a certain perspective, every one of your employees and their network of contacts are your potential customers.

If we assume that one employee contributes 10 customers, and a team of 10 people, that would be 100 customers.

Or one employee provides two groups, and 10 employees complete 20 groups.

Of course, one thing we need to note here is that, in fact, more than 90% of employees have resistance in their hearts at the beginning, and the mentality of new users is the same.

This is an extremely common situation. As a boss, you should not think that your employees have no sense of mission or dedication, because many employees have not started their own business and their values ​​are not yet at that level.

Therefore, when we mobilize our members to contribute the resources around them, we need to provide some policy incentives.

a. It can be a performance reward policy, such as how much money is rewarded based on how many people contribute or how many customers.

b. Provide some special benefits to internal test users, so that the team has a stepping stone for communication.
Here are two examples:

One is that we were previously working on a project related to mothers, and our initial cold start came from the contributions of our employees.

Because there are three mothers in our team, they have their own community owner groups and mothers’ groups. Together with several of our own partners, we immediately have 10 mothers’ groups, which means that we potentially cover two to three thousand mothers’ clients.

In addition, because the employees have a good relationship with the mothers in the community, we asked them to invite a few of them to visit the company, have meals, and communicate. At our first project communication meeting, 20 mothers came.

Through these 20 mothers, we completed more than ten project briefings, among which three or four mothers stood out and became team leaders with monthly income of over ten thousand yuan, laying the foundation for us to achieve monthly sales of one million.

Secondly, in order to encourage everyone to make invitations, our company will bear all the personal expenses incurred by each person during WeChat consultation and face-to-face communication.

For example, inviting others to dinner, or sending red envelopes on WeChat, etc. We think that instead of investing money in an invisible market in the early stage, it is better to let employees do the marketing, which is essentially the same.

2. Through community accumulation + distribution fission

From the perspective of e-commerce, whether you are building a platform or simply selling a consumer product, distribution is an essential part.

Even if you don't plan to make it an open function, you still have to give privileges to some people, especially in the early stages of fission promotion.

After we have found some basic seed users through our employees or other channels, it is best for us to add them to our WeChat and then invite them to the founding member group.

Instead of just sending them a link, a QR code or a single page, we usually need to do three things with these initial customers:

One is free internal testing, where we select some products for them to review and experience for free. This way, they won’t feel like they are being marketed to and will cooperate with us more actively.

The second is an in-depth interview, focusing on the potential user’s usage experience and some of her experiences, to understand her evaluation and needs of the product.

The third is training fission. Through online and offline dialogues and training, some interested and recognized users are selected and encouraged to distribute, as long as one or two of them have distribution capabilities.

It has a very good driving effect on our business, not only bringing in more users, but also bringing in more data references.

3. Find vertical channels for paid promotion

For almost every industry, you can find corresponding vertical channels and use them to gain exposure and traffic.

First, industry media. If you sell maternal and infant products, you can choose some public accounts in the maternal and infant field to place advertisements. In addition to strong product policies, the best delivery channels should be able to support and guide users to add WeChat or join groups.

The second is industry exhibitions, which may be more suitable for products in the To B field.

The exhibitions mentioned here are not limited to exhibitions, but also include some industry sharing sessions and resource matching sessions, where even if there are only a few dozen people, you can still show your face.

Third, industry communities. 2021 can be regarded as the year of explosion of community organizations. From Taobao, traffic, private domains, video accounts, new consumption, SaaS, sources of goods, etc., you can spend a few thousand dollars to participate, share more, or sponsor some gifts.

The most important thing to emphasize here is that once you are placing ads and selling goods through paid channels, you must find ways to add these people’s WeChat. Such as phone calls, text messages, parcel cards, etc.

4. Local promotion is the most down-to-earth

When talking about door-to-door marketing, some people may sneer and think that it is such an era and we are still doing door-to-door marketing. It will be so inefficient.

But the village chief discovered that field promotion is more efficient, more real and more visible.

Moreover, there are many businesses that are more suitable for offline promotion, such as the community group buying, takeaway CPS, Taobao, local public accounts, etc. that have been popular in the past one or two years.

There are many ways to promote products through ground marketing, among which it is easier to capture users by doing ground marketing in residential areas and commercial streets.

Whether you are doing interviews, offering one-cent benefits, or assigning tasks, you can have at least three to four hundred real users who communicate with you and add you on WeChat in a week, and the value of these users is extremely high.

Because there is trust, experience, investigation and WeChat.

5. Part-time recruitment

The part-time recruitment we are talking about here is not looking for college students in the traditional sense, but recruiting in the name of surveys, interviews, experience officers, founding members, etc., through Moments, WeChat groups and recruitment channels.

Generally speaking, if you recruit 50-100 part-time workers and are able to complete one-on-one phone calls or interviews, the possibility of this person becoming a customer and distributor is extremely high.

Last year, the village chief recruited 100 part-time workers in a county town through mobile phone part-time jobs and completed the primary marketing coverage of a county area.

6. We-media

If you are a first-time business owner and have a certain level of influence, such as personal experience and connections, then the village chief recommends that you write an introduction to your business.

Of course, this is not a naked marketing advertisement, but it is about sharing with everyone some of your past and why you are doing this now, what you want to make of it, what services you can provide, and what help you need.

Then send this article to your existing WeChat groups and Moments, and by the way, find thirty or forty or even more influential people in your Moments and pay them to help you forward it.

Since you asked others to forward it for you, just send a red envelope of 88, 188, or 288. Even if you ask 100 people to forward it, the maximum you can get is only 30,000 yuan.

If nothing unexpected happens, the promotional effect of your first article will become the one with the highest readership and conversion rate.

In addition to your first explosive marketing, learning to use Douyin, Kuaishou, Zhihu, official accounts or video accounts, and insisting on updating content for more than 3 months will definitely make you gain something.

For example, the village chief’s Shili Village started writing from scratch, and in the third month it had thousands of villagers following it, and now there are nearly 10,000 people who have added me as their WeChat friend.

For example, a friend of mine sells socks on Douyin. He shoots sock-related videos in his factory, office, and warehouse every day. In more than two months, he has attracted more than 500 WeChat friends.

The above six cold start methods are not like what you see from some big names or marketing articles, telling you that you can achieve hundreds of thousands of fissions just for free and in just a few days.

It is a truly pragmatic and effective test for the village chief in actual business.

02. What should be paid attention to during cold start

Now that we have basic traffic pools, how can we make the best use of them?

1. 1000 is just a number

Because each business has different attributes, it is not necessary to have 1,000 customers.

For some businesses, just 10 customers may be considered mature, such as some heavy-duty SAAS tools.

Based on your own business, set a cold start target for yourself at a certain stage, 50, 100 or 500 will do.

Because countless cases have proved that for a truly useful product or tool, less than 1,000 customers are enough.

Just like the mini program we made before, @微信官方, which gave me a Christmas hat, and this year's WeChat red envelope cover, we just found 50 friends to forward it to their Moments, and it completely achieved self-fission.

2. The product itself must be reliable enough

Startup teams always fall into a self-consoling misunderstanding, that is, when the product functions are very mediocre, they will promote it.

Most of the feedback we get at this time is not surprise, but complaints. We finally get a user willing to try the product, but in the end, countless problems arise.

No matter how simple your product is, you must ensure that the function and process of the product you launch are smooth.

Because in the eyes of users, they will not say that you are a new startup, so they will not compare you with mature companies.

For example, if you make a mobile phone, users will definitely compare you with Xiaomi, Apple, and Huawei, but not with Lenovo or Meizu.

Therefore, you must have at least one or two products or points that can impress the other party, otherwise all the previous promotion will be in vain.

Because users are not philanthropists. They will not use obviously good products but choose your immature ones.

This is also the reason why many people working in sales fail to sell their products, because the products themselves have major defects.

3. Keep iterating

The first product needs to ensure quality for two reasons:

One is to increase the user's trust in you, because the user's trust is only once.

The second is to increase users’ curiosity about the new product, so that you have the opportunity to improve it.

Therefore, in response to the problem feedback from cold start users, we must ensure a fast enough iteration speed so that they will have the motivation to distribute and promote.

When we develop each new project, we will add the founding users to the WeChat group and synchronize the progress of product repairs and upgrades with them in the group every day.

4. Be patient for a long time

Although we have to face the pressure brought by market, economic and other factors, the start-up period of any entrepreneurial project takes at least 3-6 months.

So during this period, you must be patient enough to find your own cold start channels and users.

Don't act too hastily, otherwise the data may look beautiful but may not have the value to be monetized in the long run.

When we are exploring the initial 100 or 1,000 customers, we really have to screen them out, talk to them, and accumulate the insights after multiple transactions.

We must first satisfy these 100 customers, rather than abandoning them one by one.

Here are two real e-commerce cases that happened around us that I would like to share with you:

One of them is a mother and baby community. The founder initially shared her own parenting recipes on WeChat Moments, and some friends in the circle became interested after reading them.

After persisting for 3 months, she formed a group of 50 mothers, and then this group of 50 mothers grew into tens of thousands of agents, and now the annual sales are 50 million.

The second is a quality group buying group. The founder himself is a parent living in a high-end residential area. He invites dozens of women from the student parent group to share some quality products they have purchased.

Up to now, the number of core group members does not exceed 500, but they have been relying on word of mouth for six years. Three of the team leaders can sell goods worth 100 million yuan a year.

Therefore, sometimes slow is fast. Don’t blindly recruit people and invest in short-term performance. Instead, test in the most reasonable model before replicating on a large scale.

Otherwise, look at those projects around you that once seemed to be very popular, and none of them survived.

Finally, I want to say three points:

First, everyone’s business is different, so the channels for cold start-up are also different. You need to find the precise one that suits you.

Secondly, in the cold start phase, free meals, interviews, offline gatherings, and flash group purchases are all operational ideas, and everyone should test more.

Third, whether it is 100 seed users, 1,000 or even 10,000, you must add them to WeChat so that you have enough opportunities to communicate.

Author: Shili Village

Source: Shili Village