From Kaixin.com to Plato, any social operation without barriers is just hooliganism!

In the turbulent July, the long-dormant Internet sector broke out two pieces of news: one was that the "Personality Labels" viral page of the Plato APP went viral, sweeping the circle of friends overnight, and quickly soared to the 15th place on the Apple Store's social list, finally provoking the big boss WeChat to take action, blocking the account and clearing all fans. The bungee-jumping transition from rapid popularity to rapid death was as dramatic as a standard "Game of Thrones"; the other was the news that Kaixin.com finally "sold itself" successfully. In comparison, this news was not so popular. Please forgive the author's first reaction after hearing it - hey, how is this thing still alive?

One died quickly but became immortal and became a mummy, while the other became stiff but not dead and became a zombie, reflecting the bizarre yet helpless present.

Death or life, this is not the core issue. The issue is how to reflect on death and life. Many times, people are too immersed in the legendary stories of heroes' success and failure, so they do not learn from their mistakes, and the pain is forgotten once the wound has healed. History always repeats itself, and people will die the way they were supposed to.

Looking back to around 2006, QQ was a must-have for us to maintain interpersonal relationships. Although everyone criticized QQ's copycat trend and low-brow style, we could only rely on it and could not leave it. Just when people thought that the Internet could no longer do anything new and the general trend of the world was already determined, three challengers, Xiaonei (now Renren) , Kaixin, and Weibo, emerged one after another on the Internet, and everyone was happy to see the fight. Your Tencent's copycat empire is finally going to change dynasties!

Who would have thought that in this chaotic battle, Tencent very low-key launched WeChat for unknown purposes (free text messages were very popular at the time, and WeChat seemed useless) , and it was quietly advancing.

The era of smart phones has arrived. Countless social apps have sprung up overnight, including those for hooking up, singing, drawing, anonymous, workplace, instant... But WeChat has been advancing quietly and silently. Until one day, we discovered that this guy with an ordinary and somewhat low-looking appearance had defeated all his previous opponents, big and small, with all their own unique strengths. The times had come full circle and returned to Tencent's hands.

The past is like smoke, and the social networks flash by like shooting stars...so the question is? Where have all those N products that were once popular gone? Why was it so popular at one point, but ultimately couldn't escape the cycle of rapid birth and rapid death? "Death after a burst of popularity" is certainly better than not even becoming popular, but why does it always end up being a cause for regret? During their "popularity", Facebook's growth hacking was constantly performed, but why did they ultimately fail to achieve the same success as Facebook? Is Growth Hacking Failed?

1. Reminiscence: The “Three Great Ancient Heroes” have passed away

To clarify the context, we have to trace back to the source.

The news on Kaixin.com brought back long-dormant memories in the author's heart. That was between 2007 and 2011, when he was still bored in an office cubicle of China Telecom. There was a huge gap between the idealism and success in college and the dark society and mediocre life after graduation. His only pleasure every day was to post messages on BBS: Tianya, his alma mater's BBS, or his own interest BBS. Just at this time, Xiaonei, Kaixin and Weibo appeared and brightened up my life.

The following content is recalled from the perspective of an ordinary user, rather than from the perspective of a product manager or entrepreneur .

1. Renren

The initial reason for using CampusNai was "girls". At that time, many schoolgirls registered on CampusNai and showed off their high-end homepages on QQ Space and other places. This also made this website, which was once popular on university campuses, come into the sight of me, an old graduate. Later, my younger classmates also started using Campus. Until one day, I found a junior with ordinary looks, but all his friends and visitors were pure beauties from universities like Peking University and Tsinghua University. This made me register for Campus without hesitation and apply for star addition.

The most common action when using Campus is to "find people". Every day, people would hang out on the pages of various colleges with many female students of excellent quality, scrolling through page after page, looking for various girls they know or don't know, without having to worry about the authenticity of the user's identity. This feeling should be very similar to what many people later experienced when they used Momo and Tantan, but it must be said that the quality of the girls on campus at that time was much higher than them. It is no exaggeration to say that even if I did not meet my girlfriends on campus, the relationship must have developed there. It was a paradise for literary and educated young people to talk about love, recite poems and write essays. It is all gone...

Since the mobile era, Xiaonei has become Renren and has been declining all the way, gradually becoming what it is today.

But my loyalty lasted until 2014, and the core reason for this was the "circle". As an "old monster" who had made some achievements in the college debate circle, I felt at that time that it was very easy to build my own circle on Renren. You don't need to have a big name or background in real life like on Weibo, nor do you need to set up a joke-telling company to engage in various operations. As long as you post some articles or statuses related to your interests (debates) , you can quickly gain a bunch of friends with strong interactions and enjoy the feeling of being a big V on Weibo. Even if your fans don't have millions like on Weibo, most of them are high-quality younger students, and this sense of existence and accomplishment is still very strong. So at that time, my passion for creation was very high. I would go to Renren for UGC whenever I had nothing to do. Then I watched the number of my friends increase day by day, and beautiful schoolmates from all over the country often came to visit me.

This beautiful experience did not last long. Everyone who was eager to get rich overnight relaxed identity verification. The originally pure campus space was filled with a mix of good and bad people, and all kinds of fake marketing accounts began to run rampant. This reached its peak as public homepages became popular with the spread of "piracy and plagiarism". All kinds of cookie-cutter, reposted chicken soup, success stories, horror titles and jokes began to run rampant in the information flow . The direct result was that if you carefully wrote an article with practical content , the effect it brought was far less than that of someone else copying a joke from Weibo, and gradually you didn't want to write anymore. At the same time, due to the existence of vests and water armies, online violence on Renren, which is similar to Weibo, began to escalate, and the attitude of the entire website was extremely ambiguous. In the end, the author suffered a very terrifying online siege and slander in 2014 and was completely discouraged and never responded again.

Let's review this case. For users like me, Renren became popular because of the "opposite sex", and the stickiness comes from the "circle". When your personal information, creations, friend relationships, and influence are all deposited on it, the "transfer cost" will be very high, and you will become inseparable.

However, students will always graduate. If the graduates want to maintain their influence in their circle, they must continue to use UGC to attract new fans, but all this was eventually defeated: first, because the new students gradually no longer need Renren, it is not so easy to attract new fans, and when they attract new fans, you will also doubt whether they are real students (or marketing accounts?) ; second, because the input-output ratio of creation has decreased, writing seriously is not as good as copying a joke from Weibo, and managing a personal account with care is not as good as others' organized marketing accounts, and the most terrifying thing is that they often face the risk of being besieged by online violence. As a result, they don't want UGC anymore.

When both genuine new fans and serious UGC are no longer sustainable, what other reasons do you have to stay on this platform other than being a sentimental one?

But please note, you must pay attention, boss Chen Yizhou did three things with very obvious benefits: First, relaxing identity verification can quickly increase the number of Renren users and immediately compete with Weibo on the same track; second, relaxing public homepages to allow marketing accounts to enter can quickly enrich the content of the information flow and bring in some institutional users to take advantage of the situation to develop and build an ecosystem. Isn’t this the case with Weibo’s Blue V, WeChat’s public accounts, and Zhihu’s institutional accounts? Third, everyone copied a lot of functions, copying whatever was popular. This is true at least in terms of probability theory. The popularity of something means that it has been more or less "verified by the market", so if you copy something, it is likely to become popular as well, right?

These three things are essentially the same thing, which is to focus on short-term data growth as much as possible, pursue beautiful data, and minimize uncertainty risks through plagiarism and imitation .

Yes, you understood it correctly. In my opinion, it is the speculative mentality of businessmen who highly emphasize short-term data and highly emphasize certainty and low risk that has sent Renren to its grave. It’s just that in every battle of this kind of mentality, the data will be very good, with all the hot products and growth hackers. Unfortunately, although we win all the battles, we are losing the whole war more and more.

2. Kaixin

So what about Kaixin.com? The earliest impression was the powerful "hunger marketing".

Not long after I used the campus network, Kaixin.com appeared. However, due to the need for an invitation email and Chen Yizhou's fake Kaixin, I was unable to see the real thing for a long time. This made it a legendary figure in the world that can only be seen from the head but not the tail. I have longed for it in my heart for a long time. At that time, the feeling was that Kaixin.com was popular and had a high-end status. Ordinary people could not use it. In the future, it would definitely be a product that everyone would use, the Facebook of China. It can be seen that this "hunger marketing" at the beginning was very successful and generated powerful explosive potential.

Finally one day, I registered on Kaixin.com and found that all my colleagues in the company were addicted to it, including the beautiful white-collar girls from other departments and the little girls from the marketing department. The interface and gameplay were very similar to those of Xiaonai, so my initial idea and plan were very simple: just like on Xiaonai, I would post some carefully written articles and photos to show my talents and interests and build my own circle. Whatever was posted on Renren would be forwarded here (and also forwarded to Space, Jiayuan.com , 51.com, etc., that's how wasteful it is) . However, the results were completely different: on the one hand, as a newcomer in the workplace, the things I posted were rarely read by old colleagues, and even if they were read, I rarely received any recognition; on the other hand, due to the unique culture of the Chinese workplace at that time, almost no one would post original articles. Everyone was forwarding third-party chicken soup, health care, and national affairs articles like today's Moments of Friends.

Now that the motivation for UGC is gone, let’s just play games .

That’s right, in my opinion, the second reason why Kaixin.com is so popular is the games. To be more precise, the games are very suitable for light social interaction among colleagues. From slave trading, grabbing parking spaces to the final game that swept all over the world, stealing vegetables, each one of them is a hit! However, as a self-righteous person, I always feel that these popular games are too low-level and I cannot immerse myself in them... Just at this time, Weibo appeared.

Let’s review the case of Kaixin.com. It exploded with the very successful “Hunger Mystery Marketing”, and what maintained its stickiness was “games”. Through a series of popular light games with strong social attributes, it repeatedly ignited the crowd, activated the crowd, and occupied their time. Yes, if Renren.com relies on interactions based on UGC to occupy users’ time, then Kaixin.com relies on interactions based on popular games. At the time, the effects seemed to be the same, and both brought about continued use by users. For Kaixin.com, it has brought about a series of short-term data surges.

But are the effects really consistent?

The more UGC a user has on the SNS platform and the stronger the motivation of UGC is, the higher his sense of belonging and switching cost will be . Gradually, he will be immersed in it and cannot leave it . However, for games, especially light games like Kaixin.com, users' continued use does not increase their switching costs. Instead, the fun has "diminishing marginal returns" . Therefore, this craze is often a movement, one wave after another. As long as you can continue to make new and more exciting games, the data will continue to rise. But as long as one day you can't make them...

Or, the game you made was quickly copied because you copied it, which is what happened later. QQ always follows up quickly at the first opportunity, making Tencent one of the most profitable gaming companies in China. At the same time, it has eroded Kaixin.com's "gaming dividends", making its each hit product promotion limited in energy and becoming a weekly offensive that quickly fades away, and it is simply impossible to threaten Tencent's relationship chain.

Companies that slowly rise by leveraging UGC and interest-based atmosphere are often slow companies, such as Xiaonei, Douban, and Zhihu. When Kaixin.com defined its strategic path as "explosive games" and when its UGC experience was far inferior to playing games, its fate was already sealed, because light games are a model that will almost never generate switching costs and will never build a moat. You can only bet that every game you launch will be a hit, and of course we know that this is almost impossible. If this kind of serial hits fails one day, or if a competitor appears that can follow up quickly but has many times better accumulation ability... then is it really impossible to do UGC in the workplace? Just look at LinkedIn and Maimai.

So did Kaixin.com die unjustly? not at all. It wasn't him who almost succeeded, it was Weibo.

3. Sina Weibo

Let’s look at Sina Weibo again.

From the day when New Weekly launched the “Micro Era” special issue, the era of Weibo arrived. I was one of the earliest Weibo addicts. At that time, I was really immersed in the world of Weibo every day. I would stay in the office and keep refreshing until 10 o'clock in the evening before I remembered to leave work. My fingers would constantly refresh, forward, refresh, and forward... Unlike WeChat, which later emphasized "private attributes", Weibo emphasized "public life" the most. It was like a square.

This kind of "public life" specifically refers to "the pleasure of being close to or even becoming a public figure" and "the pleasure of participating in public events."

The biggest difference between Sina Weibo and Fanfou at the beginning was the emphasis on the introduction of celebrities . It seemed that at that time every employee was required to recruit 5 celebrities, otherwise there would be no year-end bonus. The experience at that time was unprecedented. Those celebrities who were once high and mighty suddenly appeared on Weibo, chatting like ordinary people, and even often communicated and interacted with you (because there were not many users at the time and they could reply) . It was a shock - I had talked with celebrities! At the same time, since there are fewer users in the early stage, the atmosphere is relatively simple, and the cost of UGC is not high, if the quality of what you post is good, you may really become a hot topic, and everyone is a self-media .

I remember that I was also in the top 30 of the grassroots list in my city at that time. Therefore, Weibo at that time gave people great hope. Not only could they get close to public figures, but they could also become public figures in due time. This thriving feeling fully released the long-suppressed desire to express themselves.

However, unlike Renren’s UGC exchanges and Kaixin.com’s hit games, the most important scenario for Weibo at that time was “paying attention to and participating in public events at the first time” . There was an accident on the Ningbo-Wenzhou line, someone was beaten to death by the urban management, and there was an earthquake somewhere! Every day, we always pay attention to these hot events, and look forward to every step of progress like a holiday. Once there is new information, we will forward it immediately... It has to be said that Weibo may be the earliest breeding ground for keyboard warriors. People who lack the "square experience" on weekdays quickly participate in various public events on Weibo as if they were injected with chicken blood. Everyone secretly holds a belief that China now has many problems, but as long as we speak out and forward on Weibo, everything will gradually get better. Every click of ours is part of this grand change.

Another advantage of Weibo in its early days was "better content quality and the illusion of omnipotence."

Because at the beginning, everyone didn’t know what water armies, joke tellers, and marketing accounts were. They all wanted to convey information and attract attention in 140 words, so usually after reading ten posts, there would always be 3 or 4 that you were interested in. Micro-novel competitions and the like brought a lot of impressive content. At the same time, Weibo had more and more functions, but we were used to the complex interface on PC and didn’t think this was a problem. At that time, how could we have the idea that “making a product too big and comprehensive is chronic suicide”? Until WeChat came along.

The myth of Weibo ended not long after Kai-Fu Lee wrote the book "How Weibo Changes China".

Suddenly, we found that celebrities on Weibo started to ignore people, and even the people operating their accounts were not themselves. The pleasure of being close to celebrities gradually disappeared, but the "Matthew effect" between celebrities broke out - Han Han's "hello" attracted millions of reposts, but you wrote a paragraph with your heart and no one paid attention to it. This Matthew effect then appeared between ordinary users and marketing accounts. The feedback you got from writing a paragraph with your heart was far less than that from a paragraph promoted by the marketing account's water army and zombie fans. Would you still write it? Then, the pleasure of participating in public events gradually decreased, and public events instead became endless cyber violence, which gradually subsided as the superiors finally took strong measures. It turned out to be just a game and a dream. Finally, one day, you scrolled through 50 posts on Weibo in a row and still didn’t see a single post you liked. You no longer wanted to post anything, and at this time you knew it was time to go to WeChat.

Looking back on this case, we will find that Weibo has really caught up with a good momentum. It is really just one step away from building a new "public" relationship chain system centered around public figures and Blue Vs, just like Renren's "campus" relationship chain system. However, he was too impatient and greedy. For the sake of the surge in user data, he completely ignored the shaping of the community atmosphere. As long as there was a surge in data, the joke makers, water armies, marketing accounts, and zombie fans were allowed to make trouble. Finally, one day, the surge in user data did not bring about the decreasing marginal cost of the big network effect, but instead brought about "diminishing marginal benefits" of user experience. It was too late to control it. The quick success and quick profit of feature development and the one-sided emphasis on high-level and comprehensive execution form a good contrast with the extremely restrained and precise feature development of WeChat.

Ordinary users using WeChat more because of its functional experience is just the beginning of the disaster. When big Vs discovered that WeChat public accounts have higher benefits and switched to WeChat, Weibo’s winter arrived.

2. History is repeating itself today

Looking back at these three classic cases, they all became popular due to a surge in data, they were all highly anticipated, and they all had a good experience and atmosphere... but in the end, everything was irreversible. Such stories are constantly being repeated in the era of mobile Internet , but later social apps have performed this process faster, with rapid birth and rapid death, and their rise and fall are sudden.

By 2016, the myth of social media hits is still happening. At the beginning of the year, the anonymous game "Friends Impression" became popular in WeChat Moments, "Same" started to be popular on QQ Space, and Faceu's face-changing videos became a trend. Until recently, the personalized tags of Plato App became popular...

Today, when the demographic dividend has been exhausted, creating hit products has become a skill, and viral marketing growth hacking has become a trend. Up to now, the author is still unable to evaluate the success or failure of these detonations, and he also deeply agrees with this method. After all, capital and companies are essentially profit-seeking. Being able to bring about a surge in users with the lowest customer acquisition cost is a skill, there is no doubt about it. I have great respect for the planners of these detonations.

However, if one day we measure the success or failure of these detonations, there must be some very clear indicators:

The core value of friend impression is that great impression wall. Have users deposited more abundant personal information on it, making it as indispensable as their own "milestone and publicity base"? Can the platform accumulate a huge user database and really build a Baidu search for people, where anyone's information can be found and people can be searched for according to any conditions? The production and accumulation of this impression data is the core indicator.

Will Same's community system become richer with the influx of people, or will everyone just post selfies just for the use-and-disposable tool function of "drawing selfies"? Will Same demonstrate the value of its infinite channels and functions due to the surge in people, thereby forming a sense of belonging and creating a virtual spiritual city? The core indicators are the comprehensive activation of the channel system, the transfer of value, the formation of habits and the formation of a sense of belonging.

Faceu’s face-changing videos have become popular all over the country, but now QQ, the favorite of post-95s, has also started to make face-changing videos. Can Faceu build a brand new relationship chain for post-95s beyond video tools? Can we cultivate their habit of using Faceu for IM? Can we cultivate their habit of watching story videos? The experience of flipping brands with Faceu is good, but after flipping the brand, can it really form an effective one-to-one stranger social interaction, or is it similar to Momo and Tantan? Any major breakthrough in any of the above four points can be regarded as the success of the core indicator.

What about Plato?

We certainly admit that using growth hacking methods, even if it does not bring about a surge in the use of the product's core scenario functions, can only bring about a surge in product exposure and an improvement in rankings. This is also a victory, but it is largely a victory for operations and growth hacking. In the short term, it does bring good data, you can report to investors , and you can openly share your successful experience in PR, but you should know that this is not victory in the entire war.

There is nothing wrong with growth hacking. The book “Growth Hacker” says at the very beginning that it should be based on a solid product foundation, otherwise the huge increase brought about will be fleeting and of little significance.

Growth hacking is your triggering point, while products and business models are your depth. The key is whether you have depth, stickiness, barriers, and moats. Draw a beautiful growth curve or grow and die quickly like an earthquake line, this is the watershed.

3. Outlook: Standards are on the horizon

Then perhaps you would say, author, what you said is too abstract. What barriers and moats, what exactly are these things?

Let’s talk about something real. In Buffett's theory, the so-called moat is often technology patents, transfer costs, large network advantages and cost advantages . In Trout's positioning theory, the essence of market competition is to divide the user's mind based on category logic, in order to seize the commanding heights of the user's mind . Don’t underestimate these traditional business theories that say “Internet thinking is the way to go.” The development in recent years has fully proved that they are still fully applicable even today.

So if you are a social community or similar product, these indicators are applicable:

1. Does it convey the core value of the product?

The core functions based on core scenarios bring core actions and core experiences to users.

For example, if in positioned their core value as a tool for making pictures and stickers today, then it would definitely be a huge success to have developed into what it is today. However, if the core value is positioned as a social community like Instagram, then it can only be said that the current core value delivery is very limited.

For example, if Plato is a personality labeling tool, then this marketing is very successful. But if he is actually a faceless social tool, please, this has almost nothing to do with personality labels... Of course, some people will say that growth hacking only increases the exposure of the product and allows users to actively search and understand you. But are users more willing to download you? Today's users are so lazy that they will only use H5 if a task can be completed with H5, and will never download an APP. Even if they download one, they will hardly have the patience to learn it. As a reminder, simply delivering core values ​​may not be meaningful. The core value must be strong enough to bring about a surge in efficiency, so that users may become dependent on it.

2. Have you formed a relationship chain and built a network advantage?

This is especially important for social products. Even if N people download you, they do not form a relationship chain or network advantage. Then how different are you from a tool or a game? Why did users feel that QQ was so low-end but couldn't leave it? Because of the relationship chain. If you leave alone, you may lose contact with everyone around you, but it is not realistic to expect everyone around you to leave with you.

Of course, the acquaintance relationship chain on WeChat is already difficult to shake, so you can try to build circle relationship chains, community relationship chains, and so on.

3. Is there any switching cost?

As Lao Pa pointed out in "Emotional Thinking", many products are "toilet paper-type products". Toilet paper is a high-frequency and urgent need, but it is discarded after use and does not form any sense of belonging. Therefore, a very important point about social products is whether it can keep users “investing” in you, whether it’s in the form of personal information accumulation, UGC, or relationship chain affiliation. It should be like WeChat. One day you may not like it that much, but the cost of leaving is too high.

4. Will it bring about the side effect of "information noise"?

It seems that the data has increased, but the influx of new users has destroyed the product experience and atmosphere. Eventually, the core users begin to leave, and evaporative cooling continues to occur, just like what happened on Weibo.

5. Ultimately, have you captured the minds of users and formed a neural circuit in their minds that says “If I want…, I’ll use you”?

Positioning theory and category logic are particularly important in today's information explosion, because users are unwilling to make too many choices and take into account all of them. Often, they are only willing to remember one APP in a category. I use WeChat to communicate with my acquaintances, but I will not use MiTalk or YiXin. What’s even more frightening is that there are only a few categories that users are willing to remember, so there are generally only a few apps on the phone screen.

Finally, let us face the reality. Today, when the demographic dividend is exhausted, the days when developing an APP can lead to a surge in users, massive financing, and then reach the peak of life and marry a beautiful and rich woman are gone forever. The reality is often that even if you try your best to increase the number of users, this surge in data is far from the final victory, and it is often "big in and big out". The stories of Kaixin.com and others have been playing out all the time. Today, when product forms are mostly the same, people always push everything to operations. However, when the fundamental depth is not resolved, they can only win the battles of data surge and the battles of fooling massive financing, but ultimately lose the entire war. Data is hard, but it can also be a bubble. It can take you to the sky or the sea, but it can also accidentally betray your cognitive ability.

We emphasize DAU, retention, and point-of-care detection because reality is so cruel. Do you still remember those products that were very popular in the past two years? How many of them are still in use? In addition to paying attention to growth hackers, we should also pay attention to the things behind them. We should not wait until one day when we suddenly hear the name of a certain product, we all sigh and say - hey, how come this thing is still alive?