How to operate and grow a product from 0 to 1?

A few days ago, I met a new entrepreneur who is engaged in community products. His business is still in the early stages. He asked me: How should we operate and grow this product from 0 to 1?

To be honest, this question is quite challenging. Since I am not an expert in operations, I will not talk about the operations part today. But I can still talk about the growth part, so today I want to discuss with you: how a product or a business can increase the traffic pool from 0 to 1, to 10,000, to 1 million.

Of course, the following content is just some of my humble opinions and is for reference only. You can just take the essence and absorb it selectively.

1. Preparation before growth

First of all, if you want to grow your business and products from 0 to 1, in addition to the product itself and the team itself being OK, you also need to do the following things:

1. Identify your target audience

Some people who see this will definitely say, why are you talking nonsense again, I don’t know how many times you have said this, and I don’t know how many times I have heard it. But do you really understand this sentence?

In my opinion, this sentence can be understood in three parts.

1) Part I

It is important to identify your audience. Because only when you know clearly who your target audience is, can you aim and shoot in the opposite direction, and do the following: clarify the channels, clarify the content, clarify the materials, clarify the traffic strategy, clarify the competitors, and clarify the budget.

2) Part 2

Often asked: Who is your target user? Are the target users that you understand and express really the right target users under a reasonable growth model?

It sounds confusing, but my understanding of this sentence is: because the business has a good growth, at the beginning, it is likely to be based on a small, focused incision. This sentence is actually my own reflection on the growth of some companies I am currently helping. Some friends asked us before: Who are your target users? Our conversation is: Enterprise. "Ah? Enterprises?" We: "Small and medium-sized enterprises!"

It can be seen that we have not actually thought clearly about our target users. I believe that there must be a large number of teams in the market who have not thought clearly about it either. The so-called "small and medium-sized enterprises" here are too large and too general target users! It can't be considered a goal at all.

In the early stages of growth, product development, and business development, we should have a deep understanding of our users and think clearly about who our users are. Make the goal more concrete and granular so that you can have a preliminary impression of it as soon as you say it.

For example, small and medium-sized enterprises? Are those small and medium-sized enterprises with traffic teams? Are there any traffic teams? Is there a traffic team that can do a good job? Or are you facing a bottleneck because you are not doing well? Are they small and medium-sized enterprises engaged in education, new consumption or some other categories? Do you have the ability to produce content or not? Is the budget within 1 million or above?

Don’t think that the above positioning is a waste of effort. You have to know that your users are different because your focus is different; your products are different because the value you provide is different; your products and users are different, so your methods, strategies and channels for traffic growth are also different.

Moreover, compared to targeting a "large" group from the beginning, it is easier to start with a small group to get the traffic started. Only if you can get started at the beginning, there will be a possibility of going from 0 to 1 later. Therefore, this requires a clearer user positioning and portrait.

This is the second paragraph of understanding.

3) Part 3

To define our target audience, we must not only be truly "clear and concise", but also do a top-level design to preset what the target audience should be like at different times and stages in order to prevent failure in the process from 0 to 1, where we just reach 0.5 before reaching 1. What does this sentence mean?

You should know that in order to maintain a long-term growth from 0 to 1, the "target" users you target should be different at different stages.

On the one hand, due to a single user portrait, you will quickly reach a bottleneck period in acquiring traffic. On the other hand, when your service margin can be expanded wider and wider with the development of your business and enterprise, your users will change accordingly, and the specific behavior is: you will expand the sku.

Therefore, if we want to maintain growth from 0 to 1, rather than stopping at 0 to 0.5, we need to be a conductor, target the right people at the right time, rely on corresponding strategies, and exceed the growth talent ceiling of the original business.

Of course, this process is likely not planned in the top-level design at the beginning. It is also very likely that in the course of your business development, user feedback and user behavior will drive you to expand your product categories and target users.

If you want to achieve long-term growth, you must keep this string in your mind taut and think more.

OK, the above is the first point, and it is also my understanding of the so-called “target users”. This paragraph was inspired by my recent thoughts and I have written a lot without realizing it. I will speed up now.

After talking about the first point, let’s talk about the second point that needs to be considered first if you want to grow:

2. Clarify your positioning. Different positioning will lead to different growth patterns.

What does positioning mean here? Do you want to do big business or small and beautiful?

Big businesses have their own traffic practices, and small and beautiful businesses have their own practices. Big business often relies on large-scale investment. If you are small and beautiful, the blue ocean traffic from a single channel may be enough to sustain you.

Take the online education market as an example. I know about the fierce growth model of Yuanfudao Homework Helper, and I also know an online education entrepreneur I know who is small but beautiful, with very strong products and team, but has also achieved rapid growth this year.

But if you look back at the growth curves and strategies of the two, they are actually completely inconsistent.

Yuanfudao is a company that first develops growth and then develops products, and iterates its products during the growth process. The engine of its sustained growth is investment, and the core is actually capital-driven. My friend’s small but beautiful business first puts products first and then growth, and has a very high referral rate. Also because the product is good, the sales details are good, and the conversion rate is extremely high, the core is product-driven.

But one thing you need to pay attention to for this type of business is that either you completely position yourself to be small and beautiful, or, while being small and beautiful, you need to always consider the sustainability of growth. This brings us back to the point above. You need to consider who your second target user is, where your second curve is, how to go from 0 to 0.5, and then from 0.5 to 1, and how to break the circle. (B station comes to mind here).

Therefore, based on your own positioning, it determines what the initial focus of your business will be in the process of growing from 0 to 1, as well as the completely different traffic strategy.

Let’s talk about Bilibili again. For example, the famous registration restriction of Bilibili - answering questions. If it was growth-driven, Bilibili would have removed this restriction a long time ago. It can be seen that it is product-driven, and it has found the second curve very well. It is currently on the road to successfully breaking the circle and facing a wider group of people.

After talking about the two points you need to think about first when growing your business from 0 to 1, let’s formally talk about, as I understand it, how to make the business grow from 0 to 1 in terms of traffic.

2. How to increase traffic from 0 to 1?

In order to achieve the traffic start-up, and to achieve from 0 to 0.5, and then from 0.5 to continuously approach that 1, we need to do the following three things:

1. Review your own resources and determine your growth strategy

1. If you have a founder who is eloquent and even an internet celebrity, take the examples in our traffic growth circle, such as Xiao Yiqun, Liu Siyi, and further away, such as Luo Yonghao and Wang Xin (Qvod). So doing a good job of shaping and promoting the IP of these CEOs is actually helping the company's business grow. If your company has such resources, you must use them and use them well.
2. If you have received a large sum of money and your products and team have the conditions for growth, what are you waiting for? Launch on a large scale. Of course, the investment should not be random. It should be targeted at fixed channels and fixed groups of people. First, test and run a suitable model, and then increase the volume.
3. If your product itself is good, you also have the confidence to say that as long as the right people come, I can keep them and also get them to refer others. Then you can also try content drainage, or even buy some volume from precise channels on a small scale, and then combine it with distribution fission to make referrals based on the products and services themselves.
4. If your company already has some traffic pools, such as tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of private friends, such as public accounts with a large number of fans or accounts on other platforms. Then your growth strategy might be to try a wave of traffic first and use the volume in these existing pools.
5. If your team is strong in content creation. It might be better to be content-driven, distribute content across the entire network, or even create a few IPs, and use content and IP to drive growth.

OK, the above is to see what you have first, and then determine the preliminary traffic strategy. After that, the next step is the second step:

2. Through a lot of testing, find a channel that suits you and eat up the traffic you can get from it

After initially determining your traffic strategy, you should start looking for a channel that suits you and continue to dig deeper into it. Why "one" channel?

You should know that in the early stages of a business or product, it is better to dig one deep well than ten shallow ones. Focusing on a single channel can maximize operating cost savings and concentrate your energy on achieving traffic results that exceed others in the short term. (Of course, what we are talking about here is the early stage of increasing volume. In the later stage, due to the traffic bottleneck of a single channel, it is definitely necessary to layout multiple channels early to gain volume).

Also, the so-called channels that are suitable for you cannot be decided on a whim.

First, we need to define: What is the “right” channel?

I think the so-called "suitable" must be satisfying: faster, more, and cheaper.

And because the goal is to achieve the initial wave of business growth, this channel can be a mass channel or a niche channel. As long as it meets the above requirements: high conversion efficiency, low conversion cost, fast conversion, and has sustainable and replicable qualities, it is a channel worth investing in (of course, when multiple channels are suitable, of course the one with the highest ceiling will be chosen).

After defining the appropriate channels, how can we find the appropriate channels?

The answer is: more practice, more experiments, and relying on data for the final definition.

Here, you need to know what the user portraits of each channel look like. For example, if you are a B-side merchant, then according to your subjective impression, where will they gather? In the headlines? On Zhihu? Search on Baidu? Searching on WeChat? On TikTok? On Kuaishou?

After narrowing the scope through subjective judgment, and then conducting small-scale tests, whether distributing content on multiple platforms or delivering it on multiple platforms in a small range, you can measure which channels have advantages and meet the "suitability" mentioned above.

Of course, this testing process will take time and require certain operating costs and even financial investment. After finding a suitable channel, the next step is to dig deep into the targeted content and gameplay for this channel. If you have money, you can launch it on a large scale to quickly capture the traffic that suits you in the channel.

If you do this channel well, and you're lucky, you'll be able to get your business and products off to a good start. If we use APP products as an example, you have the opportunity to attract hundreds of thousands of new users. Of course, how much traffic you can ultimately get from this channel, how long you can keep it for, and even how much advantage you can have in the face of competition from your peers, all depends on the cooperation and strength of the traffic team.

These include: delivery capabilities, KOL BD capabilities, number-finding capabilities, content/material capabilities, data analysis capabilities, and if you are doing free traffic, then you will attach great importance to the technical capabilities and content capabilities of the channel.

After finding a suitable channel and getting relatively blue ocean traffic, the traffic limit of a single channel must have a ceiling. At this time, if we want to achieve sustained growth and increase from 0.5 to 1, we must also achieve the third point below.

3. Continue to expand channels and maintain the ability to acquire cost-effective traffic

Regarding this point, it should be considered early when doing traffic on a single channel. Especially those responsible for traffic should consider it early. They should not wait until the traffic of a single channel reaches its upper limit before looking for new volume or new channels.

When it comes to expanding new channels, the above conditions apply: high conversion efficiency, low conversion cost, fast conversion, and sustainable and replicable qualities. But the cruel truth is that in many cases, reality often does not go as we wish.

The more realistic situation we encounter is that we cannot find a channel that meets the above conditions. Even if we can find one, it is only cheap by comparison. The real price is already much more expensive than the unit price of the first channel.

At this stage, which belongs to the middle and late stages of traffic, we should rely on the momentum of the first wave of traffic while actively expanding other channels. With the help of users and running businesses, we should focus the team more on internal growth: optimizing organizational efficiency, optimizing sales conversion paths, optimizing various details, and even killing two birds with one stone by using multiple SKUs for a single user, etc., etc. And most importantly, continuously optimizing the products and services themselves.

When the competition for traffic has become fierce, traffic itself is no longer a barrier.

What we need to do is: before the fierce competition for traffic, transform the advantage of traffic into technological advantage; into organizational efficiency advantage; into brand advantage; into the advantage of countless large accounts and IPs; and, into the advantage of product services themselves.

Author: Paige

Source: Page Talks Growth