How to get 1,000 seed users with 0 yuan?

The so-called seed users are the first wave of users of new products or products that have not yet been launched. Seed users can often promote the continuous iteration and innovation of new products by using new products and giving actual feelings, feedback and suggestions. Since seed users are so important, how can we obtain them? The author of this article shared his practical experience with us. Let’s take a look at how he acquired 1,000 seed users with 0 yuan.

1. How to “create” a group of seed users

1. What is a "seed" user?

All the first wave users of new products or products that have not yet been launched, as long as someone uses my new product and gives actual product feedback and suggestions, in fact, such users can be regarded as your seed users.

In the process of accumulating seed users, what we pursue is quality rather than quantity, so how to select real seed users becomes very important.

"Seed users are not blind. They already have needs or potential needs. It is more likely that they have already felt the pain points and are actively looking for solutions to their needs" - from "Seed User Methodology".

What characteristics does a qualified seed user have?

There are three characteristics: real needs, the ability to split, and the courage to try new things.

Let me first talk about the two easiest characteristics to identify. "Fission" means that the user can actively recommend and spread new products to people around him or her. At the level of self-recommendation, he or she has the potential to become a product spokesperson, which is very important.

This feature lays the foundation for the speed at which your product spreads and whether it can truly bring in new users.

"Dare to try" represents our seed users who can quickly trust your new products and actively try your new features and services. They are the most adventurous people in the traffic pool. After all, if an unknown product wants to find a user to download, register and use it, it needs strong endorsement in addition to a solution to the demand.

After all, it is human nature to fear unknown risks, and courage becomes even more rare.

2. Choose to use "community" to cultivate your own seed users

Users are friends. All partners doing community marketing must keep in mind this basic principle: all users are your friends, and being good at making friends is the key to building a community. In the process of cultivating seed users, using the form of community is currently the best solution.

Because the community has three core elements, it can quickly cultivate users' stickiness to new products:

1. First: timely feedback. Just open WeChat and you can collect various feedback from users and respond quickly to solve problems.
2. Second: Emotional transmission. The occurrence of things must have its rationality. The birth of any thing is reasonable and logical. There is no such thing as something that comes out of nowhere. New products are born with the mission of solving problems, such as Tantan Momo solving the problem of strangers socializing;
3. Third: The huge social chain. The communities on WeChat can form a large-scale dissemination effect and faster sharing functions. Using communities is currently the fastest and best way to become your own seed users.

2. Practical explanation: where to find seed users

1. Basic information of the project and portrait of seed users

• Market areas: flexible employment market, blue-collar job hunting;
• APP products: job search websites based on WeChat official accounts, H5 that can be directly accessed from WeChat official accounts;
• Basic user profile: under 35 years old;
• Education level: high school or below;
• Region: Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Guangdong; gender is mostly female.

Let me first talk about the basic situation of this project. I am basically in charge of the product and users. In the early stages of the project, we need to recommend a large number of job seekers to work in factories and customer service centers in various places. This is the nature of human resource dispatch and labor dispatch, and it is large-scale outsourcing.

In order to improve the efficiency of "recruiting", I started to build a recruitment website specifically for those with low or no education.

In terms of overall product design, we mainly draw on the recruitment modules of two products, namely BOSS Direct Recruitment and 58.com. The reason is very simple. First, the recruitment module of 58.com is simpler and more direct, which can greatly reduce the development cost and progress, and strive to launch the product within 3-5 days.

At the same time, in order to cater to young people and the Internet, it draws on the style of BOSS Zhipin in terms of style and function.

Let’s talk about the portrait of seed users. In terms of user selection, we prefer young people, basically those born around 2000. This group of people meets our employment standards and is more receptive to job choices and trying new products.

They are typical users of small town youth, who are relatively concentrated in terms of education and region. Their groups and circles have great potential to go beyond the circle. After my actual tests, their spreading speed is higher than that of those born after 1990.

Those born in the 2000s are very capable of trying new things and are willing to share products with people around them, while those born in the 1990s have become more cautious after years of polishing.

2. Cast a wide net, refine channels, and fully segment

After the basic product is built, the next step is to find users.

Given our limited funding situation, we chose to do this by posting for free online. The following channels were initially screened: Baidu Tieba, Jianshu, Weibo, and Douban, four platforms where posts were posted to attract users.

There are three main principles for screening channels: large number of users, segmentation, and low threshold.

1) Large number of users: Weibo - Tieba - Douban - Jianshu (my user ranking)

We will direct traffic to the platform with more users. This is the primary condition. If the user base is not large enough, the natural audience will be small. Therefore, when choosing channels, we use the number of users as the criterion for weighting.

Sina Weibo is a long-established player in the traffic pool, and ranks first in overall user quality and activity. Moreover, you can judge your user by checking his Weibo homepage to see whether he is a real seed user.

The second is Baidu Tieba. The users of Baidu Tieba are basically disorganized, but their sense of the Internet is very strong. They can join your group chat and become your private traffic according to your prompts without too much guidance from you, and they are easy to hook.

The remaining two players, Douban and Jianshu, have decent user quality, but their advertising and spam users are particularly obvious, and they are not operated as the main channels; however, Douban's group traffic is worth exploring. Even if you are using Douban today, you can still get the attention of real user groups.

2) Segmentation: The platform has the function of segmenting users, such as Weibo super topic, Tieba classification, Douban group classification, Jianshu community

Taking how to "attract job seekers" as an example, we can publish corresponding recruitment information through Weibo, Tieba and other channels to attract users to pay attention to our Weibo account and posts.

This is the first step we take, to expand channels! The next step is to segment and dominate the fields within each channel. For example, for the Sina Weibo channel, I started with the Weibo super topic “Shenzhen Recruitment”. Then how do I segment the fields within Weibo?

Segment the super topic, look for the super topic of "Shenzhen XX District", segment from a large range, and use the super topics of Shenzhen's Longgang District, Nanshan District, etc. as segmented coverage advertising channels; Tieba, Douban, etc. also use the same method to segment your keywords, and strive to get labels that can cover the crowd.

If we want to attract female users in Shenzhen under the age of 60, we can create keywords for Shenzhen women aged 50 and other similar groups to cover all users.

3) Focus on channels: Quickly filter out channels that you are not good at or have poor results, and focus on one or two channels

In the process of diverting traffic across the entire network, you must know in advance that "you cannot do well in all channels." The diversion effect of each channel is limited, so it is very important to quickly try to see if it is effective on a large scale.

Make the cost of trial and error lower, select the channels that you are comfortable with, abandon the channels with poor results, put all your efforts into the effective channels, and being the first in the channel is the wisest choice.

It's better to pick on the weak than to insist on your own way.

4) Low cost: less effort, higher returns, high returns from leveraged traffic

Seeing this, everyone may have a question, why I chose platforms such as Weibo and Tieba. In essence, the process of attracting traffic is content marketing. Your content must be attractive enough to the target users to achieve the goal of attracting users.

The content presentation methods of these platforms have a common feature: "posting". For Weibo, you only need to edit 140 words to publish, and for Baidu Tieba, you only need a title and a body of text with no limit on the text. The upper limit for the title is only 60 words.

Using as few words as possible means less effort and you can quickly test the traffic-generating effects of multiple types of content. Unlike WeChat public accounts or other content platforms, manuscripts of thousands of words have to be typeset and polished before they can be published.

3. Replicate the standardized process of the community and create a traffic-based community matrix

Through the above channels, I accumulated nearly two hundred job seeker users within a week, and the highest traffic in a week was as high as 500 users. The next step is to direct traffic to the WeChat community and make preliminary preparations for our social fission.

At this stage, there are two major work cores: refining the process and replicating the traffic.

1. Segmentation process: community SOP process, with time as the horizontal axis and number of people as the vertical axis

The so-called community SOP is the standard operating procedure of our operators when working in the community. It describes the standard operating steps and requirements of a certain event in a unified format (it is recommended to use Excel tables to express them) to guide and standardize the daily work of operators in the community.

The essence of community SOP is to quantify the details of each community. For example, SOP is to refine and quantify the key control points in a certain procedure. In the actual implementation process, the core of SOP is to be in line with our original intention of building a community and to be executable. It cannot be superficial, but it needs to have a form.

Use the day the community is established as the horizontal axis and set up your daily community schedule to ensure that you have something to do every day. Using the growth in the number of people as the vertical axis, we set the goals we want to achieve at each stage. For example, when the group reaches 50 people, we need to let everyone follow the official account!

2. Duplicate traffic: Turn community building into a standardized process and execute a repetitive process in batches

"As long as you have perseverance, you can grind an iron rod into a needle." To build a traffic-based social network matrix, you need long-term execution, repeated execution and repeated feedback to push down your own SOP to get the effect you ultimately want.

Because creating a community is new, but asking you to repeat creating N communities is a disgusting thing at this time, because the repetitive operation will make you lose your enthusiasm for the community, it is difficult to maintain the original intention of creating a community, and people will become more lazy.

I hope that all those who operate communities or want to run communities will be mentally prepared and keep their original intentions in mind, only then can they build communities.

Author: Uncle Wen

Source: Uncle Wen himself