How to obtain seed users during the cold start period?

For Internet products, if there are no users, no money, no resources, and no data, they are often referred to as "four-no products" by Internet people, and it is even more difficult to operate them . However, an operation without a cold start is not a good operation. The so-called cold start is the process of accumulating users from 0 users. The most important thing during this cold start period is how to quickly acquire seed users . This article will discuss this.

I would like to state here that the cold start period in this article refers to the process of entrepreneurship from 0 to 1. It does not refer to a company with a mature and stable environment, a mature team, or a company with a mature system of architectural support and resource support. Therefore, it is more universal to a certain extent.

So during the cold start period of entrepreneurship, the primary goal of product and operation should be how to identify our users, how to improve user experience, and how to satisfy our users.

Therefore, there is a specific process: find the right target group - match the needs of target users - cultivate the loyalty of target users - bundle core users.

To put it simply, we need to find our leaders and target groups based on our product positioning. Since the product positioning may change as exploration deepens in the early stages of development, we need to screen and match our own users in the target group and gradually segment the user groups.

Because not all users will use our products in the early stages. After finding users, the next focus is to enhance user loyalty and achieve user growth. After this stage, we must pay attention to binding our core users. Many products tend to forget their early core users when they grow. However, this group of users is the key to our product’s later monetization and user retention.

Next, we will discuss the above four steps in detail:

1. Find the right target group

Whether it is product or operation, the most important thing during the cold start period is to find your target users. Products should be designed and developed based on identifying target users. Operations should find out where the target users are, let the target users use their products, and then provide feedback on users' opinions. As mentioned earlier, this may also involve changes in target users. So what kind of target users should we look for?

Next, take Xiaohongshu as an example to provide you with the following reference:

The first thing is to choose the right market. In 2013, Xiaohongshu was officially founded in Shanghai. In 2013, when cross-border tourism was developing rapidly, shopping during travel was a major pain point. People were faced with a series of problems such as how to buy high-quality goods and how to avoid being cheated.

At the same time, as people's consumption level improves, their requirements for product quality are getting higher and higher. In 2013, they began to turn to overseas shopping. However, people do not understand overseas products, do not know where to buy them at a good price, and do not understand how to pay taxes and get tax refunds.

Xiaohongshu just hits this pain point. Mao Wenchao, who loves traveling, and Qu Fang, who loves overseas shopping, found that there are a wide variety of travel guides on the market, but there is still a blank in the field of sharing overseas shopping information.

Therefore, they came up with the idea of ​​sharing their overseas shopping experiences with netizens through products, and they found a breakthrough point in the tourism market - sharing overseas travel shopping notes. This also laid the foundation for the community gene of "sharing beauty" that runs through Xiaohongshu's future development. In this process, Xiaohongshu quickly cultivated a large number of seed users.

Lei Jun said something very well - don't use tactical diligence to cover up strategic laziness. Choosing the right market can make your future life easier.

There are at least two key points to choosing the right market:

• First, this market is neither too big nor too small. If it is too big, it will be difficult to compete with the giants in the early stage, or you will face a large number of competitors. If it is too small, you may not be able to support yourself.
• Second, this market must be undergoing major changes, otherwise it would be difficult to compete with the old players who have been in this market for a long time.

After choosing the right market, you need to determine the users and scenarios. Xiaohongshu’s previous slogan was “Find good things from abroad”, and its current slogan is “Mark my life”. They are all focused on how to improve the quality of life of users. Therefore, the target users are concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, and their ages are concentrated among women between 20 and 35 years old. Their occupations include white-collar workers in big cities, civil servants, and international students.

In summary, Xiaohongshu's users are mainly young women living in big cities with an above-average consumption level. They have high aspirations for living standards and corresponding consumption levels. At the same time, I am willing to share every aspect of my life with people who have the same characteristics as me.

Xiaohongshu is mainly positioned as a cross-border e-commerce and sharing community platform. The scenarios for using Xiaohongshu are mainly distributed in two aspects: sharing community and purchasing goods. Xiaohongshu provides real-time shopping information and usage experience to users who want to buy foreign products in the form of UGC. Users can obtain shopping information and shopping experience through the community, and can also shop through the mall. The real target users always exist in specific scenarios.

After determining the target group, we can move on to the next stage of the product's task of matching target users to acquire our first batch of users. In this process, it should be noted that the first batch of users should be users with strong demands for the product, who will spend time and money trying to solve their needs. Users with strong demands will have a higher tolerance for the product. This is one of our ideas for finding the first batch of users.

2. Accurately acquire early users at low cost

Now that we know who our target users are, how should we find the first batch of users? After all, products in the exploration stage are generally short of funds at this time, and it is impossible to spend a lot of money to acquire users. Moreover, the requirement for users at this stage is accuracy, not quantity, so when acquiring early users, what we pursue is accuracy and low cost.

Here are three methods for reference only, depending on the company's situation:

2.1 Exchange list with advertising salesperson

Some people receive a lot of harassing calls every day, mostly from endless salespeople. In fact, these people, apart from making you angry, are still of some use value, because they have a large list of potential Internet customers, and they are all real.

For example: I remember one time a salesman from Baidu called me repeatedly to ask me to bid. I said that I was also in the Internet industry and had a lot of big customer lists. What do you think about us exchanging resources? So after several rounds of communication, the deal was naturally reached.

2.2 Go to the Internet venue to get the list

Most sales people from Internet companies go to conference venues to get lists and meet more potential customers. Many of the people in the venue are Party A (demand side), and of course there are also many colleagues in the same field. The people you meet at the venue have already filtered out the outsiders, so it has a very high accuracy. To get more lists at the venue, you need to have certain strength, be able to give speeches, and learn one-to-many wholesale speeches. Although you can get a lot of business cards through one-on-one business card exchanges, the benefits are not as great as from a speech on stage.

Of course, every speech needs to have a purpose. At the end of the speech, you can ask for a deal, but more often you can make your contact information public so that the parties in need can contact you. Normally, it is not a big problem to get 10-20 potential customers in a speech to 200-300 people.

2.3 Content community traffic generation

Early seed users are spread by friends around them, and these users may not be your core users, but they can produce high-quality UGC content and attract users to watch. The dissemination nodes of these seed users are very important.

You can often throw out some topics to interact with users, cater to their preferences, screen some high-quality questions, and integrate them with examples and understanding of events, so that users can recognize the discussion atmosphere of the community and stay for a long time. Later, you can conduct secondary integration by editing and screening the community UGC content. Users are also willing to spread and expand influence, and slowly form a sticky core user group willing to share.

For example: Zhihu was spread in the circle of friends through the invitation code model in the early days, acquiring seed users and generating UGC content for dissemination, which led some users to ask questions in the community, integrated content through certain operational means, invited more industry leaders to join, helped users answer questions, formed an atmosphere of learning knowledge, and continuously strengthened the community.

Knowledge-based communities not only rely on online dissemination, but also on offline linkage. By holding small salons from time to time, they can build a good offline reputation, strengthen the connection between KO and fans, create strong links, and make fans feel dependent, thus driving the rapid growth of users.

Therefore, creating high-quality content is one of the low-cost methods to acquire users, and many Internet companies have tried it successfully.

After finding the users, another factor comes into play - scenario. What actions do we want users to complete in what scenario? What kind of behavior is consistent with the core values ​​of our product? This is also what operations need to think about and guide users to complete.

3. Cultivate user loyalty

After accurately finding the first batch of users, the next step is to cultivate user loyalty. If our product cannot satisfy our first batch of users, or we are not the users' first choice, subsequent growth will be a fantasy. This means that there is a problem with our product itself, and we need to constantly modify it to meet user needs, or even start over.

Cultivating user loyalty is a phased process, which generally requires going through three stages: habit, satisfaction and emotion to complete the transformation from no loyalty to loyalty.

（1）Get users used to using your product

When a user uses your product for the first time, you need to make the user accustomed to using your product. This requires the product to be easy to use, usable, and easy to use. It also requires operations to establish the user's mindset: I am your first choice, so that the user will think of your product first when they need it.

The premise of habit is to provide users with matching content and services. Grasping the strong demands of users and guiding them, conducting differentiated marketing , and operating by user segments can allow users with different attributes to feel that the product is speaking their own language and promoting their favorite content, making users feel that the product understands them, thereby effectively establishing user minds.

（2）Make users satisfied with your product

User satisfaction is the basis of user loyalty. User satisfaction = user overall benefit - user overall cost - user expected value. The key to improving customer satisfaction lies in increasing the value that the product brings to users, that is, the product can meet the various needs of users.

For example, when users become premium members of an airline, purchasing air tickets not only satisfies their need to take the flight, but also satisfies their need to use the lounge and dine in the lounge at the airport. For some people, it even satisfies their self-esteem. Therefore, airline loyalty programs can effectively improve customer satisfaction.

In addition to increasing the value that the product brings to users, we also need to reduce the overall cost of users. User costs include not only economic costs, but also time costs during use and the physical and mental costs of obtaining and using the product. Reducing the economic cost of users is a common way to play the user loyalty system, such as giving users coupons after purchase to give them rebates when they repurchase: JD.com's Jingdou, Vipshop's Vipcoin, and Suning Cloud Diamond can all be used for cash discounts on the next purchase. These post-purchase rebates help increase the value of repeat purchase behavior to users.

Reducing the user's mental and physical costs is an advanced way to maintain loyalty. For example, Didi Taxi's big data algorithm can automatically guess the destination based on the time and starting point of your taxi, reducing the user's operating costs.

(3) Make users feel attached to your product

Having emotion means making users feel emotional about your products and services, which means you need to humanize your products.

So how do we personalize our products?

The key is to interact and communicate with users, so that users can feel that you are not a cold machine, but that you have emotions and you will express your emotions to users.

Users will change their attitudes depending on how close they are to things or people, and the "insider" mentality is a common mentality among users. In addition to allowing users to participate in interactions, the open source attitude of Internet products can even allow users to participate in the design of the product. Those users who can participate in product design will eventually become the product's most fanatical fans.

Let’s take the example of Get here. Get has a strong emotional connection with users. First of all, Get’s positioning is to provide knowledge services to users. Whether it is Luo Pang or other column bigwigs, they all have a strong sense of service, which can be clearly perceived as long as you listen to the column programs.

We select one evening every week to conduct a live broadcast of the weekly work meeting report to report to users on the work of the week. Yes, you heard it right, a report. And those who report are all at the vice president level or above, usually Luo Pang, the CEO, and the product manager.

Did you see that? Compared with other content service platforms, don’t you feel that Duoduo is warmer and pays more attention to every user? In addition to this, after each column program, everyone is encouraged to leave messages for discussion. The column teachers will also discuss issues with users, and some even have their own organizations, such as Teacher Liu Run’s "Student Union." Step by step, we need to deepen users’ emotions and time investment in the product. When creating content, we must pay attention to warmth. If we just provide knowledge coldly, wouldn’t that be like going to school?

Completing the transformation from seed users to loyal users does not mean the end of the cold start. We should also establish a user retention mechanism, bind core users, and accumulate sufficient foundation for the product.

4. Bundle core users

The core users mentioned here refer to users who will have a great impact on the core business of the product, such as KOLs of community products and big spenders of game products. In order to bind these users, here are 8 common methods:

(1) Reaching users through multiple channels

Reaching users is a very good way to improve user retention. The most common ways of reaching users are push reaching, SMS reaching, WeChat public account reaching, and more advanced smart reaching.

(2) Daily Sign-in

Daily check-in refers to the introduction of a check-in function for the product. When users reach a certain number of check-ins, they can obtain points. It is generally used in conjunction with the points system and membership system. There are also cases where the check-in function is used alone.

(3) Activity incentives

Through activity incentives, new users are guided to perform key behaviors and thus retain them.

Incentives such as novice tasks, new user benefits, and discounted coupons will increase the motivation of new users to use the service and will also guide users to use the service. For example, Taobao and e-commerce products will provide incentives such as 0 yuan purchases or new user coupons to increase the user ratio of new users using the service.

Another example is the Meituan app. The operation process for new users is that they first receive a red envelope for takeout. After receiving it, they return to the Meituan app and see a pop-up window for red envelopes for new customers. After closing the pop-up window, they see a gift package exclusively for new users. Each step is guided by activities. In addition, users' original understanding of Meituan is "discounts", so such activities are in line with user expectations.

(4) User stratification

If the product covers too many users, users with different characteristics will have segmented and differentiated demands for the same needs, which cannot be met by a single service. At this time, finding user characteristics with obvious differences in needs and providing matching services will increase the rate of new users using the service and their satisfaction after use.

For example, Xiaohongshu discovered that the retention rate among new and young users was relatively poor. After studying their usage behavior, it was discovered that their needs for searching for content related to anime avatars and celebrities were not met, nor were their needs met by the recommended content in the feed. Therefore, the operation team was arranged to complete the content in this area, or to hide the tags of missing content.

For example, information flow channels can be used to carry out targeted delivery according to fixed groups of people. While defining the users, it can also obtain the attributes of the group of people. In this way, we can develop corresponding retention strategies for this group of people. For females + users in first- and second-tier cities + interest points, recommending content or products with good conversion rates can all be a purposeful attempt.

(5) Points system

The points system introduces the concept of points into the product. By rewarding points, it encourages users to complete a series of operations, while improving user activity and retention. An example of a relatively good points system is Ant Financial's points system, which encourages users to consume through Alipay.

Another example is Taobao’s points system, which encourages users to shop on Taobao and earn points. Points can be exchanged for certain prizes, thus enhancing users’ stickiness to Taobao and greatly improving user retention.

(6) Membership system

Both traditional retail and new retail attach great importance to the construction of membership systems. There are a dazzling array of membership systems. Famous ones include JD membership, Amazon membership, KFC membership, etc. Recently, Alibaba also launched the 88 membership. The purpose of major companies launching memberships is that now is an era of inventory, and each company is trying its best to work on existing users and tap the value of inventory.

(7) Product process optimization

To increase the conversion rate from product launch to key behavior, you need to list each step and see where there is room for improvement in the conversion rate.

For example, why don’t high-traffic products like Toutiao and Baidu Mobile collect users’ interests? Although if users are asked to fill in their points of interest, recommendations can be more accurate. But logically speaking, every additional step a product takes will result in additional loss. It's just a matter of weighing the benefits of this extra step versus the loss, which is more worthwhile. Judging from the situation of Toutiao today, collecting points of interest is definitely a negative thing.

For example, if you introduce a membership system in online education, but users find that your product does not have many courses, will they stay? Another example is the sign-in and points system on shopping websites. If the products are very poor, often crash, and there are many fakes, will users still buy them?

(8) High-quality service

When new users are using your product, you should provide the best service or products and seize this most important opportunity to retain these users.

For example, when you don’t use takeout and fresh food e-commerce products frequently, they will often push coupons to you to cultivate your usage habits; social products will often push coupons to girls near you to stimulate you to use them.

While using operational strategies to improve core user retention, you also need to make great efforts to continuously polish and optimize products and improve product services.

The above are eight methods to bind core users. In specific operational practices, which method to use depends on your product evaluation to make the best choice. Here we also remind everyone to grasp the promotion channels, because the integrity of the dissemination path is a very important part of your experience, and a large number of seed users are willing to share their experiences.

Finally, a fixed operating model is not a good operation. Good operating activities are good at embracing changes and must remember to follow the rules. After all, if you can go from 0 to 1, why should you be afraid of going from 1 to 100?

By Te Fuir

Source: Te Fuir