Seed User Operation Methodology

The author shares his thoughts and experiences on seed users in entrepreneurial projects. Like most operational methodologies, it is not that difficult. The key lies in dedication and persistence (especially dedication).

I haven’t published any articles on the platform for more than half a year. In the past six months, I have been working on some entrepreneurial projects that lack obvious direction, which is quite difficult.

When it comes to starting a business, seed users are naturally indispensable for the initial cold start of a product. In the past six months, I have gained a new understanding of seed users and accumulated some methodologies for finding seed users and operating them.

This article is mainly based on the experience of the past six months and answers the following questions:

• Why do we need seed users?
• Who is considered a seed user?
• How to use engineering methods to find seed users?
• How to operate them?
• What is the relationship between seed users and products?

1. Why do we need seed users?

The main purpose is to gain empathy and help with iteration.

In the field of innovation, as the entrepreneurial track becomes more and more segmented, bosses (main decision makers) and product designers can no longer simply come up with ideas for product iterations based on their own physical sensations; they must gain the empathy of users.

In mature business areas, many businesses (such as e-commerce, mobile operating systems, etc.) have reached a stage of fierce competition. A little bit of user experience optimization will create a huge gap, so operations and interactions must be optimized based on user usage details.

Seed users are an extension of the team and an extension of the product manager's sense of touch. Seed users who have good communication skills and are affectionate towards the product will become the main source of inspiration for new insights for product managers.

2. Who is considered a seed user?

When we were acquiring seed users, I called the girl in the team who was responsible for acquiring seed users the "Smell Officer." Because not everyone is suitable to be a seed user. I believe that seed users should have certain personality traits and be consistent with the basic user portrait of the product (or the group of people we want to serve).

The process of "smelling" requires the sense of touch to distinguish whether a person is suitable to become our seed user.

1. The user’s own personality

We believe that enthusiastic and extroverted people are more suitable to be seed users. They are more willing to share their opinions, and these people are generally more willing to speak out their ideas.

2. User's static/dynamic attributes

In a nutshell, we need the user's attributes and product attributes to match.

Static attributes are the most basic attributes, mainly age, gender, location, marital status, income, etc. The generation gap is prevalent in society. If the purpose is not to explore new markets, it is meaningless to look for people who are far away from the target users in age group and gender as seed users.

Dynamic attributes are also a way to distinguish people, but this method of distinction is relatively soft. For example, people who have watched a certain movie recently, like "Tiny Times", and love playing basketball.

3. The matching degree between user pain points or needs and product capabilities

Rumor has it that when DingTalk was first founded, it visited companies one by one to co-create products with them and solve pain points in enterprise management.

This was important in the past, but now it is difficult to do or even unnecessary for most products. Because most products can no longer solve users' urgent needs. Even a product as powerful as TikTok cannot immediately tell what urgent needs it solves.

I think this depends on the product we want to design, whether it is a B-end product or a C-end product.

The demand for B-side products is more obvious (such as DingTalk), and this is more important. If it is a C-end product of pan-entertainment, this matching degree may not necessarily be a screening criterion for seed users.

3. How to find seed users using engineering methods

Let’s not talk about the traffic import strategy of Toutiao and Tencent. This strategy is basically useless for all entrepreneurial teams (even teams from big companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Momo can’t do it).

Here are two of my practical ideas. One is to fish on a large scale and then conduct careful screening; the other is to select one by one, beg or seduce them one by one, and carry out refined operations.

1. Large-scale fishing and fine-grained screening

Acquire users in user distribution centers through some activities, such as posting heroic posts in university self-media to recruit seed users for a small fee, and organizing some paid online activities in the school.

Introduce a group of people into a large community, and then through repeated communication and daily operations, those who remain in the group and can still play with us after a month are basically suitable seed users.

This method is mainly suitable for products whose seed users have obvious clustering characteristics. For example, if you want to make a product based on college students, the static attribute of college students is obviously clustered.

2. Select one by one, beg or seduce seed users

If we want to create a photo community for young people, the definition of seed users will not be as precise as the "college students" mentioned above.

Now we need to use engineering thinking:

• First of all, we need to find out where there are a large number of young people posting pictures? It may be Weibo, LOFTER, Yican, Tieba, etc.
• Then, we listed several types of rhetoric. Based on the private messaging function of these platforms, we divided our forces and used different rhetoric to hook up with them (since we could not provide anything to users, we could only act cute and pitiful and say that we were a startup team in order to gain their recognition and sympathy).
• Next, analyze where and what words are most likely to acquire seed users, and concentrate your efforts to use this method to expand.

The advantage of this method is that every user will feel that they have been invited, and those who are receptive to such approaches are generally easier to talk to and will cooperate more with our work in the subsequent operations.

4. How to operate them

1. Group operations

If there are more than 30 seed users, do not put them into a group. As mentioned above, these people are enthusiastic. If the group has too many members, it will easily become a spam group, where people chat about trivial things and fill the screen with emoticons every day.

My suggestion is to create a new group for every 30 people. Separate management can keep an eye on every seed user and prevent users from becoming insolvent.

2. Regular activities

Regular activities can be daily/weekly topics, or some free/paid APP experience activities.

The purpose of these activities is mainly to cultivate the habit of users interacting with us, let them know that we will pay attention to them and actively chat with them, and also encourage them to use our products frequently.

3. Become an extension of the product manager

This is the core and most important point.

The duties of a product manager include regular one-on-one surveys, one-to-many questionnaires, and priority use for new version releases.

During this operation process, you will also find that a group of loyal fans are quietly emerging, and they will tell you a lot of their opinions every time the version is updated.

4. Fast and timely feedback

When the features, optimizations or new ideas reported by seed users are accepted by us, we should give them feedback as soon as possible and tell everyone in the group about the relevant incentives given to these users (it may just be a small red envelope).

5. Leverage

Among this group of active seed users, there may be some who are particularly active and idle. If the functions of our products are particularly sexy, it may also make some people particularly excited.

These people can then be used to leverage our power and become KOLs or administrators of our seed user group.

5. The relationship between seed users and products

We must be clear that it is difficult for users to tell us what they want, nor can they tell us how to create the next TikTok.

I think that people should not over-glorify the role of seed users just because they have read Xiaomi’s original “Sense of Participation”.

Seed users can provide products with:

• Optimization suggestions for operation interaction;
• Judging whether you like the content tone and product tone;
• Functional optimization suggestions;
• Differentiation from competitors that we failed to identify;
• Once a product hits the user's pain points or high points, it can generate word-of-mouth communication.

Seed users cannot provide the following for the product:

• The general direction of product iteration;
• A decision to do or not do a feature;
• The direction of product tonality;
• Insights into users.

6. Advice to everyone

In the past six months or so of seed operation, I have summarized the following points:

• We operate seed users carefully and attentively. Although they cannot express new demands, they can help us prioritize current demands.
• Seed users can help a product go from 70 points to 80 points, but the process from 0 to 60 points still depends on the insights of the team and product manager. Don’t expect users to pave the way for you.
• The methodology that Xiaomi used to write in books is difficult to implement in today's society, because in that era, the Android UI interface was a very rigid pain point, while such pain points are very rare in today's startups.
• Before the product is sexy enough, don't believe that seed users will bring word of mouth. Seed users are the same as everyone else. They will help spread the product only when the product exceeds their expectations. The kind of spread due to relationship pressure (that is, you and the seed users become good friends) will not produce fission effect.

The above are some of the experiences I gained while operating seed users in the past six months.

Like most operational methodologies, it is not that difficult; the key lies in dedication and persistence (especially dedication).

I hope the above text can be of some help to everyone.

Author: Liang Yanhao

Source: Liang Yanhao