Tantan Pan Ying: How to create an algorithm-based "face value" social platform

Editor’s Note:

"It is a great thing for women to walk out of the stage without catching a cold. Once their hearts are filled with passion, their bodies become steel bones." It is said that this sentence came from Balzac of France in the 19th century. In fact, if it is used to describe the current group of female entrepreneurs in China, it is really excellent. On the occasion of another Women's Day, NetEase Entrepreneurship Club has recently launched a series of women in the venture capital circle to get closer to their thoughts on entrepreneurship or investment.

(This issue’s interviewee is Pan Ying, co-founder of the stranger social product “Tantan”.)

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Tantan: A mobile social app based on location, featuring a new concept of strangers making friends, with a simple style. Users can swipe left and right to get to know people nearby, swipe left to say goodbye, swipe right to like, and send text, voice, pictures, etc. The average age of users is currently 24 (male) and 22 (female). The team currently has about 50 core employees and has completed its C round of financing.

Foreign counterparts: Tinder

Around 2015, there were more than a dozen LBS-based stranger social products in China that were similar to Tantan or Tinder, but many of them have disappeared today in the cruel social product entrepreneurial ecosystem. From the perspective of NetEase Entrepreneurship Club, if you want to make a good social product, especially a stranger social product, you not only need to have a deep understanding of human nature and introduce this understanding into demand scenarios to iterate products that can truly solve pain points; you also need to face the natural shortcomings of the one-to-one model that is prone to user loss and virtual relationship social networking that often only meets user needs to a limited extent.

Therefore, how far it can go is a problem that is inherent to and will always exist for stranger social products.

Why is Tantan still alive and seems to be doing well at a time when other social products are transforming or dying?

From the perspective of NetEase Entrepreneurship Club, Tantan has the following main product features:

1. Design products based on female user experience

1. Focus on products from a female perspective

Virtual scenes are often a projection of reality. Whether from the current male-female ratio in society or the differences in gender psychology, men have always been the main users of stranger social products. This also leads to the fact that most stranger social products are designed and positioned based on the needs of male users. This also leads to a self-evident state: public opinion soon has a more negative perception of stranger social products: "date" is no longer a simple "date" as before. (Orz)

"We hope to create a legitimate dating platform that young people, especially young women, like to use, so as to overcome this bad phenomenon and misunderstanding in public opinion and establish a new era of dating," said Pan Ying. Therefore, the product design pays special attention to women's psychological feelings and user experience.

We can summarize it into the following points:

First of all, the product name, logo design, color tone and promotion are all more feminine, including the tone in the App, which is more suitable for communicating with post-95 girls;

Secondly, it provides a safer and more comfortable environment for female users in terms of gameplay: giving girls more freedom to choose. If the person who chooses her does not confirm the choice of the girl herself, the two people will no longer have any intersection on the platform, which will naturally prevent harassment (according to the background of Tantan, for every 100 photos, girls will choose 6% and boys will choose 60%. It is very similar to the attitude of choice in reality, oh);

Again, this matching mechanism is more in line with girls’ psychology: they can see how many people like them, but they cannot see who the other person is, which satisfies a sense of “little happiness” and “little surprise”.

2. “Appearance social networking” based on algorithms

Pan Ying introduced that on Tantan, users do not choose based on appearance alone: ​​on the one hand, "after all, most of them are ordinary-looking people." On the other hand, among the current active users on the app, the average male user will look through 200 photos a day, and the average female user will look through 300 photos a day, but in fact, millions of users are meaningless to each individual - they can't be consumed. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a set of algorithms for each user as a reference for recommendations.

"We will guess what type of users prefer based on more than a dozen indicators (such as hobbies, occupations, hometowns, etc.), and the longer users use the product, the higher the accuracy of the algorithm. From the sampling in the past month, in addition to most users having more than 3 photos, 75% of people also filled in various tags, with an average of 18 per person. These are all the information behind the photos, which can greatly increase the success rate (especially for boys)."

In addition, the product also provides some small skills for making friends. For example, the photos you upload can reflect your life, hobbies, travel and other types of photos, which are more likely to gain popularity. "According to our backend data, the girls who upload photos are mainly the girl next door type, and the boys who upload photos are mostly sunny and warm. If there are pets in the photos, the extra points will be doubled. So it can be said that the aesthetic pursuit of young people nowadays is still relatively normal." (XD)

3. Establish community norms and pay attention to noise reduction

In terms of regulating user behavior, Tantan has made a series of attempts to clean up "female users who sell goods and male users who engage in harassing behavior" to improve user purity.

First of all, for example, in terms of language usage, set banned words. For example, if a boy types words like "Let's meet?", his account (mobile phone registration system) may be blocked.

Secondly, in terms of review, there is a special team that screens out fake photos through manual analysis and judgment, and directly blocks pictures without faces or photos of celebrities, internet celebrities, etc.

Again, for the handling of marketing accounts, the first time is a warning, and multiple times will result in direct account closure.

Second, how to maintain user retention

In fact, we can regard the user information that you like to see by swiping left and right in Tantan as a "disposable" social product based on location. The "flip card" model is an unavoidable problem of how to minimize information duplication while ensuring that there are enough new users in all regions every day. There may even be such a problem: there is no shortage of users in densely populated area A, but in relatively densely populated area B, there may be a shortage of users in the early stage.

"It is indeed possible that in a certain area, users have run out of photos and there are no new ones. We have thought of many ways to deal with this situation, but the conclusion is - there is no way. So we must ensure rapid user growth."

Therefore, they have made various marketing attempts in the past six months, such as multiple embedded topic marketing attempts with female reading platforms, female Weibo influencers, and variety shows such as "Jin Xing Show" and "Happy Camp". It is said that the effect is quite good. The number of users brought by topic discussions has experienced several stages of explosive growth, from 500,000 before October last year to 1 million in December to 1.7 million at present. (Note: This figure has not been verified and confirmed by NetEase Entrepreneurship Club)

Pan Ying believes that there is no need to worry too much about the loss of users after successful matching on the platform. "After all, many times the so-called singles are too picky. For stranger social products, the biggest challenge is whether they can guarantee the unique value that users need - the success rate of making friends."

As the Bible says, “One generation goes, another generation comes.”

However, from the perspective of NetEase Entrepreneurship Club, stranger social platforms, which are one-on-one and one-on-one, are indeed very prone to losing users. To be more cruel, in fact, no stranger social product can prevent individual users from transferring to other familiar social platforms or meeting offline after communicating to a certain critical point. So how the stranger social platform handles user sedimentation or user loss is an inevitable hurdle, and it is also a point where all stranger social products need to find clever solutions, either from the group, or from the function, or by providing valuable information, etc., each taking what is best.

3. Business Model

According to Pan Ying, Tantan will also launch two or three monetization attempts this year: first, the VIP membership mechanism used by almost all social applications; second, an advertising push system that matches young users.

In fact, the conventional monetization models of social applications can generally be summarized into two categories: one is to sell memberships or emoticons and other internal resources for monetization, and the other is to cooperate with external parties to attract traffic or place advertisements. Each company's product and each product at different stages will choose different operation methods according to the actual situation.

4. How to view the female entrepreneurship boom

Like many female entrepreneurs, Pan Ying doesn't like to overemphasize gender.

"For example, people often say that female entrepreneurs tend to be emotional or indecisive. In fact, this is not a gender issue, but a personality issue, which can occur in both male and female entrepreneurs. However, people who are too emotional are not suitable for decision-making roles such as CEOs. But in terms of management style, female entrepreneurs tend to be more humane and caring."

She believes that women seem to have more advantages in industries related to marketing, sales, and products:

A person can collect a lot of information in daily life, but not all of it will enter the person's consciousness - a lot of information is actually stored in the subconscious. Women often collect a lot of information, but the amount that enters consciousness is relatively narrow. Men do not collect such a wide range of information, but they are more focused, and a lot of the information they collect can enter the consciousness for analysis.

Relatively speaking, women’s subconscious information cannot be analyzed, so it is more emotional. However, the information that remains in the subconscious is not irrelevant, so women sometimes put together those that can be clearly explained and those that cannot be clearly explained to make decisions.

However, for products related to people, such as to C products, to C strategies, to C sales, and to C advertising, opinions that are a mixture of clearly stated reasons and unclear reasons are often more correct.