Editor's introduction: With the peak of the traffic dividend and the increase in the difficulty of online customer acquisition, what should the C-end product do if it wants to obtain user growth and enhance daily life? In this article, the author combines actual cases to review the events of a C-end product achieving ultra-high traffic growth from 0 to 1, which may wish to take a look at it together.
- C-end products have no traffic dividends, want to not spend money cold start, too difficult!
- The mobile Internet has entered the stage of stock competition, no resources, how to fight?
- So many big factories are doing innovation, and there is no success
……
The above views have been constantly mentioned since 2019. The once-much-anticipated mobile Internet seems to have entered a period of decline, and those C-end product managers who have been focusing on users and focusing on experience have difficulty in having the opportunity to prove themselves, facing the pressure of transformation, downgrading and even dismissal.
And today's article, I want to bring some confidence to the C-end product manager who firmly believes in user value through a recent personal experience of a blockbuster product case.
Although there are some title parties, the project results are solid, as the first step of the review, first present you with the final product data:
A small team of 5 people (1 product, 1 designer, 1 front-end, 1 server, 1 test), only 2 weeks of development, without spending a penny, from 2021.12.9 online, to 2022.1.17, get DAU12.4w, add 48.9% of the new times, 7 stay 34%, 14 stay 26%. As an experimental C-end product, it is a cold start answer sheet that can be crossed.
In fact, this product is not complicated, just a small tool to record daily moods, called "Time Diary", it looks like this:
At first glance, there is nothing special, almost all mood diary products are designed like this, but the difference is that this is a service card customized for Huawei's Hongmeng platform, which can directly reach users in the desktop scene, so you can also use it like this:
How's that, isn't that interesting? Yes, it is in hongmeng such an emerging platform that customizing an exclusive product has brought us more traffic growth than expected.
Without further ado, I will take stock of the implementation process of this project for you, and reveal the ins and outs behind this step by step.
First, why did you choose Hongmeng?
As mentioned above, today's mobile Internet is the era of stock, and if you want to grow, you can only find an increase from the stock, and the Hongmeng system is a traffic depression that we found.
In June 2021, Huawei officially betaed HarmonyOS, upgrading more than 50 million users in August. In December of the same year, Huawei devices equipped with HarmonyOS exceeded 220 million. This growth rate allows us to see Huawei's confidence and determination in the Hongmeng system, according to the survey, Huawei's total equipment ownership is 700 million, so far it has only covered 1/3, which is definitely a treasure trove worth mining.
So we started our research around HarmonyOS and came to the following conclusions:
First, this is a new developer ecosystem with its own review and listing mechanism.
HarmonyOS applications are independent of Huawei's existing AppGallery Connect Android application system, from developer onboarding, product design, code writing, and listing review. And precisely because it is new enough, the support for the developers who worked early is very high, which is very suitable for those of us who are looking for opportunities for the small innovation team.
Second, for harmonyOS applications, there are additional traffic distribution portals.
In order to highlight the uniqueness, Huawei deliberately opened a separate traffic entrance for the Hongmeng application, when the desktop from the bottom left to the top right (or the bottom right to the top left) sliding, you can wake up an interface called "Service Center", where you can find all the HarmonyOS applications called "Service Cards", our products benefit from the promotion of this location, and get a lot of free traffic.
Third, the development cost of harmonyOS applications is low and the experience is simple and straightforward.
Compared with the traditional Android system, Hongmeng has defined an exclusive product form called "Atomized Service Card" and provided a complete development framework for this purpose. From the interface, it is a bit similar to the Widget widget, which can display cards of different sizes directly on the desktop. But unlike the App, it has its own design and coding specifications, no installation required, small size (within 10MB), point-and-click, because it is lightweight enough, and it is simple and fast to develop, which is very suitable for product verification ideas in the form of MVP.
Second, how did the 12wDAU of "Time Diary" run out?
After thoroughly investigating the characteristics of the platform, we decided to give it a try. But there are so many kinds of HarmonyOS apps, what exactly can be done? After several rounds of discussion, it was decided to start from these points:
- I have my own personal needs;
- Refer to existing success stories (iOS Widget);
- Suitable for desktop rendering;
- is a supplement to system tools;
- Simple and straightforward to use;
- Be good-looking!
Just the team's product manager, designers are little girls, they proposed that mooda on iOS is very good-looking, but because they want to spend money and don't want to, they said that they simply made a similar product, designed some cute icons, and remembered the mood with one key on the desktop, both the sense of ceremony and at a glance, and finally finalized the plan of the time diary.
After the product is settled, it is necessary to solve the problem of where the user came from. From 0 to 12w, we mainly did 2 things right:
The first is to get the official recommendation of Huawei, and the second is to get the self-dissemination on the Little Red Book.
As shown in the image above, we have experienced a total of 3 official referrals. The first promotion was unexpected, a serious bug made us miss the opportunity; the second time to reinvigorate, with the full support of the Hongmeng developer service team, successfully crossed the 5wDAU threshold.
And it is precisely because of this boost, the users on the Little Red Book discovered us, the novel experience and the cute painting style, so that the product spread rapidly, a large number of Little Red Book's note recommendations, further pulled our DAU up to the 7w horizontal line.
It is also because of the reputation of Xiaohongshu that we can take it as a highlight case, further apply to Huawei for a new round of promotion for the 3rd promotion, and finally break through the 10w mark and successfully explode!
The most gratifying thing is that the outbreak of traffic growth is not fleeting, cute design, desktop direct scenes, daily record habit formation, and finally for us to harvest a good retention data, further verify the value of the product, but also the follow-up application resources, continuous investment of a strong proof.
Third, what have we gained from the innovative practice on the Hongmeng platform?
Frankly speaking, this success is not achieved overnight, and we are not the first wave of innovative attempts on the Hongmeng platform. But after a lot of research, travel, trial and error, plus a little luck, I also summed up some experience here, not hidden, open out, hoping to let more small partners benefit from it.
1. First of all, how to make products on the Hongmeng platform? How is it different from other platforms? I have 3 points of recommendation
1) Maximize the value of your service card
Although Android also has Widget, the OS experience is inconsistent, resulting in low popularity. The desktop scene is naturally just needed, which can be seen from the popularity of the iOS widget. Therefore, it is the key to retain users to guide users to add cards to the desktop as much as possible, make full use of the advantages of screen WYSIWYG and develop corresponding fast services.
2) Lightweight, minimalist
HarmonyOS emphasizes the atomization service, which has strict restrictions on application volume and logical complexity, and is more suitable for the function of "one product only does one thing", and if you want to get user approval, you can penetrate a scene.
3) Make a layer of adaptation on the code
Since it is a new development framework, it is inevitable that there will be various interface updates, in order to cope with multiple versions of the API, it is recommended that developer students reserve a compatibility mechanism on the code to improve the adaptation efficiency.
2. Secondly, if you want to get traffic growth on Hongmeng, what is the most critical link?
My advice is: under the premise of ensuring a high-quality experience, we must establish long-term, one-on-one contact with Huawei's counterpart responsible for Hongmeng developer services.
At present, the promotion position of the "service center" has a very obvious effect, so it is extremely critical to get exposure in the designated area where the traffic is concentrated. When you are invited to become a Hongmeng developer, there will be someone to connect with you. What you have to do is to communicate with them in depth and frequently about the design ideas and functional highlights on each iteration of the product, and win the official scheduling recommendation.
The ideal rhythm is that every time you arrive, a new version is released, so as to maximize the use of this valuable organic traffic and achieve a win-win situation for you and the platform.
Of course, as a new traffic ecology, there are also many problems in developing products on the Hongmeng system.
- The first is the high cost of migration. The code developed on Hongmeng can only be compiled into its own format and cannot be adapted to ordinary Android Apps. In other words, users can only find your product on Huawei devices that support Hongmeng system.
- The second is that the means of growth rely heavily on official recommendations. At present, Hongmeng cards can only be obtained through the service center, and this scene is difficult to wake up (the understanding cost of the diagonal sliding out is higher), the location is limited, and if there is no official support, it is difficult for users to know where we are.
- The third is that the development environment is unstable, and new problems continue to emerge. Many bugs can only wait for the official update to be solved, resulting in high adaptation costs for development, which further affects the function iteration and user experience.
But then again, as a new thing, it always has to go through a certain adjustment period. We are just like the "early adopters" in "Crossing the Chasm", while eating dividends, we work with the official to optimize this ecology, cross this crack, and usher in the mass market, which is also the attitude we should have!
Finally, through this explosive practice, I hope to share with you one of the tips I have summarized on how to innovate, that is:
Taking advantage of the new traffic platform, low cost from 0 to 1, quickly verify requirements, accumulate seed users, and achieve efficient cold start.
Taking Hongmeng as an example, I drew a spiral growth curve like this:
I don't explain much about this diagram, I understand everything, and I believe that it is also applicable to reuse this curve on other platforms. I hope that this method can provide new ideas for C-end product managers who are now declining, and encourage them together!
#专栏作家 #
Shen Yue, WeChat public account: Internet Reading Notes (ID: pmboxs), everyone is a product manager columnist, 360 product director, and an excellent tutor of the starting point academy.
This article was originally published in Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without permission is prohibited
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol