As we planned the PCon Product Innovation Conference on March 25-26, 2022, we also prepared a special topic for the audience on product operations and user growth, hoping to pass on the industry's mature experience to the audience. By chance, I saw a speech by Teacher Huang Youxuan in the early years, which was about the topic of product growth, and he was experienced in product operation, good at summarizing, refining, and forming his own methodology. The speech was organized.
The topic of self-growth is not a completely new topic, whether it is product planning or operation, its underlying logic can be talked about around the product life cycle in the following figure.
This figure was proposed by Professor Funon of Harvard University in 1966, no matter what the attributes of the product and what kind of functions it has, its development process will basically follow the trend of the horizontal S-shaped curve on the map.
During the introduction period of a product, users do not trust the product, so at the beginning of the launch of the new product, the function is not perfect, the process is not smooth, and the growth is slow, which is also a very normal phenomenon. In terms of operation, we should focus on user reputation, especially to have high-quality users with high fault tolerance, and then give them an experience that exceeds expectations, because they have an experience that exceeds expectations, there is user reputation, and it will be smoother to do growth through these reputations.
In the operational logic of the introduction period, it is not recommended to put a large amount of budget into the market to buy traffic or buy conversions. On the contrary, it is recommended to subsidize users in some form, and after subsidizing users in a better form, it will exceed the user's expected experience and enhance the user's desire to share. From the perspective of operational logic, at this stage, let high-quality users do human flesh pulling.
In the growth period, some users already have the state of spontaneous word-of-mouth recommendation, and the product growth curve is significantly accelerating, which needs to be boosted and amplified in operation. In the middle and early stages, only products with spontaneous growth capabilities have operational value. If a product is in the middle and early stages, it has no way to achieve the ability to spontaneously grow, it may not have much operational value. In other words, one of the ways to die of a product is likely to be born in Laxin and die in retention.
In the growth period, the main point of operation is to increase the amount of subsidies, and then occupy various channels, do effect delivery, and quickly obtain a large number of users through various event PR.
To the maturity of the user growth curve to the ceiling, it seems that it is difficult to rise again, this time need to pay attention to two things, the first thing is called squeezing user value, how to squeeze user value? That is, to use various ways to increase the user's activity and continue to occupy the user's time. The second is business exploration and monetization, usually in the mature stage, the operation to build a user system in the station, and then the operation from extensive to fine; secondly, many product mechanisms and activities for user activity improvement will be launched, and typical actions such as points, levels, honors, medals and other mechanisms may be concentrated at this stage.
Finally, there is the recession period, when competitors and alternative products may appear, and it is found that core users continue to move to competitors. Therefore, at this stage, there are only two things to pay attention to in operation, the first thing is to do more refined management of a user's life cycle, to extend its life cycle, or to slow down the speed of user churn and transfer to other products. The second direction is to explore new product directions.
So how to build a product's self-growth gene, build a product's "self-growth" gene, the core lies in how to allow users to use the core process or function of the product, can produce a spontaneous sharing motivation.
Once this is done, it means that every time a user comes to use / experience your product, there is an opportunity to share it with the outside world during use, as long as the product is running normally, there will be a group of users to endorse the product every day, which is the core premise.
Around this premise, let's share the 6 ways of thinking about building product growth genes that we observed.
Thinking Clue 1 – How can you use the functionality or data of the product to help users generate a self-deprecating or ostentatious outcome?
To take two classic examples, the first is the Daily P Chart, which adds a one-click ability to generate my elementary school student ID photo. There are many people involved, many people share to the circle of friends, after sharing to the circle of friends, others scan the code in, users can get the highlights of this product, there is a high probability of conversion into users.
The other is Baidu Magic Map, its shell is to let users compete with a certain star, to see how high the similarity of the appearance is, and some people will continue to spread in the circle of friends. This is the first way of thinking, Input & Output, and the foothold of thinking is whether it can finally be wrapped in a shell for external output.
The second is based on user contributions or the accumulation of data generated, to form a set of actions, such as how many words are written, how many roads have been walked, how many interactions have been completed, how many books have been read, and so on. Based on this accumulated data, a shell is wrapped. Through the function of the product itself and the data function itself, it is necessary to plan some interesting or self-showing actions.
Thinking Clue 2 – Can it help users self-reveal their commitment or achievement?
Thinking Clue 3 - Can you give users a motivation to share the product with others at the moment when the user confirms that they have a better experience and harvest the value of the product?
That is to say, it can be driven by profit, or it can be driven by spiritual kidnapping, or it can be given a motivation to share the product with others. The so-called profit drive, that is, the user has gained good value and experience in me, and then I give him a motivation to share this thing, which is the so-called material motivation. There is also a motivation through spirit or honor, when the user gets a better experience, let the user share this thing.
Thinking Clue 4 – Can you help users establish or approach their own "ideal image" around the use of the product?
Products in this direction are basically related to learning, changing, and growing, and this kind of product can basically be thought about.
The most typical example is keep after the Spring Festival to do the post-festival meat fighting, and the core experience of Keep, the core function is related, and then many users come in very willing to participate, showing a strong motivation, users are also willing to share it with friends, and then go to invite small partners to sign up to participate.
In addition, there is the "21-day early rise plan" planned by the product of the morning and night calendar, its mechanism is particularly classic, relying on such a mechanism without spending any promotion costs, from 0 to nearly one million user volume, behind it is to show a positive, and lazy people are distinguished from the sense of superiority. So, mechanisms are important.
Reflection Clue 5 – Can you give user benefits through some peculiar form of user engagement?
Take selling goods as an example, to promote user consumption means including discounts, to welfare, in addition to one-way welfare discounts, you can also let customers and you "jointly complete an interaction", will be discounted to you, this interaction can be designed, assuming that the form of your interaction design is good enough, interesting enough, then it is itself a spread. For example, there is a fat cat spicy pot shop in Beijing, this shop is very famous, they have a particularly strange mechanism, that is, you stand in front of their door with a big horn tube, shout three times into the street, I love fat cats, and then he will give you a free lunch meat. This is a very peculiar form of user participation, and then the benefits are given to the user.
Thought Tip 6 – Is it possible to implant some unexpected Easter eggs in the product usage process?
The simplest Easter eggs come from copywriting, through the small interaction mechanism of copywriting. Before listening to some online courses, at the end, the copywriting of the course operation students wrote like this: Love will only make people ugly, and you will always look good when you get up early to study. In fact, each user logs in at different times to see different copywriting, and when students see the change in copywriting, they will share it with the outside world, because it is an unexpected and particularly interesting thing for them.
Event recommendations
Under the special topic of product operation and user growth, Wu Siying (ByteDance) was invited to share the topic of "high-flexibility growth tool platform construction ideas", and Hong Rui (Ctrip) will share the topic of "UGC content to help transaction growth practice", if you are making products in the direction of the sea, you can pay attention to the topic of "Overseas Growth Guide for Social Applications" that Yang Kuan (Google) will share at the conference.