- Fan Bing, author of “Growth Hacker”, founder of Shengqi Network, one of the earliest Growth Hacking practices and evangelist in China, co-founded several tech companies, former Wi-fi masterkey product manager of Shanda Innovation Institute, and technology columnist.
At the end of November, 500 Startups, a silicon Valley venture capital incubator, held its WMD 2016 conference, Invited to speak at Instagram, Pinterest, SurveyMokey and other well-known startups and investment institutions on the theme of entrepreneurial growth.
First, my overall perception
1.Growth Practices vary from company to company
Growth itself varies from company to company. Successful practices are hard to standardize, and those that can be standardized focus on processes and tools. So different speakers have different ideas about Growth or Growth Hacking. Some focus on product strategy, some on technology, and some on what’s good and what’s bad.
2. The Growth gap between China and the US is narrowing
It seems that silicon Valley’s newest practice of Growth Hacking has not broken the sky. The speed of development in China has caught up rapidly. While foreigners are still talking about Dark patterns, our Product managers in China have long been exhausted and started to seek new ways.
3. It is very beneficial for Growth novices
This kind of large-scale sharing is more permeated with the basic mindset. Advanced practitioners may feel that they lack practical skills, but growth novices just need to keep these concepts in mind. So maybe White is a better fit, God and we can share secrets we can’t share in private.
Second, WMD 2016 Dry goods review
Here are my excerpts and some of my comments. I’m not going to go through every single point of the powerpoint presentation, but I’m cutting out the empty ingredients, the PR hype, and the irrelevant cases.
1. Qualitative research is as important as quantitative research
George Lee, head of Instagram’s growth team, cites several questions about product users to demonstrate why qualitative research is just as important as quantitative research.
Which country has the fewest average heads of people in photos taken by users? – Japan. Because in Japan, accidentally taking photos of passers-by in the frame requires the other party’s permission to publish.
Who are the most followed people on IG? Selina Gomez: Over 1 million followers, but indians don’t follow her very much, which shows that any popular user has limitations and that the best way to recommend followers is to use a combination of friends, local stars and international stars. In order to reach out to local users, Instagram members even went to India to invite Bollywood stars to join the site, and it worked well.
Which country has more Instagram users than Facebook? — In Russia, Instagram is still heavily integrated with VK in Russia, despite being acquired by FB, because VK beat Facebook.
2. When setting a road map, think big and think small
How does Instagram’s growth team roadmap work? They would cycle for two months, with two weeks spent researching what to do and six weeks doing it.
Because of the 2-week cycle, managers/partners are advised not to ask for small progress every day (which of the two buttons works best), but to take the long view and focus on the important results of a period of time rather than countless details.
3. Long-term monitoring of indicators to avoid blame
How to judge whether good user growth is the result of the growth team or the product itself? This is the normal situation that makes growth leaders stressed out: When things go wrong, you are the one to blame, and when things go well, people will be suspicious and ask if you did it. The best thing you can do, Says Mr Lee, is to track it as long as possible and make sure that every change (such as a decision to switch from an Email to a mobile phone number) is verifiable, rather than a shoot-out.
4. Paid channels are doing better and better
James Currier of NFX Guild, which did growth consulting for 45 corporate clients last year, shows two charts showing that free channels have been shrinking in recent years and paid channels have been growing, with Facebook as the dominant payment channel abroad.
The effectiveness of free channels is declining
The paid channel is doing better and better
5. The effect of A/B Test is amazing
There’s an interesting point: sometimes when you say the right things, you have a foundation for growth. Case in point: Don’t say “store your photos,” say “share your photos.”
For example, to name a game (in the form of “XXX of XXX”), they tried placing ads on Facebook to test the public’s sensitivity to different word combinations:
Do A/B testing of product names on Facebook
It turned out that “Amazons of Atlantis” was the best match, but the meaning didn’t go well, so it was changed to Dragons, which was the second place. Finally, the game was named Dragons of Atlantis, and earned $120m easily.
Games named after A/B testing get A lot of traffic
A company that changed its name from Emode to Tickle doubled its valuation and increased traffic by 50% in three months. Naming is important, but few people actually do A/B testing on names, right?
6. Try a new copywriting style
Sometimes a simple change from “what is the value of doing this to the company” to “what is the value to the user” can work wonders.
For example, a trial that changed “Logging in with Facebook will help us improve the user experience” to “Want to be lazy? Log in with Facebook” saw a 19% increase in sign-ups. “232 new members have joined our community! Instead of “Another person at Google has followed you, look who it is”, reflux rate increased by 36%.
7. Products should guide users to form habits
Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, talks about four common hooks that a product uses to get users Hooked. They are:
Four hooks to guide user habits
Trigger is divided into external catalyst and internal catalyst. The external catalyst is the user touch point of AAARRR optimized by the Growth team all day long. The internal catalyst is mainly to find the user’s use psychology and move the user with external catalyst.
Action refers to the Key behavior of the product, such as the play button on YouTube and the “like” and “share” on Facebook.
Reward. If the user’s internal catalyst is boredom, give them insert variable rewards, such as Twitter/Pinterest pull-down refreshes. But if the user already feels out of control and is looking for a solution to the problem (like taking a taxi), give obvious, tangible results, like a map showing how far away the driver is and the estimated time of arrival;
Investment is to make your platform more valuable to your users. The four main Investment objects are data, content, reputation and followers, so that the more users use your platform, the more they need it.
8. Skillfully use Dark Pattern design
Lance Loveday shared some dark pattern designs that have long been seen in China. It is interesting that he has compared the evil index of his products to the characters in Marvel/DC sci-fi works, from harmless Jia Jia Guest to the most evil Lord of the Sith, Growth Hacking happens to be my favorite hero batman.
Dark Pattern design
9. Startups self-examine
Steven Dupree of Trinity Ventures shares how to grow with $10,000, including a Checklist that any early-stage startup should examine itself:
- invest in zero cost channels (SEO, contents, social)
- pull through active seekers
- copy your competitors
- harass your early adopters
- test on the cheap
- mitigate business hurdles
10. Improve the efficiency of the marketing team
Sean Ellis, the founder of Growthhackers.com, used to work for Dropbox and is now the founder of Growthhackers.com.
Sean Ellis, the father of growth hacking
Through an online survey, he found three major factors affecting the agility of marketing teams:
Less than 3 tests per week (47%) (so most people get headaches because they think more and do less);
Not doing the most leveraged things, 18%;
The team’s test goals and results were not synchronized in a timely manner (35%).
11. Prompt free downloads to increase conversion rate
Early on, LogMein tried to spend $10,000 a month on various channels, but new users didn’t sign up and didn’t convert to downloads after signing up.
- A channel has 200,000 new users accessing the product every day
- Ten percent of new users signed up
- But 90 percent of registered users are lost at the download stage
When ASKED later, it turned out that the reason was that people simply didn’t believe LogMeIn was free to download. Solution: There are two download buttons on the official website, “Download free version” and “Download paid trial version”, and the problem is solved.
12.Data-driven service
The growth team follows a daily workflow: Analyze -> Objective > ideas > prioritize > test > (loop).
The weekly growth team meeting should be a super systematic rigorous discussion, not a brainstorming session, where you need to:
- Discuss the most leveraged targets
- Coordinate with team to target progress and overall KPI
- Implement the growth process corresponding to that week
13. Growth models and Polaris indicators
How do you analyze your growth model and core metrics? The key points you need to pay attention to in different links are shown below:
User lifecycle and core metrics
14. Test-driven growth
Finally, we emphasize the importance of constant testing. Many well-known companies have seen their growth driven by testing.
Many well-known companies are test-driven in their growth
Twitter used to run tests 0.5 times a week and has been running tests 10 times a week since 2011; Testing was 20 times faster and user growth was a whole new high. After GrowthHackers.com increased the testing speed to 10 times, UV saw explosive growth, which shows the importance of testing for growth.
Can’t make it to silicon Valley’s star-studded WMD industry conference?
It doesn’t matter!
Here’s an important announcement:
GrowingIO, a rival data-driven growth conference packed with silicon Valley’s biggest names and dry goods, will be held in Beijing in mid-December. The conference brought Sean Ellis, the father of growth hacking, to the show himself!
In addition, I will share my observations and experience of growth Hackers in China in the past two years at the main venue on December 17. If you’re interested in Growth, don’t miss this annual event.
On December 16-17
Led by Sean Ellis, the father of growth hacking
Many masters of Chinese and American growth gathered
GrowingIO Data Driven Growth Conference
Click “Sign up” to be a growth hero with Sean Ellis!
The two – day package is sold out in advance, all other tickets are available as soon as possible.