You know “hacking” but never “growth”

At work, stay away from people who mention “logic” in everything they do. These people are either the most rigid or the most illogical. Similarly, those who talk about “hacking growth” every day are the first to fall into the “black hole of growth” — hacking is easy to learn, growth is difficult to understand.

Mr. Huang Tianwen, who once worked for Qunar, Baidu, 360 and other enterprises, once summarized several mistakes that are most easily encountered in the implementation of user growth:

• Vanity indicators have hidden dangers
• Blind pursuit of user numbers
• The product has not been tested by the market, and the user growth is too early and too fast

Vanity index refers to those indicators that cannot reflect the core competitiveness of the product and the real value of the product. They are some superficial indicators, such as PV, UV, clicks, APP downloads, registered users, etc. The real core metrics are how many active paying users you have, how much content you have that adds real value to your business, how many active sellers you have, and so on, depending on the business model.

SocialCam, a SHORT video social app in the US, launched in 2011 and had 40,000 users at the beginning of 2012. By May, the number of users suddenly topped 10 million, and nearly 20 million in June. In order to achieve rapid growth, SocialCam made “registered users” its core metric and launched a series of crazy viral marketing campaigns around Lahxin: There’s a lot of clickbait, borderline, whimsical content, and videos a user sees on SocialCam are automatically shared to his Facebook circle of friends. With this dual virality, SocialCam has grown rapidly.

However, Facebook continued to receive complaints from users about SocialCam’s invasion of their privacy, and in the end, Facebook decided to shut SocialCam down. SocialCam’s visitors “fell off a cliff” after losing Facebook traffic; In addition, the product is not perfect, user retention is extremely low, less than a year, ten million page views are basically zero.

A lot of companies are obsessed with user growth, not quality or retention, which leads to rapid user growth, but not in proportion to revenue growth. This mainly depends on the following two aspects:

First, the quality of new users, and whether they are target users;

Second, whether new users generate retention and continued purchases, that is, whether new users grow.

If these two problems are not solved, it will be ineffective growth.

In the past two years, the subsidy war in the Internet industry has become increasingly fierce. Excessive subsidy will attract a large number of non-target users, who come purely for benefits and will not generate any retention. The higher the user’s actual payment, the higher the retention rate, the higher the user’s actual demand, the closer to the real target users. Therefore, user quality, retention, and user growth are key factors for user growth.

Fast growth is not always a good thing. When the product is unproven, the retention rate is not high, and the product is not perfect, too fast user growth can only lead to negative word of mouth and mass churn, and ultimately accelerate the death of the product.

The second day after its launch, “A Hotel Special” APP reached the second place in apple APP Store, surpassing QQ and Fruit Ninja. The APP was almost all discussed in weibo and TMT circles. Subsequently, it was reported by more than 200 media, including CCTV, and was very successful in public opinion, instantly gaining millions of users.

Immature and fast – reaching products are like disgusting giant babies

However, at that time, he sold 23 orders a day, making only 300 yuan in total. Sometimes we get 100,000 users a day and only get 10 orders, which is pretty bleak. And quickly disappeared from the hotel industry.

1) Set the right core metrics at the right time. Whenever making a product affects the experience of non-paying users, that feature is a poor feature, no matter how much money it makes for the company.

2) Data must be aggregated and quantifiable. User experience is not a quantifiable metric, but retention and user ratings are the only measures of what we’re doing.

3) User growth strategy must obtain accurate target users, must be quality user growth; Improve retention and user growth in all aspects.

User growth = User growth x user retention rate x user monetization rate

4) Integrate experimental thinking and A/B testing into the product life cycle, only data can drive growth, only experiment can drive innovation.

Sean Ellis, the father of Growth hacking, describes the three stages that successful startups must go through: Product/Market Fit, Transition to Growth, and Growth. At the heart of many startup and project failures is investing a lot of resources at the wrong time, too early, in the wrong channels. User growth is a long-term and continuous exploration process, do not take a public account or a few words of some fake big man to make a decision. Sticking to these four points will help you avoid 80 percent of mistakes, and the other 20 percent will need to be explored.

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