Entrepreneur Readme: How to operate a "heavy vertical" enterprise

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

Author: Anand Iyer threadflip Product Supervisor

Compiling: Shinyu

In 2009, Airbnb's weekly income was around $200 trillion, nearly bankrupt, and since then there have been more than 9 million users. Etsy was founded nearly 10 years ago and has doubled its valuations in the last two rounds of financing. These pioneering companies, which have gradually advanced but eventually achieved great success, have paved the way for the rise of new forces such as Uber and Lyft.

Postmates, Getaround, TaskRabbit, and so on, are fast eating away at Craigslist, an earlier venture's territory. Market-driven startups are special because they face more complex and diverse customer groups. In the process of connecting buyers and sellers, such companies need to strive to ensure a benign interaction between the two ends of the user and between the user and the platform. As the product supervisor of Threadflip, a second-hand boutique trading platform, I believe that it is important for such enterprises to build and maintain trust, although the word trust is very subjective and difficult to grasp, but in fact, the establishment of the trust system is rule-based.

To create a hyper-expected service, let's analyze Craigslist carefully. As the platform user, you need to constantly search, email to sellers or service providers, and keep in touch with them later to monitor the entire transaction process.

Of course, all of this is done in an anonymous state. With the increasing frequency of mobile phone users, mobile application companies should pay special attention to the appearance and function design of the product, not too simple and humble. How much are you willing to pay for faster service and trade guarantees? This is the opportunity for such trading platform start-ups.

For such startups to be successful, they have to get their attention at the fastest speed. User stickiness is critical. For this reason, Craigslist and other companies will not easily disintegrate. The future trend is that most users will gradually focus on a better performance platform. Many people want mobile phones to be more functional, which is why heavy vertical companies are increasingly favored by investors. Focus on a specific field of mobile applications, by doing fine deep, can also win, such as the Homejoy in the field of home economics.

Any start-up company leader should continue to build a hyper-expected service on the basis of satisfying the needs of the users. Most mobile applications have buyers and sellers evaluation systems, such as Uber, Flywheel, Lyft, and so on, at the end of each stroke, they will prompt the driver and passengers to give an evaluation of the experience. To make this data truly valuable, they need to use the rating system to filter out some of the bad users in a way that is almost imperceptible, and on this basis, to continuously improve service levels. Uber users do not have to take the time to view the driver star and detailed evaluation, because its system has been poor performance of the driver filtered out. You will never see a driver below 3 stars on the Uber, so there are few passengers who are worried about the bad ride. In addition, the system has helped drivers filter out some of the rude, deceptive passengers.

With so many mobile apps to choose from, users have no patience to face any content that makes them suspicious. This is equivalent to the damage or too old clothing released to the Treadflip, or the very shabby room on the Airbnb, or on the application side to set up an unusually cumbersome verification process. Once this happens, the customer will immediately move on to other similar applications.

As a virtual Market manager, we need to do two things to prevent this from happening:

First, urge employees to constantly find and recommend quality information, downgrade or delete bad information;

Second, to increase community-oriented tools so that users can also participate.

Earlier, on the Airbnb, even if the inferior listings have been released, platform managers are difficult to learn at the first time. Later, when they used professional quality photos instead of users uploading photos, they found the problem. Helpless, by Airbnb to upload the way can not scale, because the vast majority of photos are still submitted to users themselves. But on the positive side, this model provides a model for renting out the information to the users of the apartments.

It is important to be clear that all of these mobile applications can be implemented technically, but the day-to-day operations must be manned. In other words, such companies should improve service levels quickly, reliably, and consistently, and users want to communicate with real people rather than cold software because they need emotional interaction in the process of trading.

Our survey found that the current ordinary users after ordering goods, can endure the longest waiting period of 10 days, 10 days, most buyers will choose to complain. We have been working hard to shorten this cycle. Not only do we send emails to buyers and sellers, we clearly list the estimated time of 7-10 days, but also provide the seller with an invoice, so that the seller simply post the invoice on the parcel.

After the order is submitted, we will keep reminding the sellers to fulfill their commitments as soon as possible to ensure that the buyer receives the goods within 10 days. Lyft is another start-up company that has taken practical steps to improve the user experience. Lyft's measures include equipping the driver with a mobile phone charger to allow passengers to recharge while in the car, and by distributing pamphlets, advising drivers to talk to passengers and to give them high fives. More importantly, what if one of the parties breaks the relationship of mutual trust in the course of the operation? For example, sellers do not timely delivery, or buyers in various ways intentionally damage the interests of sellers. At this point, as a bridge between the two mobile applications platform, should immediately follow up and solve the problem.

Of course, this is largely done by a one-to-one telephone conversation between employees. In this respect, Homejoy's practice is, once received the user to comment, the staff will immediately telephone communication, in the identification of the cause, will be affected by the user to give discounts and other compensation. I will always remember the experience of the Lyft to the driver Samsung after a taxi. Having just made the evaluation, I received an enquiry from a signed account representative. The other person said in the email that she would immediately return my feedback to the driver's operations team and ask them to verify and improve the service. Because of this personal and full ride experience, I still Lyft loyal users.

Attaching importance to the seller's role for market-driven companies, to achieve marketing success, we need to work on the supplier, because this is the source of goods and services.

This view is somewhat novel for founders of companies that are focused on pleasing the end-user. But that is true. For the buyer, most platforms are similar. Many people have become accustomed to ordering products or services through networks such as Amazon or ebay.

But few people are accustomed to mailing products to others in their personal capacity, providing car rental services, or freeing up their own rooms for rent. For these reasons, market-driven companies should first concentrate on creating a sophisticated, illuminating, and most important, user-friendly user experience for such vendors.

Just as Lyft provides drivers with cell phone chargers and manuals to tell them how to be a good and humble driver, Threadflip delivers mail to the sellers, such as boxes and even free models, to make it easier for suppliers to display second-hand clothing. Interestingly, people prefer to buy the old clothes on the models rather than the real ones. Threadflip continuously collects and publishes this kind of information, strives to help the seller group to improve the service. These small moves can boost sellers ' loyalty to the trading platform, and they will soon become a powerful promoter of the platform.

Another effective way is to create an online community in which the sellers can interact with each other. In the Airbnb user Feedback forum, sellers are often discussing what kind of listings are easiest to rent, how to become a top seller and so on. For the latter, most of the sellers ' experience is to provide the tenant with flowers or to fill the fridge with free food and drinks. Threadflip initially focused more on the buyer experience, but then we made a major adjustment to the strategy. Because obviously, the seller needs more support. Our approach includes tracking access to top sellers with the highest turnover in the past 7 days, 30 days and 90 days.

By telephone communication, we can continuously collect their feedback information, experience summary and so on, which is beneficial to our improvement of platform service. In addition, we have invested a lot of effort in providing data analysis for sellers. The seller on the trading platform of every move may affect his actual sales, only understand the relationship between the two, and constantly improve the service level, in order to really do business. We can respond immediately to the seller's feedback. Market-driven companies can invest in the following three areas to achieve great success: mobile applications development, mobile payment and user guidance. These should be the best things your product and technical team should do, if they haven't already done so. Benchmarking Capital Partner Bill Korli in an article, said that no one market is born and equal, mobile applications market potential is very large, more sophisticated design of the app, can be based on the current to further meet user expectations. At present, the mobile end of the main users are the number of years, the majority of them through the smartphone landing app to participate in such services.

If you are the technical head of a start-up, your team should focus on developing an Easy-to-use app that caters to both buyers and sellers, regardless of how familiar the user community is with technology. Again, this is an area that the sellers have been seriously ignoring. Once, I used some app to find a worker to help me with my house, and the application asked me to send the digital code as a text message, and it pushed the task to the repairman. For example, "4" may mean that the problem is very serious, but it may be just a plumbing problem or a wiring problem. There is no information in the code about the need for workers to carry relevant tools, which results in a bad experience for both sides.

The company originally had the opportunity to use the SMS function to achieve greater development, but it eventually failed. Express service company Postmates, by providing easily identifiable maps on the mobile side, to show users the exact location and current progress of the courier. The company has successfully financed. Postmates uses a mobile function module that people are already familiar with, but this kind of regroup provides users with a convenient, fan-day audience. The biggest reason for the encroachment on Craigslist's market share is that it has not integrated the payment function into its products. Uber, TaskRabbit These mobile applications, has achieved sufficient user trust, to ensure that each payment of the complete seamless docking.

Retaining users may be harder than developing a product, but there is always a way to make it easier.