How to change the user from 100 to 2 million

Introduction: Business Godfather Paul Graham in this July's Bowen "do things that Don T Scale" told the founders, not behind closed doors, to take the initiative to obtain users, the initiative to communicate with them, do their best to please them, to almost pathological pursuit of " Ultimate user experience. Here's a summary based on his blog post:

The founders of engineering often make the mistake of thinking that apart from writing code, everything else has nothing to do with themselves, and most founders of the company were initially unwilling to go out and recommend their products to users. On the one hand because of shyness, on the other hand because of laziness.

But as an entrepreneurial company, you can not wait for users to actively find the door, you need to actively attack. For startups, if you want to succeed, at least one founder needs to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing, and that person is usually CEO.

How do I locate a user?

1. If the product is only to solve their own problems. It's a good thing to do, just find someone who is facing the same problem as you. Some founders began to do some products perhaps just to solve their own problems or friends of the problem, but finally bigger. such as Dropbox. The founder is because in the commute on the road, want to open some of the files stored on the computer, but sometimes the computer did not bring the body or the computer with no corresponding files, so think of the synchronization function.

2. If not to solve their own problems, then the small market began to try. Here Paul cites the example of Facebook. At first Facebook was a Harvard-oriented student, then expanded to other schools and then to the world's expansion. Many startups will also be unconsciously expanding from their market-oriented markets. Now in Europe and America many startups will be in similar small market to release their products, to obtain users and products to make constant adjustments. Generally their steps are as follows: New Zealand-Australia-Canada-the United States, such a step-by-step approach to ensure profitability, user access and user retention mode of effective operation.

Go out of the Airbnb

Airbnb is a classic case of early access to users. Airbnb's first approach was to go door-to-door to New York's users and persuade them to use Airbnb. On the one hand, to get new users, on the other hand, to guide users to better use their products, tell them how to rent a list to do. In Paul Graham's impression, Airbnb founders often carried large bags of stuff at dinner in Tuesday because they must have just come back from somewhere.

The original Airbnb was also young and fragile, but, with the efforts of its founders, it has grown into an online leasing giant.

You wait, I'll give you A clockwork link VS. Give me the computer, I'll put it on you.

In the process of communicating with users, many founders may ask the user: "Hey, would you like to try our beta xxx?" If the user answers, "Yes, yes." "Then the founders would say," Great, you wait, I'll wind up the link for you. "But Y Combinator's stripe is different, if someone wants to use stripe, the founder will say:" OK, give me your computer, I'll put it on you. "That's why stripe can get a lot of users."

The example is to say that you don't have to wait for users to do anything other than use the product at the user's stage.

Periodically measure the amount of user access

Another reason the founders ignored the initiative to get users was because they disdained the handful of users. The mistake they made was to ignore the ability to grow. YC encourages all startups to measure their progress by week. For example, set a weekly growth rate of 10%, if you get 100 users this week, next week is 110, maybe you think 110 is 10 more than 100, but if you go on like this, you have 14,000 users a year from now, and two years later, you have 2 million users. When you get 1000 users at a time, the method is not the same, then you do not have to take the initiative to find users.

The abnormal pursuit of "extreme user Experience"

After you get the user, you also need to please the user. You want to make the user feel that using your product is the right choice. Some founders would be very thoughtful to write thank-you notes to new users. But to please users is far more than just writing thank-you notes, you have to think of other ways to please them and make them have insanely experience. The entrepreneur must have the "extreme user experience" The Metamorphosis pursue. But many founders do not, on the one hand, many of them do engineering background, feel responsible for the good things on the other hand, they will not focus on individual consumers.

Paul said he had never seen a start-up company go into a dead end by trying to make users happy. Interacting with users is not only a way to increase user capacity, but also a way to get feedback and improve the product.

The revelation of Kay Rui to the hardware start-up company

For many hardware start-ups, there are often more difficulties than software start-ups. For example, they may need a lot of money to produce hardware, because many factories have minimum order requirements, but the minimum order may cost hundreds of thousands of of dollars for startups, and at first they have no money and can only turn to investors. Although the problem has been solved by the public, it is recommended that we adopt the way of us. What did its founders do? Assemble the router yourself. If you assemble your own hardware, you can not only adjust your design quickly, but also learn something you didn't know before, which is valuable.

When the media reporter is denying you, believe in yourself

Startups are weak. Many inexperienced investors and founders, and the media will compare you to existing companies, and then say, "Look, what does this little company do?" In fact, they do not understand.

It is not important for others to deny your company, it is important that the founders do not deny their own company, if they deny it, then the harm is enormous. Even Bill Gates himself made this mistake, and soon after he founded Microsoft, he returned to Harvard in the fall semester.

In the early days of startups, the question was not whether the company was going to be swept around the world, but how big would the company be if the founders did the right thing?