How to use the lowest cost to verify the core user requirements

"Lean Entrepreneurship", from the best-selling book "The Lean Startup", that product design is no longer by the product manager and the designer to assume that all depends on the user needs to decide. Many people have read this book, but do not know how to use this methodology to build products. At just the end of the 36 Krypton Open day Guangzhou station, Litchi FM CEO Rai, through his own and millet phone examples, shared how to apply "lean entrepreneurship."

The focus of "lean entrepreneurship" is "Verifying user needs". Rai said that when doing the Litchi FM, not too dare to invest too much time and money in the beginning. Originally thought to be a mobile phone station, but the Radio podcast is not popular in the country, and the use of mobile phone to listen to, the flow of expensive. So, does the user actually use the handset to listen to the demand of the radio station?

On the basis of this idea, the Litchi FM team spent three days developing the prototype of the HTML5 format, and registered a micro-letter public account. Using the micro-letter interface, do an audio docking. Then, using the crawler software to search nearly 500 selected radio stations, put on the public account. At that time the product is still very rough, no custom menu, when users want to listen to the song, first to the public number "1", the public number of random response to a radio program. One months down, the micro-credit public number accumulated more than 30,000 fans, the second month grew to 50,000. While the numbers look good, proving that there is a real user requirement, the team quickly discovers the problem: User growth is slow.

As a result, they made adjustments and introduced a "tag cloud" to try to inspire the interest of the user. And the new function does have the effect, the number of micro-letter fans exceeded 500,000, one months later grew to 1 million, while the daily active users more than 200,000, the number of daily listening to stable in more than 1 million. The team found that while mobile radio was a huge drain, it still had a large audience. And according to the user heat improvement products, targeted more strongly. In the past, if teams were to develop products directly, the cost of failure would be high if they did not meet user needs. and Litchi FM on the contrary, first with the lowest cost, verified the original uncertain user needs, and then officially launched the APP. So, after the product is released, the loyal user has been there, only will be more, will not be less.

Rai also shared another domestic "lean entrepreneurship" case-millet mobile phone. Before, he says, people who make mobile phones are the ones who do the hardware first and test the user with the molded product. If and the user needs do not match, the product changes or does not change, the cost of loss will be very high. Millet also uses "lean Entrepreneurship", first produced a simple MIUI system, any Android phone users can be installed through the brush machine trial. Users to improve the idea first, millet in accordance with the needs of users, the weekly update products quickly. In frequent and regular interactions, MIUI collects feedback and upgrades products while accumulating users. When the MIUI users reach three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand, according to a certain conversion rate, if you can sell 150,000 units will almost be able to recover costs. When the user and demand are mature, millet began to produce hardware. It is said that the first year only plans to sell 300,000 units of millet, the result sold 3 million units. Test with product prototype, because do not need to modify hardware, so, MIUI's improvement cost is low, the iteration speed is fast, and also accumulates the user.

From millet to Litchi FM, the common denominator is to "determine the user needs." If the user has verified the demand, the product can also happen to solve the pain point, then the homeopathic launch; on the contrary, if the user is not interested, it should be a change of ideas, give up immature products. Thus avoiding the waste of time and money.