On the positioning of products

The article "How to write a business plan" on the 12 floor of Block B is now widely circulated online. We often hear business friends say that they are preparing the proposal according to our method, concise and practical. Hope that our sharing will bring more value to everyone, this has become our daily motivation to write articles.

In the article "How to write a business plan", the first part is to generalize the project in one sentence. The deep meaning of bread is "focus", but different people understand the word differently. How to be focused, the simple criterion is your product as long as the solution to a core problem.

Many people understand this, too, in the proposal. But the process of entrepreneurship is gradually drifting away, forget the original to "do what" and start. Today we have a conversation about a start-up project we met recently.

Active self-organizing platform

The entrepreneur summed up his project as an "active self-organization platform" in one sentence. The goal is to help the Chinese urban youth, to find a connected playmate, to meet like-minded friends. Positioning is a vertical interest activity social network: With the interest map and algorithm matching as the link to the offline activities for the experience, facing the weak relationship between strangers, all products, services around the search for a heart-linked playmates, and finally to create an active self-organizing platform.

But when I open the product, if I don't tell me about the app as an "activity organization", I really don't see how it can be used to organize activities. A little go in, give a person a kind of "Mo Mo" feeling, vaguely feel this is a friend's platform. On the contrary, I would like to publish an activity can not find a place, a ask to know to go to the Web site to publish. Similarly, I want to participate in activities, pull friends to participate in the activities of the experience is not good. And these should be "activity self-organization platform" Core basic function, does not the entrepreneur locate the product?

After a deep chat with the start-up team about the project, the problem was found:

1. Forgotten Beginner, product positioning began to blur. The founding team's products have been operating for three months and have developed nearly 100,000 users. But the whole operation effect of the product did not meet the expectation, this batch of small white user did not give the product the clear direction. The founding team has sought solutions from the original web version to the mobile app. Mobile app is also starting to develop Campus edition, La version. They listened to too many suggestions and tried multiple versions to find opportunities. With a team of about 10 people running so many versions, I can't imagine whether their technology and operations teams can support it. Obviously they have been a little bit confused, using their own words to do to forget the original product positioning.

2. Team Technology Control. Team of core technical personnel from abroad doctoral graduates back, technical ability is very good. Like many of the teams we've seen, such teams are often technology-controlled. They are very superstitious and expect to be recognized for product design by achieving difficult technology. So they design a lot of very cool features, such as AR technology can be filmed in the scene to achieve check-in. The technical team also spent a lot of time researching video compression and processing techniques, and implementing video presentations to organize activities. I can't understand how important these two difficult technologies are to an active organization platform. Only feel that they are trying to prove themselves, using technology to solve problems.

3. Lack of lean entrepreneurship guidance. Product design every day in the idea of trying to add new features, the product first I found that there are too many functions, but you do not know where to begin. After communicating with the team, each feature does have a little need. But each small function also has a bit of a flaw, as mentioned earlier, the result ignores the basic functional requirements. Lean entrepreneurship is the topic we have been vigorously spread, but understanding and implementation of the need to explore the entrepreneurial team themselves.

4. Lack of thinking about user value and profit patterns. Entrepreneurial team, or choose a lighter activity organization as a start-up project. This kind of project's characteristic is must reach the millions user scale to be able to have certain persuasive power. We put aside there are no VCs and the team will accompany you through this process, said to reach millions of users then how? such users have no common characteristics, can accumulate scale of value data. Many people say that as long as there are users do not worry about profit, but not. Different users, different data values. The profit model you can not carefully plan, but the precise positioning of the user's value you must be clear, know what they can bring you the potential benefits.

Suggestions on product positioning

After analyzing the project case, we gave some suggestions to the entrepreneurial team, sharing it with the 12 floor friends.

1. Think and learn successful products. Micro-letter is a model of app product design, we should study hard. Micro-letter 5.0 is coming out, will find that they always keep their value. The main two buttons will always be "micro-letter" "Address Book", the Acquaintance of communication is the soul of the product of micro-letter. Open a very high frequency "circle of friends" why not put it down? Very interesting and technical content of the "shake" search song, every time I introduced to others will be "surprise." This is a lot of product managers, technical control do not understand.

2. Product design to "willing". such as this project to do "activities from the organization platform" should be around this sentence, to design their own products, functions around the activities of the Organization, the irrelevant are removed, not too distressed, as far as possible to do the product "light". Since the "Activity self-organization platform", the user comes up, certainly is directed to the activity, and must first want to know nearby has any activity, how releases the activity, how and the friend participates in the activity. To these needs, and then design products, can help users to solve the demand. Others are clouds.

3. Product positioning is the brand impression. Each superior app has a short, concise sentence to tell the user what it is for and what needs to be done. This phrase is a tool to advertise the app, put this phrase into the user's mind, let this kind of demand trigger, users can immediately think of this app. Just think, sing, shrimp, flight butler, Super timetable, all of which have a brief summary of how they are used to solve the needs.

4. Focus is speed, only fast and not broken. Understand lean entrepreneurship, with one or two strong demand function directly hit the user key. In the product operation process, slowly iterate over more functions. Only a single point of breakthrough can be faster and more powerful. Mobile Internet entrepreneurship, focus, extreme, word-of-mouth, fast, do not fear the Giants to attack.

5. Try Gadin language, focus on subdivision. There are many app products today, and a lot of basic needs are occupied by some early startups. So in a word to summarize the app, you can try to add an attribute in front, help their industry shrink. For example, "active self-organization platform" can add a attributive "campus activity self-organization platform". Take the initiative to narrow their own market, fine-tillage market segments, more can be refined products. The market is big enough to fire on campus. The user type that crawls is more accurate, is advantageous to the future profit pattern transformation. Campus users are relatively concentrated, this part of the user also has common characteristics, the user's value and profit model is well imagined.