The successful way of the Internet "cold start"

Tencent Weibo can rely on the 700 million QQ users and the endless series of product lines in the opening two years less than the time easy access to nearly 400 million of users.

This crazy expansion of super fast growth is not a game that any internet company can play, especially for those pioneering entrepreneurial enterprises, they have encountered a "cold start" in varying degrees-there is no basic user base, and not too much money to promote marketing, but also face the lack of quality content.

All roads lead to Rome, but to them, the road to success is full of thorns and frustrations. So what can they do to attract the original "seed users" in this intense and crowded market? Watercress and the known case may be helpful to us.

60 million of the watercress kingdom

March 2005 Watercress officially open registration, until a year later it had a second in the north of the watercress staff, and the early 5 employees all from the top 2,500 registered users of watercress.

So how did the early watercress solve the problem of "cold start"?

When most of the new Web sites rely on reptiles to crawl content, the North has clearly realized that only original content can really attract users, in this process, the watercress has played a simple role as a platform provider.

The early watercress did not anticipate much of profitability, but instead put more effort into optimizing and enhancing the user experience and content. There is no marketing, just rely on the early adopters of the user's word of mouth, just by virtue of the user in the audio and video books three of the field of independent generation and sharing content, by November, Watercress has its own No. 50000-place users.

A northern personality and temperament profoundly affect the development of early watercress, he does not want the company's capital into the intervening watercress too early so did not accept Chen as the main body of investment participation, even now, he admits that he did not find watercress in the future of the appropriate profit model.

Even though various groups of topics are now the most active ingredients of watercress, but the audio and video books from the user-generated content is still the most praised watercress is the most valuable part.

Today's watercress has more than 60 million users, Alexa on the domestic web site can be ranked to 23, in the last year to complete the third round of 50 million U.S. dollars in the C round of financing.

Of course you know everything.

2011, knowing the establishment. In addition to the early-tasting Chinese version of the Quora and the glossy team background, there is not much to know about the advantages, but now, in the implementation of the application for audit registration to strictly limit the number of users, around it or formed a community of more than 300,000 people.

If you want to find out how to do tomato scrambled eggs, please turn left Baidu question and answer, but if you want to understand the first chicken or Eggs first topic, the only way to know.

And the general response to the "cold start" method is different, the idea is to attract users with a perverse indifference, to position themselves in a relatively professional position, and to set a fair threshold for their users, and to this day it insists on its own guidelines.

At the beginning of our initial period, I was interested in inviting a number of Internet professionals Kai-fu Lee, Keso and other large number of influential in the industry, the presence of the discourse and the active in which not only increased the knowledge of the exposure and visibility, more importantly, such initiatives to a great extent to improve the overall quality and atmosphere of the community.

It is with various opinions and a large number of experts in various fields as the center of discourse, so that to avoid the various questions and answers before the Web site redundancy and the poor quality of the answer, and to attract more high standards of users to join.

The number of users determines the upper limit of Web 2.0 sites, but their lower limits are determined by the value of the user.

Whether it is watercress or know, they have in the early days of their inception have experienced how to overcome the "cold start" the stage, they either focus on quality content, or value users, now, they have achieved in their respective areas of success.

So for other entrepreneurs, then how do you choose the way to spend the initial ice age?