Wei: Entrepreneurs must pay attention to user costs

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A friend introduced me to a startup project for a social network. The founder of the social Network believes that people are faceted. This friend, for example, has a side of the IT profession, an entrepreneur, and a side that has nothing to do with the front two sides: a sport enthusiast. In the eyes of the founder of the project, there is a need for a Web service that allows people to be faceted and make different friends on different "faces". This idea has a certain rationality, after all, sports enthusiasts and it practitioners, in a person's social network is not the same dimension.

I thought the project might have been inspired by Google +, which has a so-called "circle" concept, where users can designate a circle to share their content with other friends. This is a situation that is often met in real life: there are some things we just want to tell some friends. However, such a realistic scenario is not necessarily flattering in such web services.

Roughly imagine the user behavior in Weibo: send a tweet (or forward), press "submit", and it's over. And in that entrepreneurial project, the user sends a message, still have to choose in which "face" hair-the project founder appears to cherish oneself this "the faceted" idea, therefore the user must choose which "noodles". If "which side" is an optional option, the product will have no room to live in front of a large social network.

What the user gets is a service that can tell the person without telling the man. The effort of the user is to try to figure out where to submit each time a message is submitted. This is the title of this article called: 10 points of effort with 5 points of gain. Does it make sense to get these 5 points? But with a 10-point effort, the 5 point is almost negligible-no one wants to do a loss, even on a free internet service. The user's pondering and the trouble, is also a kind of "cost" ah.

Most entrepreneurial projects are actually starting at a relatively large, level, or service that has been known to many people. The founders of the project were aware of the shortcomings of the existing services, and the idea of their projects seemed to compensate for that shortcoming. This is the initial logic of many entrepreneurial projects. But how much does a user have to pay to make up for it? The problem has been overlooked by many people, since Internet services are usually free services.

Wu, author of the top of the wave, mentions similar user costs in his book: Migration costs. For example, I am now able to set up a search service that is much more accurate than Baidu's (Weibo) search results reprinting It's a valuable thing, but it's not a business value. For this 10% upgrade, users need to make a huge effort to migrate, this effort is not money not money problem, but the habit. Wu called it a "better" service, but the opportunity for business success was small.

This is actually a similar issue. When an entrepreneur launches a service, it may be too focused on what the service can do to solve the problem, ignoring the cost of how much effort the user has to make to solve the problem. Even if it is free, the user's end is still in the "accounts".