Zhou Yuan Readme: How to build 4 million users ' knowledge sharing community?

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Ten years ago, Zhou Yuan wrote code in a Canadian foreign company in Shanghai that, like most "code farmers", did not know much about the real changes in the outside world, although he worked in the world's most advanced fields.

2005 Spring Festival, Zhou Yuan in the home roadside and other people, inadvertently bought this "IT manager of the world", but to wait for people have not come, had to read the magazine. He was impressed by a story that described many of the technical variables that changed the future business world, as well as the logic of change, part of the changes mentioned in the article by programmers.

For the first time Zhou Yuan found that he had the power to do programming, and as a programmer, so long time but nothing. So, Zhou Yuan decided to do a discovery of the larger world (I dark Horse Note: Know the beginning of the slogan, it is "found a larger"), he decided to quit the work of programmers after the new year, to the "IT Manager World" magazine became a journalist.

That year, Baidu just listed, Li opened to Google, Zhou thought the reporter is "can contact a lot of good people, standing on the tide of tidal waves of people", he finally got his wish.

(Zhou Yuan)

The decision to "discover the bigger World" also allowed Zhou Yuan to start rolling, and after accumulating enough experience and insight, he began to try to do something in the Internet field. After his first venture "Meta search" failed, he founded the knowledge-question community in December 2010. Knowing that the angel invested in the innovation factory three months after its inception, he received nearly tens of millions of dollars of investment from qiming after a year. This year, the "copycat" Quora is now valued at $900 million trillion, while industry insiders estimate the estimated value of 200 million dollars.

Zhou Yuan that he has "done the media and technology and created the industry", combining the geek and the literati temperament, he created the knowledge to share the community is "the choice." Zhou believes that the community should "respect the rhythm of the community." In the first two years on the line, we know how to use the invitation system to register. March 2013, it is known that registration is open to the public. In less than a year, registered users climbed rapidly from 400,000 to 4 million.

Knowing how to grow up in a step-by-step way, the following is the oral sharing of Zhou Yuan:

Inspiration: Stories about apples

I wrote the code before I was a journalist. I am an Apple fan. 2007 when the iphone just released, a lot of people bought, I help others crack the iphone. On the floor of the office, I cracked most of the iphone.

A few things gave birth to my idea and made me "the one to let it happen." The biggest stimulus was a 2008 trip to the United States to see jobs and I was there when he released the MacBook Air! I was so close to him that I was so excited that I felt like a pilgrimage.

After he showed off his MacBook Air, he joked that if jobs had been alive, the iphone and MacBook would have turned into mainstream products within five years, when none of the two products were mainstream.

Because of the love of Apple, I joined the apple4.us, a Geek group blog site. At the beginning, everyone in the apple4.us to share the Apple products related articles, and later, came a group of the same temperament, different types of authors, engineers, product managers, designers, writers, fashion circle, all kinds of people.

Apple4us has changed, and they start talking about Apple product updates, and then they start talking about the changes in the mobile Internet, the technology and the human relationship, and its ductility suddenly unfolds. Dozens of of people in intensive collaboration, there has been a very wide range of small networks of content cross-border. I've found that the way things are generated here are very different from the IT manager world, where no one pays, no special people offer topics, but they do. After the new problem is written, more new users are attracted.

In Apple4us, although everyone has not been specially trained, but because of the trigger of something, unexpectedly produced so many quality content. When I first joined the Apple4us, I was always in the middle of excitement, and I woke up every morning to see if anyone had updated the content.

Because Apple4.us's inspiration, I thought I could do a scale, 1000 times times Big apple4.us. I then and Chengyuan (I black Horse Note: Now know from the founding team members) in the way of new media to try large-scale apple4.us, made a similar to the Apple4.us group blog N3.

(I black Horse Note: Zhou Yuan said, N3 meaning is new cubic, refers to new technology, business, new trends, three "new". N3 and now many technology blog models are similar, but N3 has not yet reached the Zhou Yuan ideal product)

Although N3 also quite successful, less than three months of traffic than the "IT manager World" official website, but its products do not reach what I want. For example, I want to do a function that everybody can edit the article together, N3 can't realize. And how to guarantee the quality of the site after a lot of content, how to let the information flow effectively, these things are not think clearly, finally we paused N3.

Later, I left "IT manager World" for the first time, doing a small business search advertising data Analysis Services company "meta Search", but this product does not hit the pain point, no one is willing to pay, my first venture failed.

After the failure of the venture, I went to Tibet to travel, went home after a period of depressed days. Until I saw the Quora, its product form to meet my previous "1000 Times times apple4.us" imagination, then the Quora does not provide Chinese version, one day I and Zhang (one of the founders) sat down to discuss, I said, we can do a Chinese version of the Quora, Entrepreneurial failure is not necessarily a burden, may also be a wealth, I have done media, and have done technology, created industry, to do such a product is simply the choice. So I decided to come out and start a business again. The former entrepreneurial team have more trust in me, they come back to do with me to know.

The project was soon launched. On the morning of the third day, Zhang told me that he had found an angel investor. I met with investors that night and he invested 1.5 million of us.

What is the known "kernel"?

Looking back, Twitter has established a social media relationship of concern and concern, with Google using a box to define the criteria for information search. I think Quora also defines a new Internet standard, that is, people can pay attention to information, information can be pushed to people. You can also focus on people and see how these people act on information, such as approval. This is also a new standard, more suitable for cross-border in-depth discussion. That's what I've always imagined.

The core functionality is not much changed because it refers to Quora as the standard, and the product key is "information logic". Information logic is to enable users to restore offline information requirements to the Internet.

The knowledge of product design simulates the line of a group of people sitting together to seriously discuss a problem model. Several people sit together, can not know, but have a certain professional background, should be around the limited common topic, can not run away. A person finishes speaking, everybody can reconsider, revise the answer mutually, can approve or oppose, can thank, can comment. If a person does not comply with this default discussion agreement, it will be "no help", "fold" and "Report".

The central function of knowing is that if the user wants to discuss (a problem), the whole community can, in some way, get the right answer to the question. and to precipitate it down, this is a user scenario that we have been working around in this user scenario in the propulsion product. I've been a journalist, and I know that you can't pick up a lot of people you want to interview, and I was very concerned about how many American Internet company CEOs and core team members ran Quora to answer questions.

We were acutely aware of its chances, and we could understand its value.

If this product can grow, it is not only for a group and an industry, for the entire internet is a very valuable contribution. It is equivalent to continuously producing something of high quality and injecting it into the entire Internet.

Systematic knowledge, high-quality information, are still in the individual brain, far from being effectively mined and used. Knowing that it provides a tool to generate, share and disseminate knowledge and to bring together everyone's knowledge and use it for the public.

Respect the rhythm of the community: the flow is useless

Knowing that when I was doing it, people thought that all communities should be watered, and that they should be rambling and spit. Quora product model, the previous part of the problem solved. But to be a community product, it's hard to be God. That means you can't run it and let it become what you want it to be. The increase in volume does not mean community growth, but it leads to problems that you do not foresee. To bring down the community is a situation, the community to make another appearance is also a situation, Baidu so large flow, also made a and know similar products "new knowledge", eventually did not do.

Group blog or community, it is very small time to reflect the value of scale, often difficult to achieve. The advent of knowledge is actually on the other side of the road-the ability to produce high quality content through UGC.

Do the Community two key points, first is the core product and function upgrade, the second is to respect the rhythm of the community. How to use the large-scale way, lets the high quality UGC content grow up, has been a difficult problem. When we were doing N3, it was a small circle, and when you extended it 1000 times times and 10,000 times times, it must not be this way (the quality of the content would be severely reduced).

The community is made up of people who have their own circle of trust and are then centered around it. In a sense, what we call a community is the composition of countless small circles, which communicate and communicate around the things and interests that they are good at. In 2010, when we first came online, we invited more than 200 users, and they defined the rules.

It now seems that the 200-person impact on the knowledge is far-reaching. Many of them are technology entrepreneurs whose expertise guarantees the quality of their answers. Technology entrepreneurs have a sense of mission, that is, to help others solve the problem, so the people brought a unique discussion atmosphere.

Community products and users need to grow, in a sense, the early days of the community, "cultural atmosphere" is relatively more important. Baidu's traffic is very large, also not necessarily what good, I think the community must have its own rhythm. You have to respect this rhythm, the rhythm is not necessarily you set, you have to respect the Community's natural growth laws.

When users invite other users in, you will find that there are a number of users and groups in the same industry, will be more and more active. There are two reasons, the first is that some industry information flow is relatively fast, the so-called hot industry is not the rapid flow of information industry? technology, Internet, finance and so on. There are big information areas, such as movies, and even automobiles, which are very much updated every day.

As the "population" continues to grow, hot areas become hotter. For example, finance, film, Law, in the beginning may be relatively sporadic, occasionally have one or two problems. But with this area of concern, the topic attracts a lot of users, users create more content to attract users, and then precipitate a good part of the content. Knowing the community is the process of a cycle moving forward.

Author: i black Horse