100萬用戶服務器

by Assaf Elovic

通過阿薩夫·埃洛維奇

我的應用在一個月內如何增長超過100萬用戶 (How my app grew by over 1M users in one month)

只需要這種簡單的每周方法和耐心。 (All it took was this simple weekly approach and patience.)

Building and promoting a new consumer product is one of the most challenging things you can do as an entrepreneur. While there are many approaches on how to design, test, build and promote apps, usually they don’t seem to bring real results.

建立和推廣新的消費產品是您作為企業家可以做的最具挑戰性的事情之一。盡管有許多方法可以設計，測試，構建和推廣應用程序，但通常似乎并沒有帶來真正的結果。

Then you start wondering, maybe it’s the product? Maybe there’s not enough market fit? Or is it bad execution? Or maybe we should grow the marketing and branding budget! Maybe we’re not targeting the right audience? Maybe we should build more features!

然后您開始懷疑，也許是產品？也許市場契合度不夠？還是執行不好？也許我們應該增加營銷和品牌預算！也許我們沒有針對正確的受眾？也許我們應該構建更多功能！

When you start questioning everything, things usually get even worse. You start defocusing from the main goal and start wasting energy and money on all kinds of wide approaches.

當您開始質疑一切時，情況通常會變得更糟。您開始偏離主要目標，開始在各種廣泛的方法上浪費精力和金錢。

The worst is when you think it’s all a matter of growing your marketing or branding budget.

最糟糕的是，當您認為這完全是增加營銷或品牌預算時。

Your goal should always be one: improving customer retention. For those who are not familiar with what customer retention is, click here.

您的目標應該始終是一個目標： 提高客戶保留率 。對于那些不了解客戶保留率的人，請單擊此處。

案例研究：為什么讓客戶保持聯系很重要 (A case study: why it’s important to keep your customers around)

To make my point clear, I’ll let you in on a story I heard from a friend of mine, who’s the Co-founder and CTO of a very successful productivity B2C company.

為了明確我的觀點，我將介紹您從我的一個朋友那里聽到的一個故事，他是一家非常成功的生產力B2C公司的聯合創始人兼CTO。

In 2012, they released the first version of their app to the Android Google store, and a crazy thing happened. Within a few days after the launch, 500K users worldwide had downloaded the app. The reason for that crazy growth was mainly because there were no good apps in the productivity space back then. Over the next few months, they had grown to a few million users and raised over $5M from VCs.

2012年，他們在Android Google商店中發布了他們的應用程序的第一個版本，然后發生了一件瘋狂的事情。發布后的幾天內，全球有50萬用戶下載了該應用。瘋狂增長的原因主要是因為當時生產力領域沒有好的應用程序。在接下來的幾個月中，他們的用戶已增長到幾百萬，并從風投中籌集了超過500萬美元。

Four years later, however, they still couldn’t reach a decent business model. He realized that despite the big numbers, there were very few users who were actually using the product long term.

然而，四年后，他們仍然無法達到一個體面的商業模式。他意識到盡管人數眾多，但實際上長期使用該產品的用戶很少。

So he decided to dig into the data and look for the reason. He found out that retention was very low. Even worse, he discovered that it hadn’t improved much in four years! That’s when it hit him to focus on retention instead of user growth.

因此，他決定深入研究數據并尋找原因。他發現保留率很低。更糟糕的是，他發現四年來并沒有太大改善！從那時起，他開始著重于保留率而不是用戶增長。

Back then, VC’s poured millions of dollars into companies with large user growth because they didn’t know how to deal with or measure the crazy scale that mobile app stores and websites brought with them.

當時，VC向擁有大量用戶增長的公司投入了數百萬美元，因為它們不知道如何應對或衡量移動應用程序商店和網站帶來的瘋狂規模。

Today the case is different. The first thing you’ll need in order to raise money in B2C is to show retention growth. And there’s a very good reason for that.

今天的情況有所不同。要在B2C中籌集資金，您需要做的第一件事就是顯示保留率的增長。這有一個很好的理由。

Back to my friend’s story: with no retention, it didn’t matter how many users had downloaded their app. After a week, 95% of users stopped using the product. So even if they had a billion users, after a few weeks it would only be a number in their database.

回到我朋友的故事：沒有保留，沒有多少用戶下載了他們的應用程序。一周后，95％的用戶停止使用該產品。因此，即使他們有十億用戶，幾周后，在他們的數據庫中也只會是一個數字。

Here’s a thought: if you have 100K users using your product every day, it’s 100X more valuable than having 100M users using your product once a month.

這是一個想法：如果每天有10萬用戶使用您的產品，則其價值比每個月有1億用戶使用您的產品貴100倍。

Most importantly, once you’ve reached a decent retention rate, you can be sure that your marketing budget will lead to the sustainable growth of your product and business.

最重要的是，一旦達到了不錯的保留率，就可以確定您的營銷預算將帶動產品和業務的可持續增長。

精益創業方法 (The Lean Startup approach)

Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product, even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. This is where the Lean startup comes in.

太多的創業公司以他們認為人們想要的產品的想法開始。然后，他們花費數月(有時是數年)的時間完善該產品，甚至從未向潛在客戶展示產品(即使是非常原始的形式)。這就是精益創業公司的來歷。

In short, the Lean Startup is a methodology that posits that every startup is a grand experiment that attempts to answer one main question — “Should this product be built?”

簡而言之，精益創業是一種方法論，認為每個創業公司都是一個宏偉的實驗，試圖回答一個主要問題-“該產品應該制造嗎？”

A core component of Lean Startup methodology is the build-measure-learn feedback loop.

精益啟動方法的核心組成部分是構建測量學習反饋回路。

The first step is figuring out the problem that needs to be solved, and then developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible.

第一步是找出需要解決的問題，然后開發最小可行產品(MVP)，以盡快開始學習過程。

Once the MVP is established, a startup can work on tuning the engine. This will involve measurement and learning, and must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate the cause and effect question.

一旦建立了MVP，啟動程序就可以調整引擎。這將涉及測量和學習，并且必須包括可以證明因果問題的可行指標。

Whenever my team and I are working on a product, here are the steps we’ve:

每當我和我的團隊開發產品時，以下是我們執行的步驟：

Define the most important product assumption
定義最重要的產品假設
Design and build an MVP of how this assumption should be tested
設計和構建應該如何測試此假設的MVP
Target early adopters to test the MVP
針對早期采用者以測試MVP
Apply the test results
應用測試結果
Repeat
重復

This is how our growth looked in the first year (2017) of iterations:

這是迭代的第一年(2017)我們的增長情況：

Slowly but surely right? Now let’s look at an example together and see what happened after enough iterations.

慢慢地但一定正確嗎？現在，讓我們一起看一個示例，看看經過足夠的迭代后發生了什么。

過程 (The process)

定義最重要的假設 (Define the most important assumption)

I’ll use my team as an example. We believed that there were no decent reminder apps that people actually like to use. The main reason, in our opinion, was that there is a lot of friction in setting a single reminder. Either you need to fill out a long form on a mobile app, or naturally ask an assistant like Siri — realizing that she doesn’t understand 50% of your requests.

我將以我的團隊為例。我們認為，沒有人們真正喜歡使用的體面的提醒應用程序。我們認為，主要原因是在設置單個提醒時存在很多摩擦。您要么需要在移動應用程序上填寫一份較長的表格，要么自然要問Siri這樣的助手-意識到她不理解您50％的請求。

So that’s when we defined our most important product assumption: if we could achieve understanding for almost every reminder request in natural language, users would use such a product long term.

因此，這就是我們定義最重要的產品假設的時間：如果我們能夠以自然語言理解幾乎所有提醒請求，那么用戶將長期使用這種產品。

設計和建立MVP (Design and build an MVP)

Since our assumption was focused on NLU (natural language understanding), we decided to focus solely on that. No branding, UX, or other features.

由于我們的假設側重于NLU(自然語言理解)，因此我們決定只專注于此。沒有品牌，UX或其他功能。

First, we hired data scientists to build a state of the art NLU algorithm for understanding complex reminder requests.

首先，我們聘請了數據科學家來構建最先進的NLU算法，以了解復雜的提醒請求。

Secondly, since all we were validating was this assumption, we decided to build the MVP as a chatbot on Facebook Messenger, instead of going through the long and annoying process of building a mobile app.

其次，由于我們只是驗證了這一假設，因此我們決定將MVP構建為Facebook Messenger上的聊天機器人，而不是經過漫長而煩人的構建移動應用程序的過程。

Please note: If we were to build a mobile app, this would not add anything to testing our assumption, and would make our MVP longer and more complicated to design and build. Moreover, it might even defocus us from the main assumption. For example, what if users just don’t like to use new apps anymore? We might’ve concluded that our assumption was wrong, even though it was for a whole other reason.

請注意 ：如果我們要構建一個移動應用程序，那么這將不會增加任何測試假??設的條件，并且會使我們的MVP更長，設計和構建起來也更加復雜。而且，它甚至可能使我們偏離主要假設。例如，如果用戶只是不想再使用新應用程序，該怎么辦？我們可能已經得出結論，即使是完全出于其他原因，我們的假設也是錯誤的。

It’s important to narrow your MVP as much as possible, so there are no distractions from your main assumption.

盡可能縮小MVP至關重要 ，因此您的主要假設不會受到干擾。

針對早期采用者 (Target early adopters)

We needed English speakers, since our NLU algorithms only supported it. Also, we believed that millennial moms would eagerly want a product like this, since they’re always on the move and very busy, while constantly needing to remember things. So we targeted some Facebook pages (with no budget) which were based on a community of moms, and successfully brought onboard a few hundred beta testers to try it out.

我們需要說英語的人，因為我們的NLU算法僅支持它。此外，我們相信千禧一代的媽媽會急切地想要這樣的產品，因為他們總是在忙碌而忙碌，同時又經常需要記住一些事情。因此，我們針對了一些基于媽媽社區的Facebook頁面(沒有預算)，并成功引入了數百名Beta測試人員進行嘗試。

將測試結果應用于產品 (Apply the test results on the product)

After our first iteration, we learned the following:

第一次迭代后，我們了解了以下內容：

There were many more ways to ask for reminders than we thought. But users really enjoyed the ease of setting reminders with a simple request.
請求提醒的方式比我們想象的要多得多。但是用戶真的很喜歡通過簡單的請求即可輕松設置提醒。
Users don’t always ask for reminders in a single request but break it down into a few steps.
用戶并非總是在單個請求中要求提醒，而是將其分解為幾個步驟。
When working with chatbots, users would like the assistance of buttons to make it faster and easier to handle.
當使用聊天機器人時，用戶希望借助按鈕的幫助，以使其更快，更容易處理。

With these results, we prioritized and went on to our next assumption, which was to add buttons to the flow of setting a reminder (conclusion three). And guess what? That assumption also turned out to be true. For more proven assumptions, you can read my article on How to improve your chatbot.

根據這些結果，我們確定了優先級并繼續進行下一個假設，即在設置提醒的流程中添加按鈕(結論三)。你猜怎么著？該假設也被證明是正確的。對于更可靠的假設，您可以閱讀有關如何改善聊天機器人的文章。

Little by little, we improved our overall product and retention rate on a weekly basis.

漸漸地，我們每周都會提高整體產品和保留率。

We never tackled more than one assumption at a time.

我們從未一次解決多個假設。

Suddenly, we started discovering users who were with us for over six months! After a year of weekly iterations, we finally decided it was time to launch our product. We reached a Week 1 retention rate of 92% and Week 4 of 19%. It was way above the market standard, which was enough for us.

突然，我們開始發現與我們在一起超過六個月的用戶！經過一年的每周迭代，我們終于決定是時候發布我們的產品了。第一周的保留率達到92％，第四周的保留率達到19％。它遠遠超出了市場標準，對我們來說足夠了。

We published our chatbot on FB Messenger in mid Feb 2018, and within a month we grew by over 5,800%, as you can see below.

我們在2018年2月中旬在FB Messenger上發布了聊天機器人，一個月內我們增長了5,800％以上，如下圖所示。

This was mostly due to delivering a lean product that we knew people enjoyed and would recommend to others. Since then, we’ve grown to over 1M users worldwide and are growing by tens of thousands of users a day.

這主要是由于交付了我們知道人們喜歡并向他人推薦的精益產品。從那時起，我們已經在全球擁有超過100萬用戶，并且每天以成千上萬的用戶增長。

We’re continuing to work with this methodology, and it’s proven a success every day.

我們正在繼續使用這種方法，并且每天都被證明是成功的。

Also, we try to make as many data driven decisions as possible. Try collecting user data for improving user experience, and do A/B tests when there is no definitive answer. For example, if you’re not sure where a button should be placed or which title would attract more clicks, try placing it on one side for half the users, and on another side for the second half. Then, see which placement led to more clicks.

另外，我們嘗試做出盡可能多的數據驅動決策 。嘗試收集用戶數據以改善用戶體驗，并在沒有明確答案的情況下進行A / B測試 。例如，如果您不確定應該在何處放置按鈕，或者不確定哪個標題會吸引更多點擊，請嘗試將一側放置一半的用戶，另一側放置另一半的用戶。然后，查看哪個展示位置帶來了更多點擊。

最后的想法 (Final thoughts)

Not only does this methodology help us focus solely on what’s the most important set of features users want, but it also helps us filter out features we believe are valuable, but that are actually not.

這種方法不僅幫助我們專注于用戶想要的最重要的功能集，而且還幫助我們過濾了我們認為有價值的功能，但實際上沒有。

As they say in customer service: the customer is always right. The same goes for product development. Trust your customers, listen to them and engage with them, and you’ll understand what they want and don’t want. Never build things out of your own intuition, unless it’s to challenge your assumptions. At the end of the road, you’ll reach one of two conclusions:

正如他們在客戶服務中所說：客戶永遠是對的。產品開發也是如此。相信您的客戶，傾聽他們的意見并與他們互動，您將了解他們想要和不想要的東西。除非要挑戰您的假設，否則切勿憑直覺來構建事物。在這條路的盡頭，您將得出以下兩個結論之一：

The product does not have enough market fit, time to move on.
該產品沒有足夠的市場契合度，需要時間繼續前進 。
You have a product people want. Good job, you’re on the way to building a company!
您有人們想要的產品。做得好，您正在建立公司！

Either way, you win.

無論哪種方式，您都贏了。

Thank you very much for reading, if you found this useful, please give me some claps ??? so more people can see it. For more articles, visit my tech blog at assafelovic.com. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line in the comments below!

非常感謝您的閱讀，如果您覺得這很有用，請給我一些鼓掌？這樣更多的人可以看到它。有關更多文章，請訪問我的技術博客ass afelovic.com。如果您有任何疑問，請隨時在下面的評論中給我留言！