User Cold Start Guideline
Marketing team is responsible for the user cold-start jobs. We try different ways to approch our users and invite them trying our product. It is an art to interact with users. We have different theories and strategies, but more importantly, is discovering the user demand. Steve Jobs believed that customers do not know what they want, until they get it. Some times, the survey and assumptions would not help us to catch users. Data and trend do. We need to study the data, learning the behavior of users behind each interaction. We need to understand the future trends, always a step, or even half step ahead of the future trend. It will help us always being accepted by customers.
Our product has a clear picture of our user persona and we set progressive stages to approach our user target groups. We need to be patient, but specific. Always target at the pain points and execute our plan 100%.
This doc will cover the basic logic we have for user cold-start. The channels we covered and the methods we use. Before that , you can check the market data first to better understand the trend of the market and what position we are in the industry.
Target User Group
Before we discuss about our users. We need to understand our mission first. Our product is the first APP developed by Hyletic. It is the first step to build our metaverse. The social interaction method is evolving, from letter to audio, from video to 3D, which is applied by AR and VR technology. We believe the 3D resources, interactive social, AR services and 3D based entertainment services will be the mainstream in the coming future. Therefore, our product plays a user-friendly 3D entertainment APP, help us building up a user habit, helping users to understand the concepts of AR, 3D video and AR socials.
For the Our product, we are not building an evolutional experience. As you can see, we are integrating 3D platform to a familiar service, like sharing photos, videos and chats. But, as we upgrading our 3D services, we will integrate all the traditional functions to a whole brand new experience.
At the early stage, we want to focus on a specific user group whom share a specific demand and interests. Taking the early user group as the cutting point of the whole market, leading us to the general users. Based on the our user persona. We are targeting at young age users aged from 12-23 year old. The users at this range are mainly students from middle school to lower grade collage students, they have a strong interests on the new tech, games and hot topics.
How's the market look like now? There are few types of service on the market nowadays: Entertainment, social and general tools. We can study the popular trends through the existing social networks such as FB, twitter, reddit, Tiktok or Steam. Firstly, you need to be clear about our goal that we are not trying to compete with social networks, however, social element is always necessary for the service. Secondly, we noticed that the game theme is the most popular topic that matches our service, resources and future market. So, we take the game community as our early cutting point.
But there are excising game communities out there. It is challenging to bring them to a brand new market. But there are constant new games release all the time. A lot of them are small/mid games such as Amongus, Fallguys. They are new game which got hot in a short time. The new games always bring up new communities. We take theses new games as chances, building our game communities, using the 3D models we have corresponding to the game. Attracting game players to our platform. After we have a stable user quantity, we could use different strategy, promoting and recommending different content to bring different user groups to Our product.
Channels
We have conducted three rounds of AB test, to discover and compare the efficiency of user reaching and app promotion. You can check the user channels test for details. From the results, it is pretty clear that users do not respond actively to the traditional invitation. Although private messaging through Reddit is most effective, but it is only around 17% success rate. We take the results as a start. There won't change in the channels, but it is our responsibility to keep discovering new methods to attract users and invite them to download our APP.
Invitations
Every invitations is executed under a clear strategy or test method. We have collected different invitation letters for different approaching methods to our users. We are keep coming out with new language or approach to attract potential users.
Once we are clear about our channels, different invitation language should be prepared by marketing team. The best one or few invitations approach will be saved or reused in the future.
Method
There is no limitation on the method. Marketing talents should be creative about this part, use creative method to promote our APP. The following methods have been tried before,
- Manually choosing users and private messaging
- Comment under users posts
- Share PH's work in outsource platforms
- Organizing activities to promote PH
Notice, these methods are very general and there are endless methods we can discover under each one. But there are more than four methods for us to approach users. You are the one to propose a new method in your work.
User groups
Bringing users to PH is only the first step. Let's take AARRR model for the example, next step is obvious: Save users.
We are inviting users to different channels, our APP, community or social media followers. It is important for us to gather all of them in one or few places which they can get our first-hand information, updates, or promotions.
In US market, we are using Discord group as our official group chat. As marketing member, we will keep our Discord group active, interesting and clean. The group manager should be able to guide the discussion topics of the group, encouraging group members to posts, create or invite friends to Our product. Furthermore, group manager should build up numbers of active fans for our APP. Those fans will help us to manage the group, participate our activities and we need to promote them. Letting them feel the values and recognition from official team.
For the fans club, following criteria is considered for a member to become a fans leader
- Posting and chatting actively
- Easy going and have passion on game
- Understand local culture and new trends
- Responsible + group management experience is recommended.
Besides Discord, we also need expand our user communities. Such as reddit, QQ or twitter. But every group needs to stay active. Because we are not expanding our user groups for nothing. Activities, regions, functions, topics are the elements to differentiate user groups.
As a group manager, following standards should be achieved.
- Daily news, updates, fun posts
- Start conversation, keep group chats active everyday
- User number growth constantly, new members join everyday
- Collect user feedback
- Keep touch with fans, assigning them tasks/ missions to do