Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing
第四讲:构建产品,与用户交谈,成长
第4讲视频课程
讨论地址:http://www.huomen.com/topic-show-id-103.html
Thanks for having me. Today I am going to be talking about how to go from zero users to many users. I’m just assuming that you have many great ideas in your head at this moment and you are thinking about what the next step is.
谢谢你邀请我。今天我要讲的是如何从零用户变成多用户。我只是假设你现在脑子里有很多好主意,你正在考虑下一步该怎么做。
A lot of my lecture is based off of mistakes I have made in the past. As Sam mentioned, I went to YC in 2010 and spent three years going back and forth, pivoting a bunch of times, starting over a bunch of times, and I learned a lot about what not to do if I were to start another startup after Homejoy. A lot of my advice comes from failure and understanding what you shouldn’t do and then using that to make generalizations about what you should do.
我的很多演讲都是基于我过去犯的错误。正如山姆提到的,我在2010年去了YC,花了三年时间来回奔波,转了很多次,开始了很多次,我学到了很多,如果要在Homejoy之后再创业,我该怎么办。我的很多建议来自于失败和理解你不应该做什么,然后用它来概括你应该做什么。
Just a reminder that you should take all advice as directionally good guidance, but every business is different. You’re different, and I’m not you, so take everything with that in mind.
只是提醒你,你应该把所有的建议都当作方向性的好指导,但每一项业务都是不同的。你与众不同,而我又不是你,所以要记住这一点。
When you start a startup you should have a lot of time on your hands to concentrate on the startup. I’m not saying that you should quit school or quit work; what I’m saying is that you should have a lot of compressed time that is dedicated to immersing yourself in the idea and developing solutions to the problem that you are trying to solve. For example, if you’re in school it is better to have one or two days straight per week to work on your idea versus spending two hours here and there every single day during the course of the week. It’s like coding. There is a lot of context switching so being able to really focus and immerse yourself is really important.
当你开始创业时,你应该有很多时间集中精力在创业上。我并不是说你应该退学或辞职;我是说你应该有很多压缩的时间,专注于让自己沉浸在想法中,并为你试图解决的问题找到解决方案。例如,如果你在学校,每周最好有一到两天的时间来研究你的想法,而不是一周中每天在这里和那里花两个小时。就像编码一样。有很多上下文转换,所以能够真正专注和沉浸自己是非常重要的。
When I first wrote this lecture I was thinking, what are the things that most people do incorrectly when starting a startup? The novice approach is thinking, “I have this really great idea, I don’t want to tell anyone about it. I’m going to build, build, build and then going to maybe tell one or two people and then I’m going to launch it on TechCrunch or somewhere like that, and then I’m going to get lots of users.”
当我第一次写这篇演讲的时候,我在想,大多数人在创业时做的错误是什么?新手的想法是,“我有一个非常好的主意,我不想告诉任何人。我将构建,构建,构建,然后可能会告诉一两个人,然后我将在TechCrunch或类似的地方启动它,然后我将获得大量用户。”
What really happens is because you did not get a lot of feedback, maybe you get a lot of people to your site, but no one sticks around because you didn’t get that initial user feedback. If you’re lucky enough to have some money in the bank you might go buy some users but it just whittles out over time and you just give up. It is sort of a vicious cycle. I actually did this once, and I did this while I was in YC. When I went through YC I didn’t even launch a product. I didn’t launch on TechCrunch which is the thing you should definitely do. You don’t ever want to get into that cycle because you’ll just end up with nothing good.
真正发生的是因为你没有得到很多反馈,也许你的网站吸引了很多人,但是没有人留下来,因为你没有得到最初的用户反馈。如果你足够幸运,在银行有一些钱,你可以去买一些用户,但它只是随着时间的推移,你就放弃了。这是一种恶性循环。我确实做过一次,我在YC的时候也做过。当我通过YC,我甚至没有推出一个产品。我不是在TechCrunch上启动的,这是你绝对应该做的事情。你永远不会想进入那个循环,因为你最终会一无所获。
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The next thing is that you have an idea and you should really think about what the idea is really solving. Like what is the actual problem. You should be able to describe your problem in one sentence. And then you should think, “How does that problem relate to me? Am I really passionate about that problem?” And then you should think, “Okay it’s a problem I have, but is it a problem that other people have?” And you verify that by going out and talking to people.
下一件事是你有了一个想法,你应该认真思考这个想法真正解决了什么问题。比如真正的问题是什么。你应该能用一句话描述你的问题。然后你应该想,“这个问题和我有什么关系?我真的对这个问题很感兴趣吗?”然后你应该想,“好吧,这是我的问题,但这是其他人的问题吗?”你可以通过出去和别人交谈来证明这一点。
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made involves my co-founder and I, who is also my brother. We started a company called Pathjoy in 2009 or 2010. We had two goals in mind. One was to create a company that made people really happy, and to create a company that was very, very impactful. A good proxy for that is to just create a big huge company. And so we thought, okay, the problem we are solving is to make people happier. We first went to the notion of who are the people who make people happy. We came up with life coaches and therapists. It seemed kind of obvious to create a platform for life coaches and therapist. What happened as a result was that when we started using the product ourselves, we aren’t cynical people by any means, but life coaches and therapists are just not people we would use ourselves. It was sort of useless to us. So it wasn’t even a problem that we had and it wasn’t something that we were super passionate about building out, yet we spent almost a year trying to do this. And so if you just start from T=0 and think about this before you build any product I think you can save yourself a lot of headache down the road from doing something you don’t want to do.
我犯的最大错误之一涉及到我和我的共同创始人,他也是我的兄弟。我们在2009年或2010年创办了一家名为Pathjoy的公司。我们有两个目标。一个是创建一个让人们真正快乐的公司,一个非常非常有影响力的公司。一个很好的代理就是创建一个大公司。所以我们想,好吧,我们要解决的问题是让人们更快乐。我们首先讨论的是谁是让人们快乐的人。我们找到了生活教练和治疗师。为生活教练和治疗师创造一个平台似乎是显而易见的。结果是,当我们开始自己使用这个产品时,我们绝不是愤世嫉俗的人,但生活教练和治疗师并不是我们会自己使用的人。对我们来说没什么用。所以这甚至不是我们遇到的问题,也不是我们非常热衷于建造的东西,然而我们花了将近一年的时间试图做到这一点。所以如果你从T=0开始,在你做任何产品之前考虑一下,我想你可以省去很多你不想做的事情。
So say you have a problem and you are able to state it, where do you start and how do you think of solutions? The first thing you should do is think about the industry that you are getting yourself into. Whether it is big or whether it is huge, you should really immerse yourself in that industry. And there are a number of ways to do this.
所以,假设你有一个问题,你能够陈述它,你从哪里开始,你怎么想解决办法?你应该做的第一件事就是想想你要进入的行业。无论是大的还是大的,你都应该真正沉浸在这个行业中。有很多方法可以做到这一点。
One is to really become a cog in that industry for a little bit. And so it might seem a little counterintuitive to do this because most people say that if you really want to disrupt an industry you should really not be a player in it. Someone who spent 20 or 30 years in an industry is probably set in their ways and is just used to the way things work and really can’t think about what the inefficiencies are or the things that you can “disrupt”. However, as a newbie coming into the industry you really should take one or two months to just really understand what all of the little bits and pieces of the industry are and how it works. Because it’s when you get into the details, that’s when you start seeing things that you can be exploiting and things that are really inefficient and may provide a huge overhead cost that you may be able to cut down.
一是要真正成为该行业的一小部分齿轮。所以这样做似乎有点违反直觉,因为大多数人都说,如果你真的想破坏一个行业,你真的不应该成为其中的一员。一个在某个行业工作了20年或30年的人可能已经习惯了他们的工作方式,并且真的不能思考什么是低效或者什么是你可以“破坏”的。然而,作为一个刚进入这个行业的新手,你真的应该花一两个月的时间来真正了解这个行业的所有细节以及它是如何运作的。因为当你深入细节时,你就会发现一些你可以利用的东西,那些真正低效的东西,可能会带来巨大的间接成本,你也许可以减少。
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So an example of this is that when we started Homejoy, we started with the cleaning industry, and when we started we were the cleaners ourselves. We started to clean houses and we found out really quickly that we were very bad cleaners. As a result, we said okay, we have to learn more about this and we went to buy books. We bought books about how to clean, which helped maybe a little bit. We learned a little more about cleaning supplies but it is sort of like basketball, you can read and learn about basketball but you’re not going to get better at it if you don’t actually train and throw a basketball into the net.
这方面的一个例子是,当我们开始Homejoy的时候,我们开始从事清洁行业,当我们开始的时候,我们自己就是清洁工。我们开始打扫房子,很快就发现我们的清洁工很差劲。结果,我们说好的,我们要多了解一些,我们就去买书了。我们买了一些关于如何清洁的书,这也许有点帮助。我们学到了更多关于清洁用品的知识,但这有点像篮球,你可以阅读和学习篮球,但如果你不训练,不把篮球扔进网里,你就不会在篮球方面做得更好。
And so we decided that one of us was going to have to learn how to clean. Or at least get trained by a professional. We actually went to get a job at a cleaning company itself. The cool thing was I learned how to clean from training the few weeks that I was there at the cleaning company, but the even better thing was that I learned a lot about how a local cleaning company works. In that sense I learned why a local cleaning company could not become huge like Homejoy is today. And that is because they are pretty old school and they have a lot of things that are done inefficiently. Such as booking the customer and optimizing the cleaners’ schedules was just done very inefficiently.
所以我们决定我们中的一个人必须学会如何清洁。或者至少接受专业人士的培训。实际上我们是去一家清洁公司找工作的。最酷的是,我在清洁公司工作的几周里,通过培训学会了如何清洁,但更棒的是,我学到了很多当地清洁公司的工作原理。从这个意义上说,我明白了为什么一家当地的清洁公司不能像今天的Homejoy那样发展壮大。这是因为他们很老派,他们有很多事情做得效率低下。比如预约客户和优化清洁工的日程安排都是非常低效的。
If you are in a situation like mine where there is a service element of it then you should go and do that service yourself. If your thing is related to restaurants you should become a waiter, if it is related to painting become a painter and kind of get in the shoes of your customers from all angles of what you are trying to build.
如果你在像我这样的情况下,其中有一个服务元素,那么你应该去做自己的服务。如果你的东西和餐馆有关,你应该成为一名服务员,如果你的东西和绘画有关,你应该成为一名画家,从各个角度了解你的顾客。
The other thing is there is also a level of obsessiveness that you should have with it as well. You should be so obsessed that you want to know what everybody in that space is doing. And it is things like writing a list of all of the potential competitors, similar types of companies, and Google searching them and clicking on every single link and reading every single article from search result number 1 to 1000. I found all potential competitors big and small and if they were public, I would go and read their S-1s, I would go read all of their quarterly financials, I would sit on earnings calls. You know most of these, you don’t get much out of it but there are these golden nuggets that you will find every once in a while. And you won’t be able to find that unless you actually go through the work of getting all that information in your head. You should become an expert in your industry. There should be no doubt when you are building this that you are the expert so that people trust you when you are building this product.
另一件事是你也应该有一种程度的强迫性。你应该如此痴迷,以至于你想知道那个空间里的每个人都在做什么。这就像是写一份所有潜在竞争对手的名单,类似类型的公司,谷歌搜索他们,点击每一个链接,阅读从1号到1000号搜索结果中的每一篇文章。我发现了所有大大小小的潜在竞争对手,如果他们是公开的,我会去看他们的S-1,我会去看他们所有的季度财务报告,我会坐在收益电话上。你知道其中的大部分,你不会从中得到太多,但有这些金块,你会发现每隔一段时间。除非你真的把这些信息都记在脑子里,否则你是找不到的。你应该成为你所在行业的专家。毫无疑问,当你在构建这个产品时,你就是专家,这样人们在构建这个产品时就会信任你。
The second thing is identifying customer segments. Ideally at the end of the day you have built a product or business that everybody in the world is using. In the beginning, you realistically want to corner off a certain part of the customer base so that you can really optimize for them. It is just about focus and whether you are catering to teenage girls or whether it is soccer moms, you will be able to focus a lot on their needs.
第二件事是确定客户群。理想的情况是,在一天结束的时候,你已经建立了一个世界上每个人都在使用的产品或业务。在一开始,您实际上是想缩小客户群的某一部分,以便真正为他们进行优化。这只是专注,无论你是迎合十几岁的女孩,还是足球妈妈,你都可以把很多注意力放在她们的需求上。
And lastly, before you even create a product or before you put code down, you should really storyboard out the user experience of how you are going to solve the problem. And that is not just meaning the website itself, it also means how does the customer find out about you. It can be through an ad or word-of-mouth, and then they come to your site and they learn more about you. What does that text say and what are you communicating to them when they sign up for the project and when they purchase the service? What are they actually getting from your service or product? After they finish using the product or service do they leave a review or do they leave comments? You need to be able to go through that whole flow and visualize in your head what the perfect user experience is. And then put it down on paper and put it into code, and then start from there.
最后,在你创建一个产品或者在你写下代码之前,你应该把你要如何解决这个问题的用户体验写下来。这不仅仅意味着网站本身,还意味着客户如何了解你。它可以通过广告或口碑,然后他们来到你的网站,他们了解你更多。当他们注册项目和购买服务的时候,你在和他们交流什么?他们从你的服务或产品中得到了什么?使用完产品或服务后,他们会留下评论还是评论?你需要能够通过整个流程,并在你的脑海中想象什么是完美的用户体验。然后把它写在纸上,写进代码,然后从那里开始。
So, you have all these ideas in your head, now you kind of know what the core customer base is that you want to go after, and you know everything about the industry, what do you do next? You start building your product. The common phrase that most people use today is,” You should build a minimum viable product.” And I underlined viable because I think a lot of people skip that part and they go out with a feature and the whole user experience in the very beginning is flat. Minimal viable product pretty much means what is the smallest feature set that you should build to solve the problem that you are trying to solve. I think if you go through the whole storyboarding experience you can kind of figure that out very quickly. But again, you have to be talking to users, you have to be seeing what exists out there already, and what you should be building should solve their immediate needs.
所以,你脑子里有了这些想法,现在你知道了你要追求的核心客户群是什么,你知道了这个行业的一切,你接下来要做什么?你开始生产你的产品。今天大多数人常用的一句话是,“你应该建立一个最低可行的产品。”我强调了可行的,因为我认为很多人跳过了这一部分,他们推出了一个功能,整个用户体验在一开始是平淡的。最小可行产品基本上意味着你应该构建什么样的最小特性集来解决你试图解决的问题。我想如果你把整个故事板的经验,你可以很快找到答案。但同样,你必须与用户交谈,你必须看到已经存在的东西,你应该构建的东西应该解决他们的迫切需要。
And the second thing is that before you put things in front of the user you should really have your product positioning down. What I mean by that is that you should be able to go to a person and be able to say, “Hey, this does X,Y, and Z in one sentence.” So for example, at Homejoy we started off with something super complicated. We were an online platform for home services, you start with cleaning and you can choose blah blah blah. It just went on for paragraphs and paragraphs.
第二件事是,在你把东西摆在用户面前之前,你应该把你的产品定位放下来。我的意思是,你应该能够找到一个人,并且能够说,“嘿,这是一句话中的X,Y,Z。”例如,在Homejoy,我们从一个非常复杂的事情开始。我们是一个家庭服务的在线平台,你从清洁开始,你可以选择诸如此类。就这样一段一段地讲下去。
When we went to potential users to come on our platform they would kind of get bored after the first few sentences. What we found out was that we needed a one-liner. The one-liner was very important. It kind of describes the functional benefits of what you do. In the future when you are trying to build a brand or whatnot you should be able to describe the emotional benefits and stuff like that. But when you are starting with no users you really need to tell them what they are going to get out of it. After we changed our position to get your place cleaned for $20 an hour, then everyone got it and we were able to get users in the door that way.
当我们去潜在用户那里访问我们的平台时,他们会在开始的几句话之后感到厌烦。我们发现我们需要一艘客轮。一艘班轮非常重要。它在某种程度上描述了你所做的工作的功能优势。将来当你试图建立一个品牌或什么的时候,你应该能够描述情感上的好处之类的东西。但是当你开始没有用户的时候,你真的需要告诉他们他们将从中得到什么。我们改变了位置,以每小时20美元的价格把你的房子打扫干净,然后每个人都得到了,我们就可以用这种方式让用户进来。
So you have an MVP out there, now how do you get your first few users to start trying it? The first few users should be obviously people you are connected with. You and your cofounder should be using it, your mom and dad should be using it, and your friends and coworkers should be using it. Beyond that, you want to get more user feedback. I’ve listed here some of the obvious places to go to depending on what you are selling. You can take your pick of the draw here. So, online communities, on Hacker News now there is the show HN – that’s a great place. Especially if you are building tools for developers and things like that. Local communities – so if you’re building consumer products you know there are a lot of influential local community mailing lists. Especially those for parents. Those are places you might want to hit up too.
所以你有一个MVP,现在你如何让你的前几个用户开始尝试呢?前几个用户显然应该是与你有联系的人。你和你的共同创始人应该使用它,你的父母应该使用它,你的朋友和同事应该使用它。除此之外,您还希望获得更多的用户反馈。我在这里列出了一些明显的地方去看你卖什么。你可以在这里选择抽签。所以,在线社区,在黑客新闻上现在有一个节目HN-那是一个伟大的地方。尤其是如果你正在为开发人员构建工具之类的东西。当地社区-因此,如果你正在建设消费品,你知道有很多有影响力的当地社区邮件列表。尤其是给父母的。这些地方你可能也想去看看。
At Homejoy we actually tried all of these. We used it ourselves and that was fine. We were the only cleaners so that was pretty easy. Our parents live in Milwaukee and we were based in Mountain View so that didn’t work. Friends and coworkers were kind of like in San Francisco and elsewhere so we didn’t have too many of them use it. So we actually ended up in a dead end of not being able to convince many people to use it in the beginning. So what we did was, because we are in Mountain View, some of you guys might know on Castro Street they have street fairs there during the summertime. So we would go out and basically chase down people and get them to try to book a cleaning. Almost everyone would say no until one day we just took advantage of the weather. It was a very hot and humid day and what we noticed was that everyone gravitated towards the food and drink area, especially on a hot day.
在Homejoy我们都试过了。我们自己用的,那很好。我们是唯一的清洁工,所以这很容易。我们的父母住在密尔沃基,我们住在山景城,所以这不管用。朋友和同事有点像在旧金山和其他地方,所以我们没有太多的人使用它。所以我们一开始就没能说服很多人去使用它,结果却陷入了死胡同。所以我们所做的是,因为我们在山景城,你们中的一些人可能知道卡斯特罗街上,他们在夏天有街头集市。所以我们会出去,基本上追着人们,让他们试着预约一次清洁。几乎每个人都会说不,直到有一天我们利用了天气。这是一个非常炎热和潮湿的一天,我们注意到的是,每个人都被食物和饮料区所吸引,特别是在炎热的一天。
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We figured we needed to get in the middle of that so we took water bottles and froze them and we started handing out free bottles of water that were cold. And people just came to us. I think we basically guilt tripped people into booking cleanings. But the proof in the pudding was that I figured most of the people were guilt tripped into doing it, but then they went home and they didn’t cancel on us. Well, some of them did but the majority of them did not. I thought that’s good, I have to go clean their houses but at least there is something we are actually solving here.
我们想,我们需要在这中间,所以我们采取了水瓶和冻结他们,我们开始分发免费瓶的水是冷的。有人来找我们。我想我们基本上是因为内疚而让人们预约清洁。但布丁里的证据是,我认为大多数人都是被内疚绊倒才这么做的,但后来他们回家了,并没有取消我们。嗯,他们中的一些人做到了,但大多数人没有。我觉得那很好,我得去打扫他们的房子,但至少我们正在解决一些问题。
I know another startup in the last batch, I forgot their name right now, but they were selling shipping type products or trying to replace shipping products. So they would show up to the US postal office and find people who were trying to ship products and just take them out of line and get them to try to use the product and have them ship it for them. So you just have to go to places where people are really going to show up. Your conversion rate is going to be really low but to go from 0 to 1 to 3 to 4 these are the kind of things you might have to do.
我知道上一批的另一家初创公司,我现在忘了他们的名字,但他们在销售船运类产品或试图更换船运类产品。因此,他们会出现在美国邮政局,找到那些试图运送产品的人,只是把他们带离线路,让他们尝试使用产品,并让他们为他们运送。所以你只需要去人们真正会出现的地方。你的转化率会很低,但是要从0到1到3到4,这些都是你必须要做的事情。
So now that you have users using you ,what do you do with all of these users? The first thing you should do is make sure that there is a way for people to contact you. Ideally there is a phone number and if you put up a phone number, one good idea is to make sure that you have a voicemail so that you won’t be picking it up all the time. But in any case a way for people to give inbound feedback is good, but really what you should be doing is going out to your users and talking to them. Get away from your desk and just get out and do the work. It seems like a slog and it is going to be a slog but this is where you are going to get the best feedback ever for your product. And this is where it is going to teach you what features you need to completely change, get rid of, or what features you need to build.
既然你有用户在使用你,你怎么处理这些用户?你应该做的第一件事是确保有一种方式让人们与你联系。理想情况下,有一个电话号码,如果你有一个电话号码,一个好主意是确保你有一个语音信箱,这样你就不会一直拿起它。但不管怎样,人们提供反馈的方式是好的,但实际上你应该做的是向你的用户公开并与他们交谈。离开你的办公桌,出去工作。这似乎是一个艰苦的,这将是一个艰苦的,但这是你要得到最好的反馈,你的产品有史以来。这就是它将教你什么特性需要完全改变,摆脱,或者什么特性需要构建的地方。
One way to do this is to send out surveys to get reviews after they have used the product. This is okay but generally people are only going to respond if they really love you or they really hate you. And you never get the in between. A way to get the in between and not all of the extremes is to actually meet the person that is using your product. I’ve seen people go out to meet the user and they sit there and it is like a laboratory and it is like an inquisition. You’re just kind of poking at them. That is not going to give you the best results. What you should really do is make it into a conversation and get to know them and get them to feel comfortable. You want to get them at a level where they feel like they should be honest with you to help you improve things. So I found that actually taking people out for drinks and stuff like that was actually a very good way to do that. I’m not sure if all of you are old enough to do that but you can take them for coffee.
一种方法是在他们使用产品后发送调查以获得评论。这没关系,但一般来说,人们只会回应,如果他们真的爱你或他们真的恨你。你永远也不会在两者之间。一种介于两者之间而不是所有极端之间的方法是与使用您产品的人进行实际会面。我见过有人出去见用户,他们坐在那里,就像一个实验室,就像一个宗教法庭。你只是在戳他们。这不会给你最好的结果。你真正应该做的是把它变成一个对话,了解他们,让他们感到舒服。你想让他们觉得他们应该对你诚实,帮助你改进事情。所以我发现带人出去喝酒之类的其实是个很好的方法。我不确定你们是否都够大了,可以带他们去喝咖啡。
So another thing that you should be tracking is how are you doing in general from a macro perspective. The best way to do that is by tracking customer retention. The number of people that came in the door today, the number of people who are coming back tomorrow, the next day and so forth. Usually over time you are kind of looking at monthly retention so people who came in the door today, are they still using it next month and so forth. The problem with that metric is that it takes forever to collect that data and sometimes you don’t have a month or two months or three months to figure that out. So a good leading indicator is actually collecting reviews and ratings. Such as five-star and four-star reviews or collecting some notion of nps, which is net promoter score. So you’re basically asking them for a rating from 0 to 10 about how likely are they to recommend you to a friend and calculating the nps.
所以你应该追踪的另一件事是,从宏观的角度来看,你的总体表现如何。最好的方法是跟踪客户保留率。今天进门的人数,明天回来的人数,第二天等等。通常随着时间的推移,你会看到每月的保留金,所以今天进来的人,下个月还会用吗,等等。这个指标的问题是,收集这些数据需要很长时间,有时你没有一个月、两个月或三个月的时间来弄清楚。因此,一个好的领先指标实际上是收集评论和评级。比如五星和四星的评论,或者收集一些nps的概念,也就是净推荐分数。所以你基本上是问他们从0到10的评分,关于他们向朋友推荐你的可能性有多大,并计算nps。
Over time what you’ll see is that as you are building new features, you will be able to see that the reviews and the retention are going up over time. That means that you are doing a good job. If it is going down then you are doing a bad job. If it is kind of staying the same that probably means that you need to go out and figure out what new things you should be building.
随着时间的推移,您将看到,当您构建新特性时,您将能够看到评论和保留率会随着时间的推移而增加。那意味着你做得很好。如果它正在下降,那么你做得不好。如果它是一种保持不变,这可能意味着你需要走出去,找出新的东西,你应该建立。
One thing you should be wary of is the honesty curve. Some people will just lie to you. These are degrees of separation from you, and this is the level of honesty. So here this is your mom, these are the friends of your friends and here are random people. Your mom will use your product and she will be proud of you anyway, so she’ll be honest this much. Your friends will be pretty honest with you and give you feedback because they care about you – this is assuming this is a free product – and then over time as you get more and more random, these people don’t know who you are. There are people over here who don’t care about giving you feedback. So take this into consideration when getting user feedback.
你应该注意的一点是诚实曲线。有些人会对你撒谎。这是与你分离的程度,这是诚实的程度。这是你妈妈,这是你朋友的朋友,这是随机的人。你妈妈会用你的产品,她会为你感到骄傲,所以她会这么诚实。你的朋友会对你相当诚实,并给你反馈,因为他们关心你-这是假设这是一个免费产品-然后随着时间的推移,随着你越来越随机,这些人不知道你是谁。这里有些人不在乎给你反馈。所以在得到用户反馈时要考虑到这一点。
So say now this is a paid product. So when it is a paid product your mom is down here. She is just going to lie to you and tell you it’s great. But then it kind of goes like this (draws graph going upward). Your friends are going to support you and give you the right feedback but it is actually these random people out here that if they really don’t think that what they paid for was worth it, they are going to really tell you. That’s because it is money out the door.
所以说现在这是一个付费产品。所以当它是付费产品时,你妈妈就在这里。她只会对你撒谎,告诉你这很好。但它是这样的(向上画图表)。你的朋友会支持你,给你正确的反馈,但实际上是这些随机的人在这里,如果他们真的不认为他们付出的是值得的,他们会真的告诉你。那是因为钱不在家。
This is another way of saying that you are going to get the best feedback if you just make someone pay for it. That’s not to say that you should make people pay for it the first time out, but it is to say that if you are going to build a product that you are going to eventually need to pay for the software or for the hardware or whatever then get to the point where you can do that very fast. Because that is when you can get to the more meaty stuff of how you can get more paying users in the door.
这是另一种说法,如果你只是让别人付钱,你会得到最好的反馈。这并不是说你应该让人们在第一时间就为它付费,而是说如果你要制造一个产品,你最终需要为软件或硬件或其他任何东西付费,然后达到你可以很快做到的程度。因为那是你可以得到更多的肉食的东西,你可以得到更多的付费用户在门口。
You’re getting a lot of feedback and what do you do before you officially launch the product? You always want to be building fast and you want to be optimizing for this stage of your growth. You might have 10 users at this point and there is no point in trying to build features for when you might have 10 million users. You want to optimize for the next stage of growth which will be 10 to 100 users. What are the features you really need for that and just go with that. One of the things I found when building a marketplace is that process is very important over time as you scale.
你得到了很多反馈,在正式发布产品之前你会做些什么?你总是想快速地建立,你想为你的成长阶段进行优化。此时,您可能有10个用户,而在您可能有1000万用户的情况下,尝试构建功能是没有意义的。您希望为下一阶段的增长(即10到100个用户)进行优化。你真正需要的功能是什么,就随它去吧。我在建立一个市场时发现,随着时间的推移,这个过程非常重要。
You need to not try and automate everything and create software to have robots run everything. What you should do to really understand what you should build is manually do it yourself. An example of this is when we started taking on cleaning professionals on to our platform, we would ask them a bunch of questions over the phone and then in person would ask a bunch of questions as well. And then they would go to a test clean and then they would get onboarded to our platform if they were good enough. Doing all these questions for that many candidates we had a 3-5% acceptance rate.
你不需要试着把所有的事情都自动化,也不需要创建让机器人运行所有事情的软件。要真正理解应该构建什么,您应该做的是自己手动构建。一个例子是,当我们开始在我们的平台上与清洁专业人士接触时,我们会通过电话问他们一大堆问题,然后亲自问他们一大堆问题。然后他们会去一个测试干净,然后他们会登上我们的平台,如果他们足够好。对这么多的候选人做这些问题,我们的录取率是3-5%。
What happened over time was that we learned certain questions that we were asking were good indicators as to whether or not they would be a good or bad performer on the platform through data collection and just looking at everything we could ask on an online form. That is when we put up an online application, they could apply and then we would ask them maybe several other questions during the in person interview. If you try to automate things too fast then you run into this potential problem of not being able to move quickly and iterate things like questions on an application and things like that.
随着时间的推移,我们了解到,我们提出的某些问题是很好的指标,通过数据收集和查看我们可以在在线表单上提出的所有问题,可以判断他们在平台上的表现是好是坏。也就是说,当我们提出一个在线申请,他们可以申请,然后我们可能会问他们几个其他问题,在面对面面试。如果您试图将事情自动化得太快,那么您就会遇到这样一个潜在的问题,即无法快速移动和迭代诸如应用程序上的问题之类的事情。
A third point here is temporary brokenness is much better than permanent paralysis. By that what I mean is perfection is irrelevant during this stage. When you get to the next stage of growth what you are trying to perfect in one stage is not going to matter anyway. So do not worry about all of the edge cases when you are building something, just worry about the generic case of who your core user is going to be. As you get bigger and bigger the volume of those edge cases increases over time and you will want to build for that.
第三点是暂时性的破裂比永久性的瘫痪要好得多。我的意思是完美在这个阶段是无关紧要的。当你进入成长的下一个阶段时,你在某个阶段想要完善的东西无论如何都是无关紧要的。因此,在构建某个东西时,不要担心所有的边缘情况,只要担心核心用户将是谁的一般情况即可。当你变得越来越大,这些边缘案件的数量随着时间的推移而增加,你会想建立这一点。
Lastly beware of the Frankenstein approach which is – great you talked to all of these users and they gave you all of these ideas and the first thing you are going to want to do is go build every single one of them and then go show them the next day and make them happier. You should definitely listen to user feedback but when someone tells you to build a feature you shouldn’t go build it right away. What you should really do is get to the bottom of why they are asking you to build the feature. Usually what they are suggesting is not the best idea. What they are really suggesting is that I have this other problem that you either created for me while using the product or I really need this problem solved if I’m going to pay to use this product. So figure that out first before piling on a bunch of features which then hide the problem altogether.
最后,要注意弗兰肯斯坦的方法,这是很好的,你和所有这些用户交谈,他们给你所有这些想法,你要做的第一件事是去建立他们中的每一个,然后第二天去给他们看,让他们更快乐。你当然应该听取用户的反馈,但是当有人告诉你要构建一个特性时,你不应该马上去构建它。你真正应该做的是弄清他们为什么要求你构建这个特性。通常他们的建议不是最好的主意。他们真正的意思是,我还有一个问题,你要么在使用产品时为我制造,要么我真的需要解决这个问题,如果我要花钱使用这个产品。因此,在积累一堆特性之前,首先要弄清楚这一点,然后将问题完全隐藏起来。
So you have a product that you are ready to ship – some people at this point will continue building the product and not ship it at all. I think the whole idea of being stealth and perfecting the product to no end is the idea that imitation is cheaper than innovation in terms of time and money and capital. I think that everyone should always assume in general that if you have a really good idea no matter when you launch someone is going to fast follow you and someone is going to execute as hard as they possibly can to catch up with you. There is no point in holding out on all of that user feedback that you can get by getting a lot of users because he felt paranoid that someone is going to do this to you.
所以你有一个产品,你准备出货-有些人在这一点上会继续建设的产品,而不是船舶在所有。我认为,隐形化和无止境地完善产品的整个理念是,从时间、金钱和资本的角度来看,模仿比创新便宜。我认为每个人总的来说都应该假设,如果你有一个非常好的想法,不管你什么时候启动,有人会很快跟上你,有人会尽可能地执行,以赶上你。有没有必要坚持所有的用户反馈,你可以得到大量的用户,因为他觉得有人会这样对你偏执。
I hate to keep harping on it but these are things that I see today with founders and something that I went through as well. And I think that unless you are building something that requires tens of millions of dollars just to start up there is really no point in waiting around to launch the product.
我不想继续唠叨,但这些都是我今天看到的创始人和我经历过的事情。我认为,除非你正在建造一个需要几千万美元才能启动的东西,否则你真的没有必要等着推出这个产品。
So say you have something that you feel ready to get lots of users on. So what do you do at this point? I will go over various types of growth in the next slides, but the one thing to note here early on when it is just you, your cofounder, and a couple of other people building, you aren’t creating a team just for growth. It is going to be one person and one person only. You really need to focus and you are going to be tempted to try five different strategies at one time.
所以说你有一些你觉得可以吸引很多用户的东西。你现在怎么办?我将在下一张幻灯片中讨论各种类型的增长,但这里要注意的一点是,当只有你、你的共同创始人和其他几个人在构建团队时,你并不是为了增长而创建团队。只有一个人。你真的需要集中精力,你会被诱惑尝试五种不同的策略在同一时间。
But really what you should do is take one channel and really execute on it for an entire week and just focus on that. And if that works continue executing on it until it caps out. If it doesn’t work then just move on. By doing this you will feel more certain that the channel you were working on is wrong and your initial hypothesis is wrong than if you only spent a third of your time on it over the course of a few weeks. So learn one channel at a time.
但实际上你应该做的是采取一个渠道,并真正执行了整整一周,只专注于这一点。如果有效的话,继续执行直到结束。如果不行,那就继续。通过这样做,你会觉得更确定,你正在工作的渠道是错误的,你最初的假设是错误的,而不是如果你只花了三分之一的时间在它的过程中几个星期。所以一次只学一个频道。
Second, when you find one channel at a time and strategies that work, always be iterating on it. You can potentially create a playbook and give it to someone else to iterate on it but these channels always change. Anything from Facebook ads to Google ads, the distribution channels, the environments that you don’t control change all of the time and you should always be iterating and optimizing for that. And lastly, in the beginning when you see a channel that fails just to get rid of it and go on there are lots of other things to try. But over time go back to that channel and look at it again.
第二,当你一次找到一个渠道和有效的策略时,一定要反复使用它。您可以潜在地创建一个剧本,并将其交给其他人进行迭代,但这些频道总是变化的。从Facebook广告到Google广告,分销渠道,你无法控制的环境都在不断变化,你应该为此不断迭代和优化。最后一点,在一开始,当你看到一个频道,只是无法摆脱它,并继续有很多其他的事情要尝试。但随着时间的推移,回到那个频道,再看一遍。
An example is that in the beginning at Homejoy we had no money so when we tried to buy Google ads to get users in the door quickly – what we found was that all of these national companies had more money than us, they were making a lot more money on the job than us. So they were able to acquire users at a much higher cost than us. So we couldn’t afford that and we had to go through another channel. But today we make more money on the job, and we are better at some things. So we should probably revisit the idea of buying Google ads. That’s what I mean by that.
一个例子是,在Homejoy的一开始,我们没有钱,所以当我们试图购买谷歌广告,让用户迅速进入大门-我们发现,所有这些国家的公司都比我们有钱,他们在工作上赚的钱比我们多得多。因此,他们能够以比我们高得多的成本获得用户。所以我们负担不起,只能通过另一个渠道。但是今天我们在工作上赚了更多的钱,而且我们在某些方面做得更好。所以我们应该重新考虑购买谷歌广告的想法。我就是这个意思。
And the key to all of this is creativity. Performance marketing, or marketing and growth in general can be very technical but, it is actually technical, and you have to be creative because if it was really easy and bland then everyone would be growing right now. So you always have to find that little thing that no one else is doing and do that to the extreme.
而这一切的关键是创造力。绩效营销,或者说营销和增长一般来说是非常技术性的,但是,它实际上是技术性的,你必须要有创造力,因为如果它真的很简单和平淡的话,那么现在每个人都在增长。所以你总是要找到别人都不做的小事,并做到极致。
So there are three types of growth. Sticky, viral, and paid growth. Sticky growth is trying to get your existing users to come back and pay you more or use you more. Viral growth is when people talk about you. So you use a product, you really like it and you tell ten other friends, and they like it. That’s viral growth. And the third is paid growth. If you happen to have money in the bank you’re going to be able to use part of that money to buy growth.
因此有三种类型的增长。粘性、病毒性和付费增长。Sticky growth试图让你现有的用户回来给你更多的钱或者更多的使用你。病毒性增长是人们谈论你的时候。所以你使用一个产品,你真的很喜欢它,你告诉其他十个朋友,他们喜欢它。那是病毒性增长。第三是薪酬增长。如果你碰巧在银行里有钱,你就可以用一部分钱来购买增长。
The central theme that I’m going to go through is sustainability. By sustainable growth I mean you are basically not a leaky bucket. The money you put in has a good return investment on it. So sticky growth is, like I said, trying to get your existing users to come back and buy stuff. The only thing that really matters here is that you deliver a good experience. Right? If you deliver a good experience people are going to want to keep using you. If you deliver an addictive experience people are going to want to keep using you. And the way to measure this and to really look at this and how you are doing over time with whether you are providing good sticky growth is to look at the CLV and retention cohort analysis.
我要讲的中心主题是可持续性。我所说的可持续增长,是指你基本上不是一个漏洞百出的人。你投入的钱有很好的投资回报。所以粘性增长,就像我说的,是试图让你现有的用户回来买东西。在这里唯一真正重要的是你提供了一个好的体验。正确的?如果你提供了一个好的体验,人们会希望继续利用你。如果你提供了一个上瘾的经验,人们会想继续使用你。衡量这一点的方法,要真正了解这一点,以及你在一段时间内的表现,以及你是否提供了良好的粘性增长,就是看CLV和保留率队列分析。
CLV, some people call it TLV, is a customer’s lifetime. It is basically the net revenue that a customer brings in the door over a period of time. So a 12 month CLV is how much net revenue does a customer give you over 12 months. And sometimes people will do the month and six months and so forth. So when I say cohort basically what you are looking at is, this is time, and this is percent of the users coming back to you. So at period zero you are at 100%.
CLV,有人称之为TLV,是客户的一生。它基本上是客户在一段时间内带来的净收入。因此,12个月的CLV是指客户在12个月内给你带来的净收入。有时人们会做一个月,六个月等等。所以当我说,基本上你看到的是,这是时间,这是百分之百的用户回到你身边。所以在第0周期,你是100%。
So cohort is another name for customer segments. For example you might look at the female versus male cohorts or people in Atlanta, Georgia versus people in Sacramento, California cohorts. The most common one is by month. So cohort equals month and let’s just say for this exercise we are looking at March 2012. So in March 2012, 100% of the people are using your product. Now, one month later 50% of the people might come back. Now, in the second month how many people that came in March are coming back two months later? That might be down. So over time you will have a curve that looks like this. There is always some initial drop off. The reasons that people don’t stay after first use could be that it wasn’t worth it or they had a bad experience, or something like that. And then over time what you want is for your curve to flatten out. These over here become your core customers. These are the ones that will stay with you over time.
因此,队列是客户细分的另一个名称。例如,你可以看看女性与男性的对比,或者佐治亚州亚特兰大的人与加利福尼亚州萨克拉门托的人的对比。最常见的是按月计算。所以队列等于一个月,我们就说这个练习,我们看的是2012年3月。所以在2012年3月,100%的人都在使用你的产品。现在,一个月后,50%的人可能会回来。现在,在第二个月,三月份来的有多少人两个月后回来?那可能是下降了。所以随着时间的推移,你会有一条这样的曲线。总是有一些初始下降。人们第一次使用后不留下来的原因可能是不值得,或者他们有过不好的经历,或者类似的。随着时间的推移,你想要的是曲线变平。这些都是你的核心客户。这些会一直伴随着你。
Say we are at one year later and you have built a bunch of stuff. You graph out the same thing and hopefully what you see is that you have a curve like this. That is, that even in the first period more than 50% of the people came back to you and more and more people are sticking with you. A really bad retention curve looks like this – which is after the first use they just hate you so much that no one even comes back. I don’t know what kind of business that is, it is obviously a shitty business. I can’t explain a good business that has a retention curve like that. Over time as you are thinking of strategies to increase this curve and to keep making it go up and up and up you want to keep looking at this analysis over time to see if that strategy is working for you.
假设我们在一年后,你已经建立了一堆东西。你画出同样的曲线,希望你看到的是这样的曲线。也就是说,即使在第一个时期,也有超过50%的人回到你身边,越来越多的人支持你。一个非常糟糕的保留曲线是这样的-第一次使用后,他们非常讨厌你,甚至没有人回来。我不知道那是什么样的生意,这显然是一个糟糕的生意。我无法解释一个好的企业有这样的保留曲线。随着时间的推移,当你在考虑增加这条曲线的策略,并使其不断上升和上升,你想继续看这个分析,随着时间的推移,看看这个策略是否适合你。
The second kind of growth is viral growth. Like sticky growth you also need to deliver a good experience. But on top of that you need to deliver a really, really good experience. What is going to make these people shout out loud on Twitter or on Facebook or whatever and tell all their friends and email all of their family about you. You have to really deliver a good experience. Combined with that is you have to have really good mechanics for the referral program itself. You have 100 customers who really want to talk about you. Now how are they going to talk about you?
第二种增长是病毒性增长。像粘性增长一样,你也需要提供良好的体验。但除此之外,你需要提供一个非常非常好的体验。是什么让这些人在Twitter或Facebook上大声喊叫,告诉他们所有的朋友,给他们的家人发电子邮件。你必须提供一个好的体验。再加上这是你必须有一个非常好的机制为转介程序本身。你有100个顾客真的想谈论你。现在他们怎么谈论你?
So in that sense the viral growth strategy is all about building a good experience, but if you have that, how do you build a good referral program. I have listed the three main parts of that. One is the customer touch points which is where are people learning that they can refer other people? That might be after they book or after they sign up. A better one is after they use the product for a while and you see that they are highly engaged, then you show them that link and get them to send it out to everyone. Another one is if you are doing more of a platform type play – for Homejoy we actually go inside their home. So another customer touch point is when the cleaning professional is inside the home they can have a leave behind and we can show them something there too as well. You want to basically put the customer touch points and the actual link to however they are going to refer their friends at a point in time where they are highly engaged and you know that they are loving you.
所以从这个意义上说,病毒性增长策略是建立一个良好的经验,但如果你有,你如何建立一个良好的转介程序。我列出了其中的三个主要部分。一个是客户接触点,这是人们了解到他们可以介绍其他人的地方?那可能是在他们预订或注册之后。更好的方法是在他们使用产品一段时间后,你看到他们非常投入,然后你向他们展示这个链接,让他们把它发送给每个人。另一个是如果你在做更多的平台类型的游戏-为了家庭乐趣,我们实际上进入他们的家。因此,另一个客户接触点是,当清洁专业人员在家里,他们可以留下来,我们也可以向他们展示一些东西。你基本上要把客户的联系点和实际链接放在一个时间点上,在这个时间点上,他们非常投入,你知道他们爱你。
The second is program mechanics. The most common thing I have seen is $10 for $10. You get $10 if you invite your friends and they use it and they get $10. And so you should try different types of mechanics in that sense and try to optimize for whatever works for you. It could be 25 for 25 or it could be 10 for 10, it could be any of these things. And lastly, when your friend clicks on your referral link, when they come back to the site it is really important to optimize that conversion flow of how they are going to sign up. Sometimes you need to sell them in a different manner or up-sell that a friend suggested that you use this and so forth. So with all of these combined, you will really need to play around with them in different dimensions and come up with a good referral program.
第二是程序机制。我见过的最常见的东西是10美元换10美元。如果你邀请你的朋友,他们用了,你就得到10美元。所以你应该尝试不同类型的机制,在这个意义上,并尝试优化任何适合你的。可能是25比25,也可能是10比10,可能是这些东西中的任何一个。最后,当你的朋友点击你的推荐链接时,当他们回到网站时,优化他们如何注册的转换流程是非常重要的。有时你需要以不同的方式销售它们,或者向上销售朋友建议你使用的产品等等。因此,所有这些结合起来,你真的需要发挥他们在不同的方面,拿出一个很好的推荐方案。
And lastly is paid growth. Some examples of paid growth are this right here. And these are some of the most obvious ones and I’m sure that you guys can think of more. Paid growth is you happen to have money you can spend – you may have credit cards or whatever – but you can spend something to get users. So the correct way to think about paid growth is that you are going to risk putting money out there so that are you going to get a return. The simple way to think about it – is your CLV, your customer’s lifetime – is it more than your CAC. And your CAC is an abbreviation for customer acquisition costs. So an example is – say you run a bunch of ads over 12 months and the customer is worth $300 to you. Each one of these ads, when you click on it the CPC costs different types of money, and then when they click on your ad they have to come to the site and sign up or buy something.
最后是薪酬增长。这里有一些付费增长的例子。这些是最明显的,我相信你们能想到更多。付费增长是指你碰巧有钱可以花——你可能有信用卡或其他什么——但你可以花一些钱来获得用户。因此,正确的方法来考虑有偿增长是,你要冒险把钱放在那里,这样你才能得到回报。考虑它的简单方法是你的CLV,你客户的一生,它比你的CAC更重要。您的CAC是客户获取成本的缩写。举个例子,假设你在12个月内做了一堆广告,而顾客对你来说价值300美元。每一个这样的广告,当你点击它的CPC成本不同类型的钱,然后当他们点击你的广告,他们必须来网站注册或购买一些东西。
And the conversion rates are different for all of these ads. The CAC is calculated by the CPC divided by the conversion. So you see that there are different acquisition costs for different types of ads. To determine whether or not that is a good or bad ad all you have to do is CLV minus the CAC. If it is more than zero you are earning a profit. So you see that despite the CLV remaining the same and the conversions being higher or lower sometimes some ads that might seem good actually don’t seem so good at the end of the day.
所有这些广告的转化率都不一样。计算CAC时,CPC除以换算。所以你看到不同类型的广告有不同的收购成本。为了确定这是一个好的还是坏的广告,你所要做的就是CLV减去CAC。如果它大于零,你就是在赚取利润。所以你会看到,尽管CLV保持不变,转化率提高或降低,但有时一些看起来不错的广告在一天结束时看起来并不那么好。
You can look at this for your whole entire customer base, aggregating all of your customers together, but the better way of looking at it is to break it down by customer segments. If you are building a marketplace for country music the CLVs of someone in Nashville, Tennessee is going to be much larger than the CLVs of someone in Czechoslovakia. I just assume that is the case anyway.
你可以从你的整个客户群来看,把所有的客户聚集在一起,但更好的方法是按客户细分。如果你正在为乡村音乐建立一个市场,田纳西州纳什维尔某个人的CLV要比捷克斯洛伐克某个人的CLV大得多。我只是假设情况就是这样。
You will want to make sure that when you are buying ads for these different types of cohorts that you know what the differences are and you don’t want to mix everything together. The last point on payback and sustainability – I think a lot of businesses get in trouble and they turn into bad businesses when they start spending beyond their means. And it has a lot to do with risk tolerance or how much risk you are willing to take on.
你要确保当你为这些不同类型的人群购买广告时,你知道他们之间的区别,你不想把所有的东西都混在一起。关于回报和可持续性的最后一点——我认为很多企业陷入困境,当他们开始超出自己的能力范围消费时,就会变成糟糕的企业。它与风险承受能力或你愿意承担多少风险有很大关系。
So when you look at these CLVs, which is suppose you get a customer that is worth $300 after 12 months. In the first month they are worth $100. If you wait until the 12 month period then they give you the other $200. But if in the first period you are actually paying $200 for them then you are in the hole for $100 until the end of the 12 month period. That’s when you start to get into potentially unsustainable growth. Something could happen at the end of the 12 months where you don’t actually get the $200 from the customer and you end up in a very bad situation. Essentially, at the end of the day you could be running out of money. And if you are doing this with credit cards you will definitely find that you are going to have to declare bankruptcy very soon.
所以当你看这些CLV时,假设你在12个月后得到一个价值300美元的客户。第一个月价值100美元。如果你等到12个月后,他们会给你另外200美元。但是,如果在第一个时期,你实际上是支付200美元,他们那么你是在洞100美元,直到12个月的期限结束。那是你开始进入潜在的不可持续增长的时候。在12个月结束的时候,可能会发生一些事情,你实际上没有从客户那里得到200美元,结果你的处境非常糟糕。基本上,一天结束的时候,你可能会花光所有的钱。如果你用信用卡,你肯定会发现你很快就要宣布破产了。
So again, payback time is very important. Safe time to go with is three months. If you are very risk loving then maybe 12 months is better. Beyond 12 months is very much unsafe territory.
所以,回报时间非常重要。安全时间是三个月。如果你非常喜欢冒险,那么12个月可能更好。超过12个月是非常不安全的领域。
The art of pivoting – Homejoy in its current concept was literally the 13th idea we fully built out and tried to execute on and tried to get customers for. And so a lot of the questions I get are,” How do you even get to that 13th idea, and how did you decide when to move on?” The best guidance that I can give on that is the kind of look at these three criteria, which is once you realize that you can’t grow, and despite building out all of these great features and talking to all of these users none of them stick, or the economics of the business just don’t make sense – then once you make that realization you just need to move on.
旋转的艺术—Homejoy在其当前的概念中,实际上是我们完全建立的第13个想法,并试图执行和争取客户。所以我遇到的很多问题是,“你是怎么想到第13个点子的,你是怎么决定什么时候继续前进的?”我能给出的最好的指导就是看看这三个标准,也就是说一旦你意识到你不能成长,尽管建立了所有这些伟大的特性,并与所有这些用户交谈,但没有一个能坚持,或者商业的经济性根本就没有意义——那么一旦你意识到这一点,你就需要继续前进。
I think the trickiest one is probably the growth one because there are so many stories out there where the founders stuck with the idea and then after three years all of a sudden it started growing. So the trick here is what you really should do is have a growth plan when you start out. What is an optimistic but realistic way to grow this business? it might look something like this. In week one you just want one user, in week two you want maybe two users and so forth. And you can keep doubling up and up.
我认为最棘手的可能是成长型,因为有太多的故事,创始人坚持这个想法,三年后突然开始成长。所以这里的诀窍是你真正应该做的是,当你开始的时候有一个增长计划。什么是一个乐观但现实的方式来发展这项业务?可能看起来像这样。第一周你只需要一个用户,第二周你可能需要两个用户,以此类推。你可以一直加倍。
In week one you should basically build as much as possible to get that one user. And then a week to build as much to get two users. If you have a product that people want you should be able to maintain this growth curve pretty easily by just walking around and manually finding people. It is when you get to 100 users a week when you need these growth strategies to start working. What I tell people is usually if you are fully executing on your product, and you are working really hard, then if you go three or four weeks in a row of no growth or backwards growth, then it is time to maybe consider a pivot.
在第一周,你应该基本上建立尽可能多的一个用户。然后用一周的时间来构建两个用户。如果你有一个产品,人们想要你应该能够保持这种增长曲线相当容易,只要走来走去,手动找到人。当你每周有100个用户时,你就需要这些增长策略来开始工作。我告诉人们的通常是,如果你完全执行你的产品,你真的很努力,然后如果你连续三到四周没有增长或向后增长,那么是时候考虑一个轴心。
Maybe not in the sense that you completely come up with a new idea but you are probably fundamentally doing something wrong because at that early stage a startup should always be growing. This is optimistically what it looks like and this is the kind of growth curve that I set forth and put out when I started Homejoy, but really what it looks like is like this. So you want to make sure that when you are in a lull you don’t stop. And that is what you should wait 2 to 3 weeks. As long as you don’t stop working hard you’ll eventually get back here and you’ll see a trend like this over time.
也许不是说你完全想出了一个新主意,但你可能根本上做错了什么,因为在创业的早期阶段,初创企业应该一直在成长。乐观地说,这就是它看起来的样子,这是我在开始Homejoy时提出的增长曲线,但实际上它看起来是这样的。所以你要确保当你处于平静期时你不会停下来。你应该等2到3周。只要你不停止努力,你最终会回到这里,随着时间的推移,你会看到这样的趋势。
I can take questions at this time.
我现在可以回答问题。
Q: So one question online was if your users already have a product that they are already comfortable with how do you get them to switch to yours?
Q: 所以网上的一个问题是,如果你的用户已经有了一个他们已经习惯的产品,你如何让他们切换到你的?
A: There is always a switchover cost. I will tell you the example of Homejoy. We were actually creating a new market in the sense that a lot of our initial users had never had cleanings before so it was pretty simple to get them on board. And a lot of people who have cleaners already really trust their cleaner. To get them to come and use something else is probably the most difficult task in the world. When you are building things and trying to get people to switch over to you what you really need to do is find the moments where your product or what you are offering is much better or very much differentiated from the existing solution they have.
A: 总有转换成本。我将告诉你Homejoy的例子。我们实际上是在创造一个新市场,在这个意义上说,我们的许多初始用户从来没有清洗过,所以它是非常简单的,让他们在船上。很多有清洁工的人已经很信任他们的清洁工了。让他们来用别的东西可能是世界上最困难的任务。当你在构建产品并试图让人们转向你时,你真正需要做的是找到你的产品或你提供的产品比他们现有的解决方案更好或有很大区别的时刻。
So an example is someone who had a regular cleaner and maybe had a party one day and they needed a cleaning almost the next day. Because Homejoy in most areas has next-day availability they would just come to Homejoy and use it because they knew they couldn’t get their regular cleaner. And once they start using the product, then that is when they start realizing the little advantages of using Homejoy, which adds up to a big advantage. Realizing that leaving cash out or using checks was really annoying so being able to do all of your payments online was more convenient. Being able to cancel or reschedule according to your own schedule was very convenient.
举个例子,有人有一个固定的清洁工,也许有一天开了个派对,第二天就需要打扫了。因为Homejoy在大多数地区都有第二天的可用性,所以他们只会来到Homejoy使用它,因为他们知道他们不能得到他们的常规清洁剂。一旦他们开始使用这个产品,那就是他们开始意识到使用Homejoy的小优势,这就是一个很大的优势。意识到离开现金或使用支票真的很烦人,所以能够做你所有的付款网上更方便。能够取消或重新安排根据您自己的时间表是非常方便的。
A lot of people when they build a product they are like – and these 50 things are better than the existing solution – and even if the benefits outweigh the switchover cost it is really hard to actually tell that to a user and try to get them to aggregate all of those benefits over many little things. It is better to have one or two things that clearly differentiate yourself from the other product.
很多人在构建一个他们喜欢的产品时,这50件事比现有的解决方案要好,即使好处超过了转换成本,也很难真正告诉用户,并试图让他们把所有这些好处加在许多小事上。最好有一两样东西能让你与其他产品明显区别开来。
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