100万用户服务器

by Assaf Elovic

通过阿萨夫·埃洛维奇

我的应用在一个月内如何增长超过100万用户 (How my app grew by over 1M users in one month)

只需要这种简单的每周方法和耐心。 (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.

建立和推广新的消费产品是您作为企业家可以做的最具挑战性的事情之一。尽管有许多方法可以设计，测试，构建和推广应用程序，但通常似乎并没有带来真正的结果。

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!

然后您开始怀疑，也许是产品？也许市场契合度不够？还是执行不好？也许我们应该增加营销和品牌预算！也许我们没有针对正确的受众？也许我们应该构建更多功能！

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.

当您开始质疑一切时，情况通常会变得更糟。您开始偏离主要目标，开始在各种广泛的方法上浪费精力和金钱。

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

最糟糕的是，当您认为这完全是增加营销或品牌预算时。

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

您的目标应该始终是一个目标： 提高客户保留率 。对于那些不了解客户保留率的人，请单击此处。

案例研究：为什么让客户保持联系很重要 (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.

为了明确我的观点，我将介绍您从我的一个朋友那里听到的一个故事，他是一家非常成功的生产力B2C公司的联合创始人兼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，他们在Android Google商店中发布了他们的应用程序的第一个版本，然后发生了一件疯狂的事情。发布后的几天内，全球有50万用户下载了该应用。疯狂增长的原因主要是因为当时生产力领域没有好的应用程序。在接下来的几个月中，他们的用户已增长到几百万，并从风投中筹集了超过500万美元。

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，他们仍然无法达到一个体面的商业模式。他意识到尽管人数众多，但实际上长期使用该产品的用户很少。

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，他决定深入研究数据并寻找原因。他发现保留率很低。更糟糕的是，他发现四年来并没有太大改善！从那时起，他开始着重于保留率而不是用户增长。

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.

当时，VC向拥有大量用户增长的公司投入了数百万美元，因为它们不知道如何应对或衡量移动应用程序商店和网站带来的疯狂规模。

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.

今天的情况有所不同。要在B2C中筹集资金，您需要做的第一件事就是显示保留率的增长。这有一个很好的理由。

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：没有保留，没有多少用户下载了他们的应用程序。一周后，95％的用户停止使用该产品。因此，即使他们有十亿用户，几周后，在他们的数据库中也只会是一个数字。

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.

这是一个想法：如果每天有10万用户使用您的产品，则其价值比每个月有1亿用户使用您的产品贵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，一旦达到了不错的保留率，就可以确定您的营销预算将带动产品和业务的可持续增长。

精益创业方法 (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.

太多的创业公司以他们认为人们想要的产品的想法开始。然后，他们花费数月(有时是数年)的时间完善该产品，甚至从未向潜在客户展示产品(即使是非常原始的形式)。这就是精益创业公司的来历。

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?”

简而言之，精益创业是一种方法论，认为每个创业公司都是一个宏伟的实验，试图回答一个主要问题-“该产品应该制造吗？”

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

精益启动方法的核心组成部分是构建测量学习反馈回路。

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决的问题，然后开发最小可行产品(MVP)，以尽快开始学习过程。

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，启动程序就可以调整引擎。这将涉及测量和学习，并且必须包括可以证明因果问题的可行指标。

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

每当我和我的团队开发产品时，以下是我们执行的步骤：

Define the most important product assumption定义最重要的产品假设
Design and build an MVP of how this assumption should be tested设计和构建应该如何测试此假设的MVP
Target early adopters to test the MVP针对早期采用者以测试MVP
Apply the test results应用测试结果
Repeat重复

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

这是迭代的第一年(2017)我们的增长情况：

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

慢慢地但一定正确吗？现在，让我们一起看一个示例，看看经过足够的迭代后发生了什么。

过程 (The process)

定义最重要的假设 (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.

我将以我的团队为例。我们认为，没有人们真正喜欢使用的体面的提醒应用程序。我们认为，主要原因是在设置单个提醒时存在很多摩擦。您要么需要在移动应用程序上填写一份较长的表格，要么自然要问Siri这样的助手-意识到她不理解您50％的请求。

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，这就是我们定义最重要的产品假设的时间：如果我们能够以自然语言理解几乎所有提醒请求，那么用户将长期使用这种产品。

设计和建立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.

由于我们的假设侧重于NLU(自然语言理解)，因此我们决定只专注于此。没有品牌，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，我们聘请了数据科学家来构建最先进的NLU算法，以了解复杂的提醒请求。

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，由于我们只是验证了这一假设，因此我们决定将MVP构建为Facebook Messenger上的聊天机器人，而不是经过漫长而烦人的构建移动应用程序的过程。

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.

请注意 ：如果我们要构建一个移动应用程序，那么这将不会增加任何测试假设的条件，并且会使我们的MVP更长，设计和构建起来也更加复杂。而且，它甚至可能使我们偏离主要假设。例如，如果用户只是不想再使用新应用程序，该怎么办？我们可能已经得出结论，即使是完全出于其他原因，我们的假设也是错误的。

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

尽可能缩小MVP至关重要 ，因此您的主要假设不会受到干扰。

针对早期采用者 (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.

我们需要说英语的人，因为我们的NLU算法仅支持它。此外，我们相信千禧一代的妈妈会急切地想要这样的产品，因为他们总是在忙碌而忙碌，同时又经常需要记住一些事情。因此，我们针对了一些基于妈妈社区的Facebook页面(没有预算)，并成功引入了数百名Beta测试人员进行尝试。

将测试结果应用于产品 (Apply the test results on the product)

After our first iteration, we learned the following:

第一次迭代后，我们了解了以下内容：

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.请求提醒的方式比我们想象的要多得多。但是用户真的很喜欢通过简单的请求即可轻松设置提醒。
Users don’t always ask for reminders in a single request but break it down into a few steps.用户并非总是在单个请求中要求提醒，而是将其分解为几个步骤。
When working with chatbots, users would like the assistance of buttons to make it faster and easier to handle.当使用聊天机器人时，用户希望借助按钮的帮助，以使其更快，更容易处理。

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.

根据这些结果，我们确定了优先级并继续进行下一个假设，即在设置提醒的流程中添加按钮(结论三)。你猜怎么着？该假设也被证明是正确的。对于更可靠的假设，您可以阅读有关如何改善聊天机器人的文章。

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

渐渐地，我们每周都会提高整体产品和保留率。

We never tackled more than one assumption at a time.

我们从未一次解决多个假设。

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，我们开始发现与我们在一起超过六个月的用户！经过一年的每周迭代，我们终于决定是时候发布我们的产品了。第一周的保留率达到92％，第四周的保留率达到19％。它远远超出了市场标准，对我们来说足够了。

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.

我们在2018年2月中旬在FB Messenger上发布了聊天机器人，一个月内我们增长了5,800％以上，如下图所示。

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.

这主要是由于交付了我们知道人们喜欢并向他人推荐的精益产品。从那时起，我们已经在全球拥有超过100万用户，并且每天以成千上万的用户增长。

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

我们正在继续使用这种方法，并且每天都被证明是成功的。

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，我们尝试做出尽可能多的数据驱动决策 。尝试收集用户数据以改善用户体验，并在没有明确答案的情况下进行A / B测试 。例如，如果您不确定应该在何处放置按钮，或者不确定哪个标题会吸引更多点击，请尝试将一侧放置一半的用户，另一侧放置另一半的用户。然后，查看哪个展示位置带来了更多点击。

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.

这种方法不仅帮助我们专注于用户想要的最重要的功能集，而且还帮助我们过滤了我们认为有价值的功能，但实际上没有。

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:

正如他们在客户服务中所说：客户永远是对的。产品开发也是如此。相信您的客户，倾听他们的意见并与他们互动，您将了解他们想要和不想要的东西。除非要挑战您的假设，否则切勿凭直觉来构建事物。在这条路的尽头，您将得出以下两个结论之一：

The product does not have enough market fit, time to move on.

该产品没有足够的市场契合度，需要时间继续前进 。
You have a product people want. Good job, you’re on the way to building a company!您有人们想要的产品。做得好，您正在建立公司！

Either way, you win.

无论哪种方式，您都赢了。

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!

非常感谢您的阅读，如果您觉得这很有用，请给我一些鼓掌？这样更多的人可以看到它。有关更多文章，请访问我的技术博客ass afelovic.com。如果您有任何疑问，请随时在下面的评论中给我留言！

翻译自: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-my-app-grew-by-5-800-in-one-month-with-no-branding-or-marketing-d0bafb93108/