How can I earn 100,000 active users as quickly as newly launched services?

Even if you launch a new service that responds to the needs of the world on the application or net, if the number of users does not increase beyond people's eyes, the service will not be appreciated properly and it will be incomplete as a business I will. As the information exchange site for parents with small children started in 2016Winnie"Has cleared the milestone of" 100,000 active users "in 2017, and looking back on the points of success up to that point, it is open to the public on the blog.

How to Get Your First 100k (Active) Users - Winnie
https://blog.winnie.com/how-to-get-your-first-100k-active-users-909fa4292a27

Winnie is a service that wants information necessary for child rearing, a parent who is troubled can exchange information on smartphone applications and websites, and information that is disclosed is "a child in an open space nearby Day care services that can be deposited ", and more general topics such as" breast feeding methods ".

Winnie - Inspiration & Insight for Modern Parents
https://winnie.com/


Almost all of the information published in Winnie is provided by the user. Therefore, WinnieNetwork effectIt is a service that appears strongly. As the number of new users increases, the information is added, the service utilization value is improved, and the effect that leads to new user acquisition is expected, but the driving force of growth will depend on the information by the user It becomes important to secure a lot of contents from the initial stage. Winnie explains about factors that could have grown to overcome such a problem, divided into "what worked" and "what did not work".

◆ Functions
· Part 1: "Grow it before formal launch"
Many of the new services often carry out beta version testing only for familiar people before formal launch. Family and friends are often targeted, but in reality it is important to have a mechanism to grow from this stage. Winnie has expanded the number of users from 10 to over 400 people in the first three months, but it is all a user who was acquired by referral or personal connection.

These users are "Early Adapters", which brings much useful information to the service. Also, it seems that the service provider also has the effect that motivation can be obtained by increasing the number of users.

· Part 2: "Make it big anyway"
For Winnie in the early stage, it seems that it seems to be very attractive that we narrow down the area of ​​service provisioning and proceed with development targeting 2 or 3 places, but when such approach is taken, new users flow in There will be a very limited number of channels to come. Then, for services with high network effects such as Winnie, it will hamper expansion and improvement, and it will be impossible to lead to growth.

Winnie's strategy was that at the stage of releasing version 1 it gathered users even in areas with little information. However, useful information is naturally not received in the initial stage, so the utility value for users is very low. So, Winnie, for users who began using services in areas without information, can start using it preferentially when service provision begins, instead of having the information provided at the first stage "Early Access system "to prepare a mechanism that gathers information more efficiently. In other words, even in an area where information can not be obtained satisfactorily, by providing a kind of "reward" for the user, it is possible to prevent the user from going away is.


· Part 3: "Advertise, but that to test for improvements"
It is very difficult to grow well if you do not understand what kind of position your company stands. When trying out newly developed features, Winnie worked on advertising with paying some cost to Google and Facebook, and checked whether it works well or not. It seems that in addition to obtaining useful feedback, it was able to grasp what kind of function the user actually wants. At one point, Winnie who has recognized that the user responds strongly to the item "a place where children can dine for free" put resources into this field. It seems that this function still has the presence enough to be counted as one of the eyeball functions of Winnie.

· Part 4: "Try to do something in line with Google and Apple policy"
Increasing the exposure of your application on Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store is very important to win new users. Winnie has been selected several times in the App Store "Today's App" so far, and it has had a big effect on expanding the user, but behind it is " I was doing how to make it. " For example, doing a design that adheres to the design guidelines specified by Google and Apple in detail, or devising efforts to design the icons to make it easier to see, and in some cases like the Apple Pay function, It seems that each platform aimed at "the eyes of God of the app store" by introducing the function which is putting in force at that time.


· Part 5: "I understand that" sharing "is also communication
It can be said that sharing the information provided is very important, but depending on how you do that, users' reactions will be totally different. In early Winnie, "Share" button was prepared for every article, but in fact it is said that it was not used much. Instead, users requested it to "save". In response to this voice, Winnie developed a function to "save" and implemented a "share" button on the screen, it seems that the opportunity to share articles has increased.

What I learned from this is that the fact that users actually share information with friends and family in spite of not necessarily thinking that they are "people to share". In Winnie, we succeeded in creating a flow of sharing articles naturally by users by creating an order that users first "save" the articles and then "share" them . As a result, it is said that the probability of sharing articles has increased by 300%.

· Part 6: "Start with what you always want"
In Winnie, we targeted the service from the earliest stage to "a place where parents can connect and exchange information" plus "to be connected to businesses and service providers related to child rearing", but such Developing functions at the same time is not easy for startup, which has limited resources. Therefore Winnie said that it has survived this difficulty by shaping it in descending order of service.

The initial driving force for Winnie was to list detailed information on day care services and kindergartens with 5000 locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Later on, this information has become a material that gathers a lot of Royal customers tied strongly to the service, and that customers have come up with a virtuous cycle in which advertisers can attract advertisers and flow money.

· Part 7: "Do not develop for existing users only"
In Winnie, he stipulated the principle that "we do not focus too much on repeatedly touching a certain product." The first Winnie was a service that provided helpful information for parents with small babies, but this is not a very useful service for parents with big children, on the other hand. So Winnie developed a service targeted at parents who are slightly larger than babies and have children between 3 and 5 years old. One example is "Day care and kindergarten information", later on growing as one of the important functions in Winnie. It also means that the 'topic' page that allows users to interact about the topics they are interested in has also been successful as a feature that attracts many users.


◆ That did not work
· Part 1: "Hosting user participatory events"
Events that users who use services participate and can interact with the management side are worth implementing on the branding side, but there was not much merit in terms of "return on investment".

· Part 2: "Specializing in mobile specialized services"
In Winnie, there was a time when we tried to specialize the service for mobile for a while, but this did not work perfectly. The reason is that it was because he was doing erroneous targeting that "Mirenial generation uses a service through an application", he was not able to accurately grasp the influence of influx from the web. Winnie recalls that "Mobile First" is correct, but "Mobile only" is a mistake.

· Part 3: "Dependent on application push notification only"
Another mistake made in relation to the application was relying too much on the push function of the application. When developing an application and being able to deliver information by push notification, the administrative staff will feel comfortable approaching users, but in reality it seems they faced the result of "being ignored and finished". So Winnie noticed that it was a "approach to users using email" approach.