Chapter 1: The Nature of Growth—What Does Growth Do?
In short, the essence of growth is to match the needs of more users and to better match the needs of each user.
Two latitudes. breadth and depth.
1. Breadth, matching the needs of more users
More users and more needs.
Only by matching user needs in breadth can we achieve growth in “surface”, that is, growth in the number of users.
Tell a story.
As we all know, Amazon only sold books in its earliest days. Therefore, Amazon’s users are limited to those who want to buy books. A girl who just wants to buy a piece of clothing is not going to go to Amazon. A user who just wants to sell clothes will not go to Amazon.
Later, Amazon began to gradually expand its categories. For example, it began to sell clothes, so Amazon had many more users buying clothes.
Later, Amazon began to let sellers open stores on Amazon, so many users who wanted to sell clothes began to use Amazon.
Later, Amazon felt that its idle computing resources could be opened up for rent to others, so it launched cloud computing to serve as the "water, electricity, and coal" of the Internet. As a result, Amazon has gained many more developers and enterprise users.
Domestically, the development of JD.com is similar to Amazon. At first, JD.com only sold some computer accessories and the like. Therefore, girls who want to buy a beautiful dress will not use JD.com. Merchants who want to sell clothes will not use JD.com.
Later, JD.com opened more and more categories and had a lot of clothes. As a result, many girls came to JD.com to buy clothes.
Later, JD.com allowed merchants to open stores, so many merchants selling clothes became users of JD.com.
Tell another story.
Everyone knows that Google started as a search engine. Of course, search is still the core of Google.
However, at the beginning, when Google was only for search, although it soon had a large number of users, the time that everyone used Google was very short. Because searching means searching and then leaving. Even if each user searches many times a day, it won't take much time.
In other words, the time users use Google is very short. Short usage time means fewer opportunities to monetize through advertising and less income.
Later, Google launched Gmail.
Email is a common and high-frequency application, but the usage time is naturally longer than search. Therefore, the time users spend on Google every day has obviously increased a lot.
Later, Google launched Google docs.
Office work such as writing documents and making forms takes a lot of time. As a result, Google users spend more time on Google every day. . .
This is breadth. Then, let’s talk about depth.
2. Depth, better matching the needs of each user
Only depth can better match the needs of each segmented user group.
Only with depth can growth be achieved.
Depth is actually “category first”.
Only by being number one in the category can the user group of this "category" give up similar products and use your product. Only then can your product achieve growth, and even acquire all users of this user group.
Then tell the story of Amazon.
Amazon is a classic example of category number one.
It started selling books online that year. Take "category first" as your strategy.
When selling books online, no matter which category of books, it can sell the most comprehensive books compared to offline bookstores. Therefore, it can sell the most comprehensive books in any subcategory, and it can also have zero inventory.
Therefore, on the one hand, Amazon has attracted a large number of long-tail users with book purchasing needs, and the long-tail users combined far exceed the head users. In addition, users with long tail needs can easily be converted into users with head needs, so Amazon quickly attracted users with book buying needs from traditional booksellers.
On the other hand, there can be zero cost in terms of inventory. The reduction in costs allows Amazon to give users greater discounts on book prices, which greatly increases the appeal of users who want to buy books.
In this way, Amazon has made itself the "number one in the category" for buying books, or the number one in the "bookstore" category.
Later, do cloud computing. Amazon is still the first category strategy. When Amazon was doing cloud computing, the entire Internet was full of various server hosting providers, large and small. They make money by selling and renting servers or virtual hosts. However, to build a website, it is not only enough to have a server or virtual host. First of all, various configurations will be very troublesome and costly. Then, as time goes by, With the development of business and the growth of traffic, various services such as storage, CDN, elastic computing, flexible upgrade and downgrade, etc. are needed. However, ordinary hosting providers cannot provide these at all or cannot provide them completely. Moreover, many hosting providers have poor technical skills and poor server stability and other aspects.
Amazon has launched the banner of "cloud computing" and wants to turn this market of selling and renting servers and virtual hosts into a "water, electricity and coal" model of "selling services".
Amazon's model is IaaS, which is "infrastructure as a service".
The emergence of Amazon IaaS directly defeated a large number of hosting providers, large and small. As a result, a large number of developers and companies abandoned the products of the original hosting providers and turned to Amazon IaaS.
Amazon achieved first place in the "Internet infrastructure" category and remains so to this day.
Let’s talk about Google.
Gmail.
In 2004, Google launched Gmail. However, at that time, there were already various giants in the field of email. It seemed to be a saturated market. In email, almost no one thought there was any opportunity.
However, after the launch of Gmail, it quickly became popular. Everyone abandoned the mailboxes they had used for many years such as Yahoo email and Hotmail and turned to Gmail.
The situation in China was the same. At that time, there were no restrictions on accessing Google in China, and everyone registered and used Gmail one after another.
Why? Because Gmail has achieved the first place in the email category - while not losing to its competitors in other aspects, Gmail is the email with the largest storage capacity.
Gmail storage capacity is 1 G.
Note: Today's Gmail storage capacity has far exceeded 1G.
Now, it sounds like 1 G is a joke. However, you may not know that before Gmail appeared, the storage capacity of all mailboxes was only a few to dozens of megabytes.
I still remember that Hotmail only had 5M of storage back then. The mailbox with the largest storage capacity in China, the 163 mailbox, only has a storage capacity of 25M.
Therefore, the emergence of Gmail at that time can be said to be disruptive. As a result, everyone started using Gmail.
It's a similar situation with Google docs.
Before the emergence of Google docs, writing documents had to be done through Microsoft Word or other client software. And most of these software are paid.
In other words, "document-type" products are all client-side.
Google docs created the subcategory of "online documents" and has always maintained its first place in this category.
And because of the advantages of "online documents" compared to "client documents" (free, convenient, collaborative, etc.), it directly stole a number of users from companies such as Microsoft, thereby greatly increasing the time users use Google. .
That is, if you go deep and be the first in the category, then all the user groups in this category will belong to you. If you can't be number one in a large category, then be number one in small categories or subdivided categories.
Build depth and grab a user base in a category. Build breadth and grab more user groups in more categories.
This is the nature of growth.
Say more.
Matching demand is to make products.
This means that making products means making growth, and making growth means making products.
Products are used to make money. Growth is the process of making money. Only in the "process of making money", by continuously improving products and better matching needs, can we continue to acquire more users.