• Listen to customers

  • Continuously communicate with customers
    • Making friends with customers is the simplest strategy: once they become your friends, you can bother them for feedback frequently. To a certain extent, sending chat messages is easier than emails and meetings.
  • Pick customers you serve
    • Exclude customers who are not painful about the problem you are solving
    • Exclude customers who want features that you haven't made yet

• Fast execution

  • Define just the right scope
    • Usually, satisfy the simplest use case and wait to see what else people want. You will naturally know what to do next.
  • Develop an intuition for problem-solving
    • The product is a combination of art and science. Too data-driven products lack soul and surprise. How to practice intuition? Try to validate ideas without code.
  • Maximize autonomy and promote a culture of prioritization by persuasion. At the same time, allow teams to choose their work based on their emotions, lives, and interests. Use persuasiveness and dynamic adjustment to drive progress.

Who Does Xiaomi Learn From​

• Tongrentang: Aiming for a century-old enterprise, Tongrentang is the best example. Its characteristic is high product quality, even though the prices are not cheap.
• Walmart & Costco: Innovation in business models, lowering prices, with most products priced at less than half of similar existing products. A research and development system that hires a small number of the best talents, where one person is worth fifty. Eliminating traditional marketing and channel costs: removing market expenses from marketing, focusing solely on word-of-mouth marketing. Simplifying sales channels, focusing only on direct sales. Although the prices are low, the sales volume is extremely high.
• Haidilao: What is word-of-mouth? Exceeding user expectations.

A business model of high quality, low price, and optimized efficiency can only be executed by those who have made money and are not short on cash. Affordable, high-quality smartphones are merely a means to acquire customers, drawing users into mobile internet platforms and e-commerce platforms (+ smart hardware).

Internet Thinking = Seven-Character Formula (Focus on Extreme Word-of-Mouth Fast) + Sense of Participation (Mass Line)​

• Focus on Extreme: Centering on smartphones, TVs, and routers, doing it oneself, serving as the entry point for the ecosystem, while other companies handle other products within the ecosystem.
• Word-of-Mouth? Exceeding user expectations, even bringing the product into a friendship. This is the core of internet thinking.

De-Management​

Pursuing super flat structures, where leaders understand all the details, enabling quick responses and decisions. Pursuing super flat structures, where leaders understand all the details, enabling quick responses and decisions.

Comments​

Prerequisites

• Platform-level products, making the platform affordable, allowing monetization through applications at the platform level.
• Having top-tier talent and capital during the bootstrap phase.
• Achieving likability in branding.

• Listen to Your Customers

  • Continuously communicate with customers
    • Making friends with customers is the simplest strategy: once you become friends, you can easily and casually ask for their feedback. At a certain point, sending a short message is easier than emailing or having meetings.
  • Selectively choose your customers
    • Eliminate customers who do not feel the pain of the problems you solve
    • Remove customers who want features that you have not yet developed

• Execute Quickly

  • Define the right scope
    • Generally, meet the most basic use case, and then wait to see what else people want. You will naturally know what to do next.
  • Cultivate a good intuition for problem-solving
    • Product is a blend of art and science. Overly data-driven products lack soul and surprise. How to practice intuition? Validate ideas without using code as much as possible.
  • Maximize autonomy and promote a culture of prioritization by persuasion. At the same time, allow teams to choose their work based on their emotions, lives, and interests. Drive progress through persuasion and dynamic adjustments.

Simply looking at the current trend of MAU cannot predict its future trajectory. For example, in the Growth Accounting Framework — during a certain period, some people start using your product (user acquisition), some leave your product (churn), and some leave and then return (reactivation), resulting in a net MAU value. As time goes on, user acquisition and reactivation become increasingly difficult; the more users there are, the higher the churn rate. The overall MAU curve tends to flatten or decline.

So what are the indicators that can predict future MAU? Andrew believes there are two:

1. Positive feedback from user acquisition
2. Positive feedback from retention and reactivation

Positive Feedback from User Acquisition​

UGC + SEO Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Yelp, Houzz, Wikipedia

1. New users see good content
2. Some new users join in to create new content
3. Google indexes this unique new content
4. Users search for more content

Paid Marketing Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Blue Apron, Casper, Uber

1. New users click on ads
2. Some new users try the product
3. Some become paying users
4. More budget is allocated for advertising

Viral Marketing Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Dropbox, LinkedIn, Instagram

1. New users register
2. New users invite/share content with friends
3. Some friends click on the link
4. Friends respond to the invitation/shared content

The conversion rates and numbers of these four steps can be calculated. For example, 30% of new users may import contacts and send invitation links to 10 people, of which 40% actually send the link, and 50% of those who receive the link will register. Thus, the growth factor is 0.6, meaning that from 1,000 registrations, there will be 600+ new registrations; over time, this could reach 2,500.

How to improve? Break down the steps and tackle them one by one.

Positive Feedback from Retention and Reactivation​

Social Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Instagram, LinkedIn, Gmail

1. Users create content
2. Content is seen by other users
3. Content receives social feedback
4. Notifications are sent to the content creator

Personalized Content Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Zillow, Credit Karma, Netflix

1. Users subscribe or add
2. New content appears
3. Users are notified or receive a push feed
4. Users see and like the content

Non-Scalable Channels​

PR, promotions, holiday features, conferences, content marketing, partnerships, and app store feature updates. These are all drivers that can attract people into these positive feedback loops, but they are not the positive feedback itself. These drivers are either difficult to attribute or hard to sustain over time.

There are billions of mediocre products in the world, and no one can experience them all in a lifetime. The vast majority of these are subpar; people don't need mediocre products. What people need are a few truly excellent ones. Creating excellence requires focus, and focus means saying no to good things because they hinder your ability to create something great.

2017 - The Second Half of the Internet: Skyward, Grounded, Globalized​

• Skyward: True high technology, along with traditional ABC — AI, Big Data, Cloud
• Grounded: Not just being grounded but going underground — merely connecting consumers is not enough; WeChat has already solved this problem; moreover, the barriers to connection are low, and you must delve into all aspects of the industry chain.
• Globalized: Countries are not boundaries; more likely, they are sources, currencies, and cultural habits. For instance, the boundary for Toutiao is language. The competition between China and the U.S. spans five to ten years. Collaboration among enterprises is necessary. Software talent is scarce in Southeast Asia.

2014 - New Business in the Era of Connectivity​

2012 - My Entrepreneurial Story​

After graduating from Tsinghua University with an EE degree, I went to the University of Delaware for my PhD. My advisor was not particularly available, and I saw the wave of social media online. In 2004, I gave up my PhD to start a business and contacted two classmates to become partners. We pooled together 300,000 RMB, rented a three-bedroom apartment in Haifeng Garden on Xueqing Road, with each of us having a room and working in the living room. We developed many products.

In August 2004, we launched our first SNS, Duoduo You, and by August 2005, our daily user growth was in double or even single digits, requiring us to invite friends and classmates. The problem was: wanting to target everyone made promotion difficult, leading to low density. The lack of focus stemmed from inexperience; we didn’t know what was important and what wasn’t.

In August 2005, we changed our approach and made three new attempts, one of which launched on December 8, targeting college students, expanding from Tsinghua, Peking University, and Renmin University to other schools. We started with the student festival of the Tsinghua Electronics Department, subsidizing ticket sales, spending 3,000 RMB to acquire about 5,000 users, with a customer acquisition cost of approximately 0.6 to 1 RMB per person. By the end of December, we were still wavering between this and another project. At this time, the team was still three people.

The difficulty of cloning lies in the feeling that you can differentiate yourself slightly; when your understanding of the product is not deep enough, you don’t know why it does what it does, nor do you know which differences are critical. ==Subtle differences can have significant implications.==

Competitors numbered in the dozens, with people in China and around the world cloning FB, such as 5Q, Zhanzuo, etc.

Why did the campus network succeed? Good luck (Tsinghua) and simplicity.

In 2006, we sold to Qianxiang Interactive for possibly 2 million due to financing issues.

1. The investment letter's lock-in period was a pitfall; the other party signed but did not invest. I recommend checking out Venture Hacks and Founders at Work.
2. I didn’t realize how big this could be; I only wanted to raise 1 million USD, but that was far from enough. I needed to meet people with sufficient insight.
3. I probably didn’t meet enough VCs.

After the handover, in 2007, I started working on Hainai and Fanfou. There were several important reasons for leaving:

1. External: In September 2006, FB launched the most significant revision in SNS history: Feed. The importance of Feed can be compared to the search box of search engines. This created new opportunities.
2. Internal: ==Time is always scarcer than money==.

Building a company to a certain level can be achieved through individual or team effort, but to reach a top-tier level, like IBM, Microsoft, Google, or Facebook, requires the enhancement of the entire society and comprehensive national strength. Not everyone can achieve that well, partly due to Tencent.

Tencent's dominance, with QQ and QZone, restricted the development of other mainstays. Some businesses belong to the mainstay, while others are branches; the mainstay provides nutrients to the branches, but mainstays can compete for nutrients with each other.

In July 2009, regulatory issues arose, leading to the shutdown of a batch of Weibo accounts. At this point, waiting indefinitely was not an option; the deadline was six months, after which we had to move on.

In January 2010, we launched Meituan, completing it in 20 days, and it was the earliest to go live. Speed was crucial; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman once said that if a product version doesn’t embarrass you, it’s because you launched it too late. Additionally, you need to clearly understand the scale of the problem you are solving.

Let’s talk specifics about the market.

Great products can only emerge when there is a massive market and demand. User numbers:

• Billion-level: FB, Google
• Hundred-million-level: BAT, future Meituan
• Ten-million-level: Meituan in 2012

Generally, entrepreneurship either solves a new problem or uses new methods to solve an old problem. If you view market demand abstractly enough, there are only a few types of problems in the world, and many things can be done repeatedly. Marc Andreessen believes that we consider the things we are willing to do or invest in, and if they fail, we try again in three years, six years, or nine years. For example, cash flow and payments are old problems: PayPal in 2009, Square in 2012. Other examples include gaming, information retrieval, and business transactions.

Churchill said: The further back you can see into the past, the further forward you can see into the future. History and futurism are crucial.

Taking Wang Xing's historical perspective as an example: social networking and group buying both belong to the internet, which belongs to IT, and IT encompasses many other things. For instance, three of China's Four Great Inventions are IT-related. What can you do with IT? Generation, transmission, storage, processing, and display of information. For example, in transmission, current fiber optics and mobile communications have established the underlying communication, and now we can only work on upper-layer SNS. From a long-term perspective, IoT is reliable; it’s just a matter of time.

Specifically regarding Meituan's position: E-commerce can be categorized into product e-commerce and service e-commerce. Digitalization is unstoppable, but specific services cannot be replaced by digital means. Meituan is service e-commerce.

Regarding the number of competitors: marathon runners aiming for gold medals do not concern themselves with how many people are competing.

Copywriting is the simplest and most direct way of impressing your customers. Persuasive copywriting = three means of persuasion + copywriting. Three means of persuasion are emotion, logic, and credibility.

1. Capturing readers' emotions​

An excellent copywriting creates emotional resonance with customers. And emotions push people to act. If your copywriting hits the bottom of the consumers' hearts, customers will spend much time and money on your products.

2. Cultivating creative thinking​

More than rhetoric, creative writing deals with real problems. Using real-world practices to improve your creativity:

• Writing more in various styles.
• Reading more fiction and digging into people's emotions.
• Jumping out of the comfort zone, learning something new, and asking harsh questions against yourself.

3. Considering different requirements for different assignments​

4. Telling stories and secrets to customers​

Telling a secret is a beautiful way to ignite customers' interest -- Most people are curious about things behind-the-scenes. Doing this improves the click-through rate (CTR).

5. Applying sweet talk​

Straight compliments satisfy customers' self-esteem. People like to feel unique. This method originates from the three types of persuasion by Aristotle.

6. Valuing less of the grammar​

It does not mean you can completely ignore the grammar. Our ultimate goal is to convey the message to customers. Sometimes, concise and crisp expressions are the most important, instead of grammar.

To increase product sales and leave a good impression on potential customers, copywriting plays a crucial role. How can you improve your copy? In Andy Maslen's "Persuasive Copywriting," six key copywriting methods are introduced that may inspire you.

Create Emotional Resonance with Readers​

Good copy can evoke emotional resonance with customers. Emotions play a critical role because they drive us to take action. Therefore, once the copy touches the hearts of consumers, they are likely to spend significant time and money on the product.

Read and Write More to Foster Creative Thinking​

It is undeniable that some rhetorical techniques used in writing can be beneficial. However, creative writing requires the ability to address potential issues, which is more important than merely using fancy writing techniques. If people can refer to the methods mentioned below, they will surely find their creativity flowing.

• Writing more articles across various fields can cultivate creativity.
• People should read novels and delve into the emotions and thoughts of the characters.
• Stepping out of the comfort zone to learn knowledge that is not directly related to oneself, while asking some probing questions to help reshape oneself, is essential.

Consider Different Requirements for Different Tasks​

Sometimes, certain companies provide relevant requirements for copywriters to reference. If there are no specific requirements, authors should research to clarify writing points and reflect them in the text. Additionally, especially for beginners, it is crucial to keep paragraphs short and clear, and to pay attention to the tone of voice used for different tasks.

Tell Stories or Share Secrets with Consumers​

This is a great way to pique customer interest, as people are irresistibly drawn to captivating stories. Moreover, most people are curious about behind-the-scenes secrets. By adopting this approach, customers are less likely to resist the temptation to learn more. Thus, they will click on the headline to discover the story or secret behind the product.

Offer Compliments or Use Wise Methods Found in Greek Mythology​

Straightforward praise satisfies customers' self-esteem. Additionally, they enjoy feeling special and unique. This falls under one of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos), specifically "pathos," which fulfills customers emotionally.

There's No Need to Rigidly Follow Grammar Rules​

This does not mean that grammar can be ignored. The ultimate goal of copywriting is to provide effective reading for customers. Frankly, sometimes people do not even notice these minor grammatical errors; on the contrary, such writing can make the copy clearer and easier to understand.

David Schneider, ServiceNow's President of Customer Ops, shares his sales performance metrics for SaaS companies that are aiming for hyper-scale. For the last 5 quarters:

• • Total Contract Value Attainment
  • Total Managed (ACV, Renewal, PS)
• • Net New ACV Attainment
  • Sales Quota Achievement
  • Q/Q Growth
  • Y/Y Growth
• • Cumulative Total New Customers
  • New Customers (incl. losses)
• • ACV Repeat Customers % to Net New
• • Cumulative Total Net Customers
  • New Customers
• • # Reps On-Board
  • Average Productivity per Sales Rep
  • Sales Rep Annualized Attrition Rate
  • Total Sales Annualized Attrition Rate

You need enough chips to play the game — hire a sufficient number of high-caliber talents who care about quality and are smart enough. You must repeatedly emphasize the company's culture of valuing quality, forming formal routines to check large pieces of work and fix what needs fixing.

Tactically, there is a best practice — reduce the difficulty of doing the right thing. The Stripe tech team makes various trade-offs to ensure that any engineer can improve any part of the system. Encourage a sense of ownership.

There are dedicated internal tools to check the level of internationalization, which may seem tedious but is worth the time. It goes back to the company's culture; when an individual contributor says, "I spent some time on i18n last week," they should assume that leadership values this enough to respond, "Of course, you took the time to do this, great job."

"Open a ticket for the relevant team, and someone will handle it" is a good practice, but if you can push this system to resolve tickets faster and better, you can motivate people to open tickets.

The company provides dedicated channels, such as mailing list aliases, to report product quality bugs. There are dedicated teams to triage these tasks or assign them to the appropriate groups for fixing, along with established routines to inform the entire company about the bug fix rate.

Before making significant API changes, both internal and external testing should be conducted. Regularly ask, "Who has a real Stripe account on hand? Can we update to the beta version and try it out?" People need to set aside dedicated time for this and document it thoroughly — imagine having a group of picky customers; while you may not be able to use your product as deeply and broadly as users do, this approach is much better than guessing.

Discovering that "a piece of payment code hasn't been touched in 5 years, and I don't know how it works, and there are no tests" is rare but valuable for the engineering team.

None of the above is high-tech, nor is it a sufficient condition to guarantee quality. Stripe never settles for the current level of quality and does not passively say, "Our standards are high," but rather maintains a proactive approach to continuously improve.