For the vast majority of entrepreneurs, the first time they come out to start a business, there may be no shortage of technology, no shortage of funds, no shortage of teams, and the most important thing is the lack of traffic or the first batch of customers.

How to do a good cold start has become the most important issue before everyone.

When the village head first started his business, he suffered from this loss. Our team at that time had strong technology and strong financing capabilities, but we were unable to do anything about the cold start.

On the other hand, the village head also found that those projects that ran faster from the beginning had a better basic flow.

Therefore, the village chief combined with the practical operation and observation of entrepreneurship in the past few years, today I will talk to you about how we should do a cold start and how to find our 1,000 customers first.

1. How to find 1,000 customers first

1. First mobilize the power of all teams

As long as the products you make are not particularly partial, high-end, and to B-oriented, from a certain perspective, each of your employees and their network are your potential customers.

We contribute 10 customers according to one employee, and 10 people in a team, that's 100.

Or one employee provides two groups, and 10 employees complete 20 groups.

Of course, we must pay attention to this. In fact, more than 90% of the employees had resistance in the beginning, and the mentality of this new user is the same.

This is an extremely common situation. As a boss, don’t feel that employees have no sense of mission and dedication, because many employees have not experienced their own entrepreneurship and their values ​​have not yet reached that level.

Therefore, when we mobilize members to complete the contribution of resources around us, we should do some policy encouragement.

1. It can be a performance reward policy, such as how many people contribute, how many customers are rewarded and how much money.
2. Give some special benefits to the internal beta users, so that the team has a stepping stone to communication.

Here are two examples.

One is that we did a Baoma-related project before, and our initial source of cold start came from the contributions of our employees.

Because there are three bao moms in our team, they have their own community owners, bao moms, and a few partners of our own, so there are 10 bao moms immediately, which means we have potential coverage Two or three thousand Bao Ma customers.

In addition, because the relationship between the employees and the community’s moms is pretty good, they asked them to invite a few to visit, eat, and communicate with the company. At our first project communication meeting, 20 moms came to the site.

And through these 20 mothers, we have completed more than 10 project briefings one after another. Among them, three or four mothers stood out and became team leaders with a monthly income of over 10,000, laying the foundation for our monthly sales of one million. .

Secondly, in order to encourage everyone to invite us, our company will bear the expenses of various favors incurred by everyone in WeChat consultation and face-to-face communication.

For example, inviting others to have a meal, or sending a red envelope on WeChat, etc., we feel that in the early stage, instead of investing money in an invisible market, it is better to let employees do the market. The essence is the same.

2. Through community precipitation + distribution fission

From the perspective of e-commerce, whether you are making a platform or simply a consumer product, distribution is an indispensable part.

Even if you don't intend to make it an open function, you should give some people special privileges, especially when it is promoted in the early stage of fission.

When we find some basic seed users through employees or other channels, we'd better add them to our WeChat, and then invite them to the founding member group.

Instead of losing a link, sending a QR code or a single page to them, it’s all done. Generally, with these initial customers, we have to do three things:

One is free internal testing, select some products to let them review the experience for free, so that they do not feel that they are being marketed, and they will cooperate more actively with us.

The second is in-depth interviews, aiming at the potential users' experience and some of her experiences, to understand the evaluation and needs of the product.

The third is training fission. Through online and offline dialogue and training, some interested and recognized users are selected and encouraged to do distribution, as long as one or two of them have the ability to distribute.

For our business, it has a very good driving effect. It not only brings users, but also brings more data references.

3. Find vertical channels for paid promotion

In almost all industries, you can find the corresponding vertical channels, and do some exposure and drainage through these channels.

One of the industry media, if you are selling maternal and child products, then you can choose some public accounts in the maternal and child field to publish. In addition to the strong product policy, the best delivery channel can support and guide the addition of WeChat or group membership.

The second industry exhibition, this product may be more suitable for the To B field.

The exhibition mentioned here is not limited to the exhibition, but also includes some industry sharing sessions and resource matching sessions, even if there are only dozens of people can show their faces.

For the three industry communities, 2021 can be regarded as a year of outbreak of community organizations. From Taoke, traffic, private domain, video number, new consumption, SaaS, supply, etc., spend a few thousand dollars to participate and share more. Or sponsor some gifts.

The most important thing to emphasize here must be that once you launch and sell goods on paid channels, you must find ways to add these people's WeChat. Such as phone calls, text messages, parcel cards, etc.

4. The ground push is the most grounded gas

When talking about ground push, some people may sneer, thinking about what age is this, and how inefficient it is to push ground.

However, the village chief found that the efficiency of ground push was higher, more real, and more visible.

And there are many businesses that are more suitable for offline local pushes, such as community group buying, takeaway CPS, Taoke, local official accounts, etc. in the past year or two.

There are many ways to push to the ground. Among them, it is easier to grab users in residential areas and commercial streets.

Whether you are doing interviews, a penny of welfare, or assigning tasks, it is feasible. In a week, there are at least three or four hundred real, communicating, and WeChat users, and these users are extremely valuable.

Because there is trust, experience, surveys, and WeChat.

5. Part-time recruitment

The part-time recruitment we are talking about here is not to find college students in the traditional sense, but to recruit in the circle of friends, WeChat groups, and recruitment channels in the name of surveys, interviews, experience officers, and founding members.

Generally speaking, if you recruit 50-100 part-time jobs and can complete one-on-one phone calls or face-to-face interviews, then the possibility of this person becoming a customer and distributor is extremely high.

Last year, the village chief recruited 100 part-time jobs in a county through mobile phone part-time jobs, and completed the primary marketing coverage of a county area.

6. From the media

If you are starting a business for the first time and have a certain degree of influence, such as personal experience, contacts, etc., then the village head suggests that you write an introduction to your business.

Of course, this is not a naked marketing advertisement, but to share with you some of your past and why you are doing this now, what you want to make, what services you can provide, and what help you need.

Then post this article to your existing WeChat groups and circle of friends, and by the way, find thirty or forty or even more influential people in your circle of friends to pay for them to help you forward it.

Since you ask someone to forward it for you, send a red envelope ranging from 88, 188, or 288, even if you ask 100 people to forward it, the maximum is 30,000 yuan.

Not surprisingly, the publicity effect of the first article will become your article with the highest reading volume and conversion rate.

In addition to personal explosive marketing for the first time, learning to use Douyin, Kuaishou, Zhihu, official accounts or video accounts, and persisting in content updates for more than 3 months, will definitely give you something to gain.

For example, the village chief’s Shili Village started writing from scratch. In the third month, thousands of villagers paid attention, and by now nearly 10,000 people have added my WeChat friends.

Another example is a friend who sells socks on Douyin and shoots videos related to socks in his factory, office, and warehouse every day. In more than two months, he also attracted more than 500 WeChat friends.

The above six cold-start methods are not like you see some big coffee or marketing articles, and you say that you can complete hundreds of thousands of fission in just a few days for free.

It is really pragmatic and effective for the village chief in the actual business test.

2. What needs to be paid attention to during cold start

So with the basic traffic pool, how to make good use of them?

1. 1000 is just a number

Because each business has different attributes, it doesn't have to be 1,000 customers.

Some businesses may be considered mature scale as long as 10 customers, such as some heavy SAAS tools.

Based on your own business, set yourself a phased cold start goal, 50, 100, or 500.

Because countless cases prove that a really useful product or tool is enough for customers within 1,000.

Just like we used to do a small program  , we just found 50 friends and forwarded it to the circle of friends, and it was completely self-fissile.

2. The product itself must be reliable enough

The start-up team will always fall into a self-comforting misunderstanding, that is, when the product function is very ordinary, it will be promoted.

Most of the feedback received at this time was not a surprise, but a complaint. Finally, a user was willing to experience it, but in the end countless problems appeared.

No matter how simple you are, you must ensure that the product you launch is smooth in terms of function and process.

Because in the eyes of users, you won't say that you are just starting a business, so I won't compare you with a mature company.

For example, if you make a mobile phone, users will definitely compare you with Xiaomi, Apple, and Huawei, but will not compare you with Lenovo and Meizu.

So you must have at least one or two products that can impress each other, otherwise the previous promotion will be wasted.

Because the user is not a philanthropist, it is obvious that there are good products that do not use it, but use your immature ones.

This is also the reason why many people who are doing sales go out and cannot sell, because the products themselves have big defects.

3. Continue to iterate

There are two purposes for the first product to ensure quality:

1. It is to increase the user's trust in you, because the user's trust is only once;
2. It is to increase the curiosity of users to understand and use new products, so that you have the opportunity to improve.

Therefore, in response to the feedback of cold start users, it is necessary to ensure a fast enough iteration speed, so that they also have the motivation to distribute and promote.

When we develop each new project, we will pull the founding users into the WeChat group, and synchronize the progress of product repair and upgrade with them in the group every day.

4. Be patient for a long time

Although we have to face pressure from market and economic factors, the start-up period of any entrepreneurial project will take at least 3-6 months.

So during this time, you must have enough patience to find your own cold-start channels and users.

Don't act too hastily, otherwise the data that looks beautiful will not have the value of continuous realization.

When we dig out the 100 or 1000 customers in the early stage, we really need to filter out and talk about them, and they are precipitated after many transactions.

It is necessary to satisfy these 100 customers first, not to lose one.

Two real e-commerce cases that happened around us can be shared with you.

One is a mother and baby community. The founder initially shared his parenting recipes in Moments. Some friends in the circle were more interested after reading it.

After persisting for 3 months, she pulled a group of 50 mothers, and through these 50 mothers, she became an agent of tens of thousands. Now the annual sales are 50 million.

The second is the quality group buying group. The founder himself is a parent of a high-end community. Dozens of women drawn from the parent group of students share some of the high-quality goods they have bought.

Up to now, the core group has no more than 500 people, but after six years of relying on word of mouth, three of them can sell 100 million in one year.

Therefore, sometimes slow is fast. Don't blindly recruit or launch for short-term performance. You should first test and then replicate on a large scale in the most reasonable mode.

Otherwise, if you look at the surrounding projects that once seemed to be loud, they will not survive.

Finally, I want to say three points:

1. Everyone's business is different, so the channels for positioning the cold start are also different. You must find the precise one that suits you.
2. In the cold start phase, free orders, interviews, offline gatherings, and flash group purchases are all operational ideas, and everyone should test more.
3. Whether it is 100 seed users, 1,000 or even 10,000, you must add them to WeChat, so that you have enough opportunities to communicate.

Well, the village head will share this today.

#Column writer#

Shili Village, WeChat public account: Shilipxl (Shilipxl), everyone is a product manager columnist. Share life occasionally, focusing on e-commerce, technology, and new things.

This article was originally published when everyone is a product manager. Reprinting without permission is prohibited