This article will take you to explore the secrets behind it. By analyzing the successful cases in the fields of artificial intelligence, blockchain and short plays in the past two years, we found a common point - the key to success lies not only in innovative ideas and resource support, but also in whether we can start from human nature and build an ecosystem where multiple parties build and share benefits.
In the past two years, more and more friends around me have started to engage in the fields of artificial intelligence, blockchain web3, and short plays. Whenever we start a deep conversation, everyone always asks me a question: What do you think is the most effective growth model in the current XXX field? Or they will start to share with me excitedly, "I have found a blue ocean model that will definitely detonate the market, break through the circle, etc.", and then tell me his ideas in detail...
Whenever this happens, I start to think about a question. In fact, there is no shortage of people with ideas and resources in this world. Their cognition and thinking about things are also very logical and insightful. But why are there so few who can actually make the project big?
When we look at this issue in the past, we feel that man proposes, God disposes. The success of a thing is often the result of the combined effect of time, place and people. It is not only something that the founder himself can influence, but "luck" is also a very important success variable that must be considered.
There is nothing wrong with this statement, but if you only use this logic to judge specific things, you will fall into a kind of "agnosticism", because in essence, "luck" and "time" are difficult for you to change and influence. Even if you know their important role, it is difficult to formulate effective strategies to manage and influence them. So is there a way to effectively manage and promote projects and achieve the greatest success?
If you observe the vision and things that many projects did when they first started, as well as their ultimate success, you will find that they are hard to imagine, or even unrelated.
For example, Xiaohongshu started out as a cross-border e-commerce shopping guide, a small booklet of only 7 PDFs, but now it has become the largest "universal" lifestyle community; Kuaishou started out as a mobile app for making and sharing GIF images, but now it is one of the largest short video platforms in China; these are still considered small adjustments in direction. HP's earliest business was making oscillators, but now it is one of the largest computer companies; and Deere & Company, the largest tractor manufacturer in the United States, is now trying to transform itself into an online software company, so the intensity of its business adjustments can be imagined.
How did such a big business adjustment happen? Is it true that the founder’s insightful insights led to the company’s success as many reports say, as he saw the trend of the times ten or even dozens of years in advance and made drastic and decisive transformation?
In recent years, through the research and observation of hundreds of successful projects, I found that: the reforms of most projects are not the result of the founders actively discovering trends and changing them, but the project itself encounters a major problem and has to be changed, or the project itself encounters an important opportunity and the reform can immediately bring huge benefits to the project.
However, during the reform process, the founders will keenly start from the perspective of "human nature", respect the market and actual conditions on the basis of considering the interests of users, investors and other partners, and ultimately "co-build" the project successfully with the joint efforts and promotion of multiple parties.
This is why after many projects succeed, the founders themselves are often confused, because in the success of this project, the real role played by the founder is actually to build an effective mechanism to allow everyone related to the project (users, investors, partners) to participate in the project for the maximization of their own interests. In the end, the continuous development and growth attracted more people to join in the co-construction, and finally completed the construction of the entire ecological model. Next, we can analyze this conclusion through two typical cases.
1. Xiaohongshu’s development path - a successful ecosystem created by all users
Xiaohongshu started out as a cross-border e-commerce service guide. Initially, it was just a booklet with 7 PDFs. However, within less than a month of its release, the booklet had been downloaded more than 500,000 times. This was in 2013, when mobile Internet was just emerging. Such an achievement can be said to be very impressive.
How did users use this booklet? It turned out that at that time, the demand for cross-border e-commerce was already very strong. Not only did people who travel abroad need it, but their relatives and friends also needed help with purchasing. So, the core information of what to purchase, how to purchase, and where to purchase more cost-effectively became the core hook for Xiaohongshu to connect with users.
What’s more important is that this group of users not only have the desire to communicate and learn, but also the desire to summarize and share their own experiences. Therefore, the UGC community was established and Xiaohongshu also ushered in explosive growth.
Users actively share good products and exchange shopping tips and experiences in the Xiaohongshu community. Of course, the content shared by users also includes various long-tail content of life, such as food, clothing, housing and transportation. In this community, the relationship between users is very harmonious because everyone has the same needs (overseas shopping), they are mainly young women and have the common value of pursuing good products and a good life. Therefore, everyone is willing to help others and call each other "sisters", just like family.
New users feel the atmosphere of "home" and are willing to be active and make more contributions to become part of the family. As Xiaohongshu's traffic continues to grow, the content shared by users is also increasing. From the initial pursuit of good products to all aspects of life, everyone treats each other as sisters and talks about everything. The sisters also show strong tolerance and empathy to the "sisters" and "sisters" who encounter problems and provide help as much as possible.
During this period, Xiaohongshu's slogan has undergone many updates and iterations, from the initial "Put travel into your shopping bag" to the later "Good things from all over the world" and then to the later "Good life from all over the world". It can be seen that with the evolution of community content, Xiaohongshu's positioning is also constantly evolving.
In this evolution process, the efforts of the founding team are of course indispensable, such as encouraging users to share, beautifying pictures, and sponsoring talent shows, etc. However, from the above evolutionary logic, I believe you can also clearly feel that the evolution from cross-border guide PDFs to actively and continuously sharing good products and guides, and then to sharing bits and pieces of life is actually the result of users' active choice. Xiaohongshu's official has seen this trend and actively catered to and actively guided this trend.
In fact, in the early days of its development, Xiaohongshu wanted to develop in the field of e-commerce seeding, but it aroused community backlash and ultimately failed to succeed. So from this perspective, the success of Xiaohongshu is not only the success of the founding team, but also the successful ecosystem created by all users.
The strength of Xiaohongshu's founding team lies in that they start from the perspective of human nature, focus on the real needs of users to continuously satisfy and serve them, and at the same time do not impose their own will on the project (when they realized that e-commerce was not the actual need of users at the time, they decisively gave up on it and chose to prioritize user needs rather than company profits. It is not easy to do this. You can also think about how many projects on the market have failed repeatedly because of the will of the founders but continue to work)
2. The development path of TON ecology - decentralized operation growth mode
Friends who are familiar with the blockchain industry should be familiar with TON. TON is currently the fastest growing and most popular public chain. This public chain is developed by a community development team and supported by Telegram. It is committed to linking and connecting the web2 and web3 ecosystems.
It stands to reason that Telegram, with 900 million monthly active users, could have imitated many web2 giants in the past and given web2 users and developers many incentives and benefits to attract more users. However, the community and Telegram did not do so. They believe that the most important thing for a good ecosystem is community consensus. Only by relying on the real needs and interests of users, developers, and partners can the ecosystem continue to develop and become stronger. Although it may prosper for a while if it relies purely on profit stimulation, it will inevitably end up in a mess.
Therefore, when building the TON public chain, they always adhere to the needs of serving real users and developers, considering the scalability and compatibility of web2 developers when developing web3 projects, considering the construction and provision of basic functions (stablecoin toolkits, wallets, points and application markets, mini-programs, etc.), considering the various problems of most decentralized applications in user experience (providing a smooth experience through Telegram Bot), and also considering the pursuit of interests by community developers and users (TON tokens). At the same time, in order to further increase the participation of Telegram's existing users, they also released a new coin DOGS this year. Telegram users can receive airdrops based on their Telegram account age, activity and other indicators, which triggered a wave of fission and activity. As of now, TON is already the fastest growing and hottest public chain in the entire network, and it is still growing rapidly.
In essence, the success of the TON team is also the success of humanity and ecology. It is the institutional co-construction design made by the TON team after deeply understanding the most basic needs of users: for users, whether you are using web3 or web2 products, the product experience is very important, and the key is the user's enjoyment. Therefore, although web3 is a good technology, it is also necessary to provide users with a good experience in order to truly apply it. The TON team provides users with a smooth experience through telegram Bot and mini-programs, which is in line with human nature;
Developers are optimistic about web3, but the entry threshold is high. If the threshold can be lowered and some incentives can be given, the cost-benefit ratio will be much higher for developers. This is more meaningful and in line with human nature than simply promoting how promising web3 is.
There is a threshold for existing users to try something new, so you will be given a sweet taste first to allow you to gain certain benefits. It is expected that you must give before you take, and the threshold for operation is also very low, which is in line with human nature.
It can be said that despite having 900 million monthly active users, TON did not adopt the strategy of massive subsidies and incentives to quickly occupy the market like many other giant whales. Instead, it used a decentralized approach to allow the community, developers, and users to participate together based on their own goals to expand the ecosystem. It fully considered the value of humanity and ecology, and therefore reaped the current results.
Of course, in addition to Xiaohongshu and TON, there are many other projects that have achieved success in a similar way. For example, LTC (Lite) that you may be familiar with and Bitcoin (BTC), the big brother of the blockchain with the largest market value, are now decentralized projects. I don’t need to elaborate on their development achievements.
From the above cases, you must have discovered how important it is for a project to be successful if it complies with human nature. It is even more important than the founding team at some stage. Next, let’s analyze how a project should be operated to be in line with human nature and how it should be operated to achieve ecological development based on human nature.
What is human nature?
A philosopher once said that human nature refers to a series of characteristics that are universal in human beings and run through human life. Maslow divided human needs into five levels: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, respect needs and self-actualization needs.
Physiological needs: refers to a series of needs that humans need to maintain their own survival, including food, clothing, housing, transportation, etc.
Security needs: refers to the need for humans to ensure their own safety and avoid adverse factors such as threats and diseases.
Social needs: refers to the satisfaction of needs and a sense of belonging in close relationships, including friendship, love, and family.
Esteem needs: refers to the human desire to have a stable social status (social identity) and self-identity (self-esteem)
Self-actualization needs: refers to the human desire to realize personal ideals and ambitions and maximize self-worth.
These five levels of needs are the most basic human needs. The same person may play different roles in the social division of labor. In one project, this person may be a user, in another project, he may be a developer, and in another project, he may be a project owner. However, in these projects, each role has these five levels of needs that need to be met.
The so-called human-oriented operation, the most core and essential thing is to operate according to the subject of "people" and meet their basic needs at these five levels. For example, once the respect needs and social needs of the early users of Xiaohongshu are fully met, they may change from users to co-builders in order to realize their needs for self-realization, and contribute content and emotions.
For example, once a TON user's physiological needs and respect needs are met and he has established trust and confidence in the project, he may transform from a user to a contributor for the sake of self-realization, contributing his own technical resources, promotion resources, and even funds; so how can we meet these five levels of user needs? From the operation of these successful projects, we can see some important principles:
1. Focus on user needs, not the will of the founder - let users and partners bind their interests to your project
The phrase "user needs are the core" has been said so many times, but there are indeed very few people who can really do it. Many founders feel that the project was created by me with great effort and effort, and I should be fully responsible for the project and have absolute say in the future of the project. However, if a project is decided by only the founder, then it is definitely not user-centered. Even if the founder attaches great importance to user needs, it is only the user needs that the founder understands, and does not represent the real needs.
Only when users or partners have resources or interests tied to the project, what they say represents their real needs. This is human nature.
Just like the founder of Xiaohongshu wanted to do e-commerce, but gave up e-commerce, which could make money and benefit him, for the sake of the interests of community users. Just like TON distributed early tokens to users and open sourced the project code to the community, hoping to build and share the pie together with users.
In this sense, the founder initiated the project, but from then on the project will be jointly built by everyone closely related to the project, and the benefits will also be shared.
This benefit refers not only to money, but also to Maslow's five hierarchical combinations such as self-realization and social recognition. Therefore, when you first design the business model, incentive system, economic model and other elements of the project, you need to consider clearly what your users and partners want and how to bind them to your chariot.
2. Always consider satisfying the physiological needs of users - determine predictable goals and clear paths to achieve them + timely feedback during the process + surprise and randomness + network effects
If it is difficult for your project to directly provide users with self-realization, social needs and other values, you can at least consider providing users with physiological needs first, such as helping them make money. Providing some small benefits related to the project is an effective way to build user trust in the early stages. So how do you help users make money? The Internet industry has an addiction model, and the blockchain has an economic model, both of which are effective cases worth referring to.
The addiction model means that when you participate in something, you will have expectations for it, that is, your goal expectations; for this goal, you continue to participate in the project, continue to get timely feedback and get closer to the goal. In the process, you may also get some random surprises that make you feel very happy and addicted. You expect to get some surprises every day and how much progress you have made compared to yesterday, and then continue to participate and become addicted. The core elements of building an addiction model are: determining predictable goals and a clear path to achieve goals; timely feedback during the process; surprises and randomness.
The economic model is the most essential and basic ecological support of the blockchain. A good economic model can motivate each role in the ecosystem to participate in the project for the sake of maximizing their own interests, thereby making the pie bigger; the construction of the economic model should take into account fairness and universality, starting from each role and considering his most essential needs to see how to design to maximize his efforts and resources; at the same time, it is also necessary to consider how his efforts and resources will have a linkage effect and network effect on other surrounding roles, ultimately forming a positive spiral growth.
3. Provide emotional value to users as much as possible - high-frequency product path + user-related + timely feedback
Of course, if your project only has profits but does not meet actual needs, it will be difficult to go long-term. Actual needs are the most essential. In addition, you can also satisfy the emotional value of users as much as possible and improve the level of the project. For example, many blockchain exchanges will take out part of their handling fees for charity, and donate them in the name of users (the handling fees are contributed by users) to children in poor mountainous areas who need help. You may also receive a thank-you letter from the children who donated. For another example, many projects will add the element of carbon neutrality points to establish green and environmentally friendly project concepts and values. For another example, many products with more female users will add elements such as "Win cat food, save kittens" to make users love them.
Providing emotional value is not just a plus. Maslow's five levels of needs complement and influence each other in a person. If the user recognizes the practical value of your project, and you provide him with emotional value, he will feel that your project is really as good as he thought at the time, which will in turn strengthen his recognition of the practical value. If your project encounters some twists and turns and problems at this time, the user's tolerance will be much higher. The user will think that who doesn't encounter some problems? They have also done a lot of environmental protection and public welfare, etc., and it is a very responsible project.
Of course, there are skills to provide emotional value for users. It is not that I do a charity and then send a PR, it should be run as a project. First of all, this matter should be closely related to the product path. It is best to be a function that users need to use frequently, such as the exchange fee mentioned above. As long as the user trades, he can see it every time; secondly, this matter should be related to the user himself, for example, the exchange fee is part of the money contributed by the user himself, and he will feel that he donated it; for example, cat food is also won by the user through his own efforts; thirdly, it is best to have timely feedback and interaction, such as the designated children who received the donation will send back a thank-you letter, and take a close-up photo of the kitten who sent the cat food, and it is still eating the cat food you helped it win.
You may have understood it by now. What is human operation and ecological operation? Everyone has Maslow's five levels of needs. If you can satisfy his human nature at one or several levels, and let him make the project bigger in order to maximize his own interests and align with your goals, this is human nature-driven operation. On this basis, you need to further consider the relationship between different roles in the ecosystem, so that the efforts of role A can affect role B to the greatest extent, and the efforts of role B can also reversely strengthen the efforts of role A, forming a positive network effect and synergy effect, which is the realization of true ecological operation. In this process, the founding team of the project party should always serve the ecosystem from the perspective of the service provider, not the owner of the ecosystem, and give priority to the will of the ecosystem, not the will of the founder himself.
3. At the end of the article, we summarize the core content of this article
First, let’s start with a question: Is there a way to effectively manage and drive projects to achieve maximum success?
Through the research and observation of hundreds of successful projects in recent years, I found that most of the reforms of projects are not initiated by the founders who actively discover trends and take the initiative to change, but the project itself encounters a major problem and has to change, or the project itself encounters an important opportunity. Once the reform can immediately bring huge benefits to the project, it will change. However, in the process of reform, the founders will be keen to start from the perspective of "human nature", respect the market and actual conditions on the basis of considering the interests of users, investors and other partners, and finally "co-build" the project successfully with the joint efforts and promotion of multiple parties. This is why after many projects are successful, the founders themselves are often confused, because in the success of this project, the real role of the founder is actually to build an effective mechanism so that everyone related to the project (users, investors, partners) can participate in the project for the maximization of their own interests. In the end, the continuous development and growth attracted more people to join the co-construction, and finally completed the construction of the entire ecological model.
Next, we interpreted this conclusion through two cases. One is the development path of Xiaohongshu. The development of Xiaohongshu is actually the result of users’ active choice. Xiaohongshu’s officials took the initiative to cater to and actively guide the trend after seeing this trend. The founding team of Xiaohongshu is so powerful because they will start from the perspective of human nature, focus on the real needs of users to continuously satisfy and serve them, and at the same time do not force their own will on the project. (When they realized that e-commerce was not the actual need of users at the time, they decisively gave up on it and chose to prioritize user needs rather than company profits. It is not easy to do this. You can also think about how many projects on the market have failed repeatedly due to the will of the founders but continue to work.)
One is the development path of the TON ecosystem. TON has 900 million monthly active users, but firmly believes that the most important thing for a good ecosystem is community consensus. Only by relying on the real needs and interests of users, developers, and partners can the ecosystem continue to develop and grow stronger. Therefore, TON made the decision to distribute early tokens to users and open source project codes to the community, hoping to build, grow, and share the pie together with users. It is currently the fastest growing and hottest public chain.
Finally, we analyzed how we can do a good job in humanistic operation and ecological operation since humanistic operation and ecological operation are so important.
Focus on user needs, not the will of the founder - let users and partners bind their interests to your project
Always consider satisfying the physiological needs of users - determine predictable goals and clear paths to achieve them + timely feedback during the process + surprise and randomness + network effects
Provide emotional value to users as much as possible - high-frequency product path + user-related + timely feedback
I hope your project can also make good use of humane operations and ecological operations to achieve rapid growth.
