做产品，和用户交流，然后成长

标题：做产品，和用户交流，然后成长 作者：Adora Cheung，Homejoy创始人 译者：杜月，Madara，Daniel吴佳农

Adora Cheung Thanks for having me. Today I am going to be talking about how to go from zero users to many users. I’m just assuming that you have many great ideas in your head at this moment and you are thinking about what the next step is.

谢谢你们的邀请。今天我要讲的内容是关于如何从最初的没有用户增长到拥有许多用户。我假定你们现在脑袋中已经有很多绝佳的主意，并且你们在想着接下来要做些什么。

I wrote this up early this morning and a lot of this is based off of mistakes I have made in the past. So as Sam mentioned I went to YC in 2010 and I spent three years going back and forth, pivoting a bunch of times, starting over a bunch of times, and I have learned a lot about what not to do if I were to start another startup after Homejoy. A lot of it comes from failure and just telling you about what you shouldn’t do, and kind of making generalizations of what you should do from that.

我在今天早上的时候写下了这些内容，并且这里面很多都是建立在我曾经所犯的错误之上的。所以就像Sam提到的一样，我在2010年加入YC，并且在三年内来来回回折腾, 转移了无数次方向，无数次地重新开始。从这些经验中我学到了很多，我清楚如果在Homejoy之后我再次创业的话有什么事情是不能做的。很多我会讲到的内容都来自失败的经验，并且会提醒你们不应该做的事情，同时又从中总结出你们应该做的事情。

Just a reminder that you should take all advice as directionally good guidance, but every business is different. You’re different, and I’m not you, so take everything with that in mind.

顺便提醒一下，你们应该把所有的建议当成良好定向的指导，但是每个商业模式又不同。你们都不一样，并且我也不是你们，所以请谨记这一点。

When you start a startup you should basically have a lot of time on your hands to concentrate on the startup. I’m not saying that you should quit school or quit work; what I’m saying is that you should have a lot of compressed time that is really dedicated to immersing yourself in the idea and developing solutions to the problem that you are trying to solve. So for example, if you’re in school it is better to have one or two days straight per week to work on your idea versus spending two hours here and there every single day during the course of the week. Since this is an engineering class, it is sort of like coding. There is a lot of context switching and being able to really focus and immerse yourself is really important.

当你成立一家初创公司时，基本上你手头上要有很多的时间去专注于这家初创公司。我不是告诉你一定要辍学或者是辞掉工作，我说的是你应该要有很多集中起来的时间能让你全身心的投入到创业的想法中，并且为你想要解决的问题创造解决方案。所以举个例子，如果你还在上学，最好你能有每星期一到两天全天的时间来投入到你的想法中，这样比你在一星期中每天在不同的时间花两个小时来做这件事要好多了。既然这是一节工程课，那么打个比方这就像编程一样。因为创业中会有很多的环境切换，所以能够让你自己十分专注地沉浸于其中是非常重要的。

So, like I said, when I first wrote this up I was thinking what are the things that most people do incorrectly when starting a startup. The novice approach is sort of thinking, “I have this really great idea, I don’t want to tell anyone about it. I’m going to build, build, build and then going to maybe tell one or two people and then I’m going to launch it on TechCrunch or somewhere like that, and then I’m going to get lots of users.”

所以，正如我所说的，当我在准备这份演讲稿的时候我说先想的是什么是大多数人在创业的时候做错的事情。一般菜鸟会这么意淫 “我有这个绝妙的主意，我是不会让任何人知道的。我会不断的完善，完善，再完善这个主意然后或许我会告诉一两个人，再然后我会在TechCrunch或类似的平台上上发布我的产品，然后我就可以得到巨暴多的用户了哈。”

But what really happens is because you did not get a lot of the feedback, maybe you get a lot of people to your site, but no one sticks around because you didn’t get that initial user feedback. If you’re lucky enough to have some money in the bank you might go buy some users but it just whittles out over time and you just give up. It is sort of a vicious cycle. I actually did this once, and I did this while I was in YC. When I went through YC I didn’t even launch a product. I didn’t launch on TechCrunch which is the thing you should definitely do. You don’t ever want to get into that cycle because you’ll just end up with nothing good.

但是骨感的现实却是由于你没有得到足够的反馈意见，或许你可以吸引很多人到你的网站，但是没有多少人会在上面逗留，就是因为你没有获得那个最初的用户反馈。如果你幸运到有足够的银行存款，你或许可以去买些用户，但这样的用户量必然会逐渐削减，然后你就会放弃了。这就有点像恶性循环。事实上我做过一次这种事，并且是我在YC的时候做的。当我经历了YC之后我甚至没有发布任何产品。我没有在TechCrunch上发布产品，这确本来是你必需要做的。你不想进入那个恶性循环，因为这样的话你是不会得到好结果的。

The next thing is that you have an idea and you should really think about what the idea is really solving. Like what is the actual problem. You should be able to describe your problem in one sentence. And then you should think, “How does that problem relate to me? Am I really passionate about that problem?” And then you should think, “Okay it’s a problem I have, but is it a problem that other people have?” And you verify that by going out and talking to people.

接下来你有一个主意，然后你就应该真正的想想这个主意解决了什么问题。什么是真正的痛点。你必须要能够用一句话描述你的痛点。然后你就该思考：“那个痛点如何和我联系起来？我真的对那个痛点有足够的激情吗？” 然后你必须思考：“好的这是我有的痛点，但这是其他人也有的痛点吗？”然后你出去和人们讨论并验证你的假设。

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made involves my Co-founder and I, who is also my brother. We started a company called Pathjoy in 2009 or 2010. We had two goals in mind. One was to create a company that made people really happy, and to create a company that was very, very impactful. A good proxy for that is to just create a big huge company. And so we thought, okay, the problem we are solving is to make people happier. We first went to the notion of who are the people who make people happy. We came up with life coaches and therapist. It seemed kind of obvious to create a platform for life coaches and therapist. What happened as a result was that when we started using the product ourselves, we aren’t cynical people by any means, but life coaches and therapists are just not people we would use ourselves. It was sort of useless to us. So it wasn’t even a problem that we had and it wasn’t something that we were super passionate about building out, yet we spent almost a year trying to do this. And so it you just start from T=0 and think about this before you build any product I think you can save yourself a lot of headache down the road from doing something you don’t want to do.

我曾经犯下的最严重的错误是和我的合伙人有关系的，他同时也是我的弟弟。我们在2009或2010年的时候共同创办了一家叫做Pathjoy的公司。我们当时有两个目标。一个就是创办一家让人们快乐的公司，其次是创办一家非常非常有影响力的公司。一个更好的替代品其实就是创建一个巨暴大的公司。所以我们想所以我们要解决的痛点就是让人们更快乐。首先我们开始思考是什么人能让人们快乐。我们想到了人生导师和治疗师。这样看起来似乎很明显我们可以为人生导师和治疗师创建一个平台。这样的结果就是当我们开始使用这个产品的时候，即使我们无论如何都不是什么愤世嫉俗的人，但人生导师和治疗师就不是我们自己会用的人。对于我们来说这个很没有用。所以这甚至不是什么我们有的痛点，并且这也不是我们特别充满激情地想要创造的东西，然而我们却花了几乎一年的时间来做这件事。所以如果你们能在最开始还没有创造任何产品的时候就想到这点，我觉得你们可以给自己省去很多做着你们不想做的事情的头痛经历。

So say you have a problem and you are able to state it, where do you start and how do you think of solutions? The first thing you should do is think about the industry that you are getting yourself into. Whether it is big or whether it is huge, you should really immerse yourself in that industry. And there are a number of ways to do this.

所以打个比方你有个痛点并且你可以指出它，你该从哪里开始并且你该如何设想解决方案呢？你该做的第一件事是思考下你将会让自己进入到哪个行业。不管它是大是小，你应该真正的把你自己沉浸在那个行业。并且有很多方法可以这么做。

One is to really become a cog in that industry for a little bit. And so it might seem a little counterintuitive to do this because most people say that if you really want to disrupt an industry you should really not be a player in it. Someone who spent 20 or 30 years in an industry is probably set in their ways and is just used to the way things work and really can’t think about what the inefficiencies are or the things that you can “disrupt”. However, as a newbie coming into the industry you really should take one or two months to just really understand what all of the little bits and pieces of the industry are and how it works. Because it’s when you get into the details, that’s when you start seeing things that you can be exploiting and things that are really inefficient and may provide a huge overhead cost that you may be able to cut down.

一种方法就是真正在那个行业做段时间。这么做或许会看起来会有点反直觉，因为大部分人说如果你真的想要变革一个产业你就不应该成为这个产业中的一员。有些人在一个产业花了20或者30年的时间很可能已经形成了思维定式，并且他已经习惯了行业运转方式，他们真心没办法想到什么是低效率的或者有什么事情是可以变革的。然而，作为一个刚入行的新手，你真的应该花上一两个月的时间来真正了解这个行业的细枝末节以及这个行业是如何运作的。因为当你真正碰到了细节上的事情时，你才会开始发现你可以开发利用的事情，那些非常没有效率并且会造成很大的间接成本的事情，你或许可以削减掉这些间接成本。

So an example of this is that when we started Homejoy, we started with the cleaning industry, and when we started we were the cleaners ourselves. We started to clean houses and we found out really quickly that we were very bad cleaners. As a result, we said okay, we have to learn more about this and we went to buy books. We bought books about how to clean, which helped maybe a little bit. We learned a little more about cleaning supplies but it is sort of like basketball, you can read and learn about basketball but you’re not going to get better at it if you don’t actually train and throw a basketball into the net.

举个这样的一个例子，当我们创立Homejoy的时候，我们从清洁行业切入，并且刚开始的时候我们自己就是清洁工。当我们开始清洁房屋的时候我们很快的就发现我们是很差劲的清洁工。结果就是我们决定我们必需学习更多关于这个行业的东西，然后我们去买了书。我们买了关于如何清洁的书，这或许有一点点用。我们进一步学习了一点关于清洁用品的知识，但是这就像篮球，你可以通过读书学习关于篮球的知识，但是如果你不进行真正的训练并且把篮球投到篮筐里你就不会有进步。

And so we decided that one of us was going to have to learn how to clean. Or at least get trained by a professional. We actually went to get a job at a cleaning company itself. The cool thing was I learned how to clean from training the few weeks that I was there at the cleaning company, but the even better thing was that I learned a lot about how a local cleaning company works. In that sense I learned why a local cleaning company could not become huge like Homejoy is today. And that is because they are pretty old school and they have a lot of things that are done inefficiently. Such as booking the customer and optimizing the cleaners’ schedules was just done very inefficiently.

于是我们决定我们其中一个人不得不去学习如何清洗。又或者至少找个大湿指导。事实上我们最后去了一家清洁公司找了份工作。很赞的是我在那家清洁公司的几个星期里学会了如何清洗，但更牛叉的是我学会了一家地方清洁公司是如何运作的。从这种意义上来讲我学会了为何一家地方清洁公司没有办法变成像今天的Homejoy一样的庞大。那是因为他们实在是太腐朽了，并且他们有很多事情做得很没有效率。比如预约客户和优化清洁工的日程安排做得简直是非常没效率。

If you are in a situation like mine where there is a service element of it then you should go and do that service yourself. If your thing is related to restaurants you should become a waiter, if it is related to painting become a painter and kind of get in the shoes of your customers from all angles of what you are trying to build.

如果你和我情况相同，你要做的东西是有服务性质的，那么你就应该亲自去做下那种服务。如果你要做的事情跟餐馆有关系，那么你就要去当个餐馆服务生，如果是和绘画有关系，那么就成为一个绘画师，并且站在你的客户的立场上以不同的视角去揣摩你尝试创建的东西。

The other thing is there is also a level of obsessiveness that you should have with it as well. You should be so obsessed that you want to know what everybody in that space is doing. And it is things like writing a list of all of the potential competitors, similar types of companies, and Google searching them and clicking on every single link and reading every single article from search result number 1 to 1000. I found all potential competitors big and small and if they were public, I would go and read their S-1s, I would go read all of their quarterly financials, I would sit on earnings calls.. You know most of these, you don’t get much out of it but there are these golden nuggets that you will find every once in a while. And you won’t be able to find that unless you actually go through the work of getting all that information in your head. You should become an expert in your industry. There should be no doubt when you are building this that you are the expert so that people trust you when you are building this product.

还有一点就是你对于这个创业点子要有一定的迷恋程度。你要对它极度迷恋，迷恋到你想要知道每个人在那个领域所在做的事情。这些事情包括比如列出所有潜在竞争对手，相似种类的公司，并且谷歌搜索他们，点击从搜索结果的第1条到第1000条的每个链接，并且阅读每一篇链接里的文章。我找出了所有潜在的大大小小的竞争对手，如果他们是上市公司，我还会去读他们的S-1文档，我会通读他们所有的季度财报，我会坐穿他们的利润报表。你清楚大部分时间你不会获得太多东西，但是你会时不时的发现一些金坷垃。除非你真心地把所有这些信息塞进你的脑袋，你是不能发现这些金坷垃的。你应该成为你行业的砖家叫兽。毫无疑问当你在创建这个产品的时候你要是砖家叫兽才能让人们信任你所做的产品。

The second thing is identifying customer segments. Ideally at the end of the day you have built a product or business that everybody in the world is using. But realistically in the beginning you kind of want to corner off a certain part of the customer base so that you can really optimize for them. It is just about focus and whether you are catering to teenage girls or whether it is soccer moms, you will be able to focus a lot on their needs.

第二件事情就是鉴别客户群体。理想状态就是最后你创建了一个全世界人都在使用的产品或生意。但现实点，在刚开始的时候你应该想划出一部分你真心想服务的客户群。这全都是关于专注，不管你是专注于未成年妹纸或者是足球大妈，你将能够更多的专注于她们的需求。

And lastly, before you even create a product or before you put code down, you should really storyboard out the user experience of how you are going to solve the problem. And that is not just meaning the website itself, it also means how does the customer find out about you. It can be through an ad or word-of-mouth, and then they come to your site and they learn more about you. What does that text say and what are you communicating to them when they sign up for the project and when they purchase the service? What are they actually getting from your service or product? After they finish using the product or service do they leave a review or do they leave comments? You need to be able to go through that whole flow and visualize in your head what the perfect user experience is. And then put it down on paper and put it into code, and then start from there.

最后，在你开始创建一款产品或者在你写代码前，你真的应该针对用户体验勾勒出你要如何解决这个痛点。这不仅仅是指网站本身，这还意味着客户如何找到你。这可以是通过一则广告或者口碑相传，然后他们来到你的网站对你进行更多的了解。当他们注册了这个项目，当他们购买了服务时会看到什么文字，你会向他们阐述什么？他们从你的服务和产品中到底得到了什么？在他们使用完了这个产品或者服务，他们是留下使用反馈呢还是留下意见？你必须要能够过一遍整个流程并且在你的脑中形象化什么是完美的用户体验。然后把它体现在纸上，体现在代码上，然后从那里开始。

So, you have all these ideas in your head, now you kind of know what the core customer base is that you want to go after, and you know everything about the industry, what do you do next? You start building your product. The common phrase that most people use today is,” You should build a minimum viable product.” And I underlined viable because I think a lot of people skip that part and they go out with a feature and the whole user experience in the very beginning is flat. Minimal viable product pretty much means what is the smallest feature set that you should build to solve the problem that you are trying to solve. I think if you go through the whole storyboarding experience you can kind of figure that out very quickly. But again, you have to be talking to users, you have to be seeing what exists out there already, and what you should be building should solve their immediate needs.

所以，你脑中有所有这些想法，你大概知道你想要针对的核心客户群是什么，并且你知道关于这个产业的所有东西，接下来你要做什么呢？你开始创建你的产品。今天大多数人使用的通用短语是“你应该创造出一个最小可行性产品。”我在可行性下加了下划线，因为我觉得很多人都忽略掉这点，并且他们只有一个功能就上线了，而且在最开始的时候整个用户体验一般。最小可行性产品基本代表着你应该创建的来解决你正在尝试解决的痛点的最小的功能是什么。我觉得如果你过一遍整个流程的体验，你应该可以很快的理清大概思路。但是再提醒一遍，你必须和用户沟通，你必须知道市场上已经有什么样的产品，并且你必须要创造能够解决他们即时需求的产品。

And the second thing is that before you put things in front of the user you should really have your product positioning down. What I mean by that is that you should be able to go to a person and be able to say, “Hey, this does X,Y, and Z in one sentence.” So for example, at Homejoy we started off with something super complicated. We were an online platform for home services, you start with cleaning and you can choose blah blah blah. It just went on for paragraphs and paragraphs.

第二点是在你把东西展现在用户面前之前你必须真的把你的产品弄妥当了。我说这话的意思是你必须要能够跑到一个人面前然后用一句话说：“嘿，这东西可以做X,Y,和Z。” 举个例子，在Homejoy我们开始时的产品是非常复杂的。我们是一个关于家政服务的平台，你开始于清洁服务，然后你可以选择这个这个那个那个。那一直持续一整大篇幅又一整大篇幅。

When we went to potential users to come on our platform they would kind of get bored after the first few sentences. What we found out was that we needed a one-liner. The one-liner was very important. It kind of describes the functional benefits of what you do. In the future when you are trying to build a brand or whatnot you should be able to describe the emotional benefits and stuff like that. But when you are starting with no users you really need to tell them what they are going to get out of it. After we changed our position to get your place cleaned for $20 an hour, then everyone got it and we were able to get users in the door that way.

当我们跑去找我们的潜在客户到我们的平台上的时候，他们在看了几句话之后就会被无聊死。我们发现我们需要的是一句俏皮话。这一句俏皮话非常重要。它要描述你做的东西的功能益处。在未来当你尝试建立一个品牌什么的你就必需能够描述情感益处和类似的东西。但当你从没用户的时候起家你真的需要告诉他们他们能从中得到什么好处。在我们把我们的策略转变成“20美刀每小时清理你全家”的时候，所有人瞬间懂了，然后我们才得以让我们的用户开始购买服务。

So you have a mvp out there,

现在，通过以上，你已可以开发一个最小化的可行产品。

now how do you get your first few users to start trying it?

现在，如何让你的第一批用户去使用它呢？

The first few users should be obviously people you are connected with.

显然地，这些第一批试用用户应该是你熟识的。

You and your cofounder should be using it, your mom and dad should be

你和你的合伙人，你的父母

using it, and your friends and coworkers should be using it.

你的朋友以及同事都应该去使用下产品。

Beyond that,

除此之外，

you want to get more user feedback.

你需取得更多用户反馈。

I’ve listed here some of the obvious places to go to depending on what you are selling.

这里，就产品特性，我列举一些（获取用户反馈）的地方。

You can take your pick of the draw here.

你可以适当选择使用。

So, online communities, on Hacker News now there is the show HN - that’s a great place.

例如：·1、线上社区，Hacker News现在有个一个版块Show HN，这是一个不错的地方。

Especially if you are building tools for developers and things like that.

尤其当你的产品是针对开发者的工具或者其他类似的产品时。

Local communities - so if you’re building consumer products you know

2、本地社区-如果你正在开发的是消费品类，

there are a lot of influential local community mailing lists.

有很多有影响力的当地社区邮件列表（可用）。

Especially those for parents.

尤其那些针对父母的。

Those are places you might want to hit up too.

这些地方也许你会希望覆盖到。

At Homejoy we actually tried all of these.

在Homejoy时，我们实际上尝试了各种方法。

We used it ourselves and that was fine.

亲身实践并取得了不错的效果。

We were the only cleaners so that was pretty easy.

作为唯一一家提供清洁服务的（公司），所以相当容易。

Our parents live in Milwaukee and we were based in Mountain View so that didn’t work.

我们的父母住在Milwaukee（密尔沃基），我们的总部在Mountain View（山景城），所以（请父母试用）行不通。

Friends and coworkers were kind of like in San Francisco and elsewhere so we didn’t have too many of them use it.

朋友和同事都在类似San Francisco（旧金山）这样的地方，因此，我们也没把找到太多的朋友和同事去使用产品。

So we actually ended up in a dead end of not being able to convince many people to use it in the beginning.

结果初期，我们走进了没有太多人来使用产品的死胡同。

So what we did was, because we are in Mountain View,

最后我们是这样做的，因为我们在Mountain View（山景城）

some of you guys might know on Castro Street they have street fairs there during the summertime.

你们也许有人知道，每年夏天， Castro Street（卡斯楚街）都会有集市。

So we would go out and basically chase down people and get them to try to book a cleaning.

因此我们在大街上追着人群跑，说服他们尝试预定一次清洁服务。

Almost everyone would say no until one day we just took advantage of the weather.

大多数情况，人们会拒绝，直到有一天，得益于天气情况，（情况有所改善）。

It was a very hot and humid day and what we noticed was that everyone

那是非常闷热的一天，我们注意到，在热天，人们都会涌向

gravitated towards the food and drink area, especially on a hot day.

就餐和喝东西的地方。

We figured we needed to get in the middle of that so we took water bottles and froze them and we started handing out free bottles of water that were cold.

我们想，我们需要到这些地方去（做点什么），所以，我们带着冰镇瓶装水（到这些地方），开始免费派发。

And people just came to us.

人群被我们吸引过来。

I think we basically guilt tripped people into booking cleanings.

But the proof in the pudding was that I figured most of the people were

实践证明，我发现大多数人的确会去预定，

guilt tripped into doing it, but then they went home and they didn’t cancel on us.

他们回家之后，也并没有取消预定（我们的服务）。

Well, some of them did but the majority of them did not.

当然，确实有些人取消了，但大多数人没有取消（我们的服务）。

I thought that’s good, I have to go clean their houses but at least there is something we are actually solving here.

我很满意，虽然我得去打扫房屋，但至少我们实际解决了（问题）。

I know another startup in the last batch,

我知道在上一批（YC孵化的）创业公司中，有一家

I forgot their name right now,

我现在想不起他们的名字了，

but they were selling shipping type products or trying to replace shipping products.

但我记得他们做的是运输类产品或者颠覆运输行业的产品。

So they would show up to the US postal office

他们蹲守在美国邮政办公室，

and find people who were trying to ship products

寻找需要运货的人，

and just take them out of line and get them to try to use the product and have them ship it for them.

将他们带离队列，说服他们试用他们的产品，帮助他们运输货物。

So you just have to go to places where people are really going to show up.

所以，你的目标用户出现在哪里，你就需要去哪里。

Your conversion rate is going to be really low but to go from 0 to 1 to 3 to 4 these are the kind of things you might have to do.

虽然转化率会很低，但（用户）从0到3到4，这些是必经的历程。

So now that you have users using you ,what do you do with all of these users?

现在，你已经有了用户，那么要如何服务这些用户呢？

The first thing you should do is make sure that there is a way for people to contact you.

第一件事，要确保，用户和你之间有畅通地联系渠道。

Ideally there is a phone number and if you put up a phone number,

理想情况是，提供一个联系电话，如果提供了联系电话，

one good idea is to make sure that you have a voicemail

那最好办一个语音信箱业务，

so that you won’t be picking it up all the time.

这样你就不需要时时守在电话旁了。

But in any case a way for people to give inbound feedback is good,

无论如何，向用户提供入站反馈途径是正确的，

but really what you should be doing is going out to your users and talking to them.

但，你真正需要做的，是走到你的用户身边，和他们面对面沟通。

Get away from your desk and just get out and do the work.

赶紧离开你的办公桌，去这样做吧（去和用户面对面沟通）。

It seems like a slog and it is going to be a slog but this is where you are going to get the best feedback ever for your product.

这好像很难，也确实是，但是你获取最有价值产品反馈的方法。

And this is where it is going to teach you what features you need to completely change, get rid of, or what features you need to build.

将告诉你哪些（产品）功能需要去改变或者完全去除，以及哪些（产品）功能需要添加。

And so, one way to do this is to send out surveys to get reviews after they have used the product.

一种途径是，发送调查问卷，获取用户反馈。

This is okay but generally people are only going to respond if they really love you or they really hate you.

这样做是可以，但是一般只有当他们真地喜欢或者讨厌你的产品时，他们才会反馈，

And you never get the in between.

你将永远不知道除此之外的其他用户（怎么想）。

A way to get the in between and not all of the extremes is to actually meet the person that is using your product.

除了极端（喜爱或者讨厌）地用户，了解介于这两者之间的用户体验如何，一种途径是和那些正在使用你的产品的人面对面（交谈）。

I’ve seen people go out to meet the user

我过去曾见过一些人和用户交谈，

and they sit there and it is like a laboratory and it is like an inquisition.

他们坐在那里，像是身临实验室或者是宗教法庭。

You’re just kind of poking at them.

类似你在盘问他们似的。

That is not going to give you the best results.

这样做并不能带来理想效果。

What you should really do is make it into a conversation

你应该尽量做到像是在进行一次聊天，

and get to know them and get them to feel comfortable.

努力理解他们，使他们感到自然。

You want to get them at a level where they feel like they should be honest with you to help you improve things.

达到一种让他们觉得他们应该真诚待你，并帮助你一起改善产品的状态。

So I found that actually taking people out for drinks and stuff like that was actually a very good way to do that.

我发现，带着用户出去小酌一下或者诸如此类，实际是达到以上效果非常有效的一种途径。

I’m not sure if all of you are old enough to do that but you can take them for coffee.

我不知道在座各位是否到了可以饮酒的年龄，但也可以带着用户们去喝喝咖啡的。

So another thing that you should be tracking is how are you doing in general from a macro perspective.

你们需要注意的另一件事，是通常从宏观上如何把握。

The best way to do that is by tracking customer retention.

最好的方式是追踪客户留存。

The number of people that came in the door today, the number of people who are coming back tomorrow, the next day and so forth.

今日的用户量，明天的用户留存量，下一天的等等。

Usually over time you are kind of looking at monthly retention so people who came in the door today,

一般，经过一段时间之后，可以按月查看留存，观察用户下个月是否仍

are they still using it next month and so forth.

光顾等等。

The problem with that metric is that it takes forever to collect that data

那种度量方法的问题是：需要一直收集（用户留存）数据

and sometimes you don’t have a month or two months or three months to figure that out.

但有时，你没有一个月两个月或者三个月（数据）去用来分析。

So a good leading indicator is actually collecting reviews and ratings.

所以，实际上，收集用户反馈和评价是项不错的指标。

Such as five-star and four-star reviews or collecting some notion of nps, which is net promoter score.

例如五星、四星评价或者类似净推荐值这样的计量方式， nps即net promoter score。

So you’re basically asking them for a rating from 0 to 10 about how likely are they to recommend you to a friend and calculating the nps.

基本上，就是询问你的用户，“在多大程度上愿意向你的朋友推荐产品，按照0-10打分，（10分是非常愿意），并计算净推荐值。

Over time what you’ll see is that as you are building new features,

又经过一段时间，你会发现，随着每次改版，

you will be able to see that the reviews and the retention are going up over time.

你都能看到用户评论和留存有所增长。

That means that you are doing a good job.

这证明你做得很好。

If it is going down then you are doing a bad job.

如果（用户评论和留存）下降了，说明这次做错了。

If it is kind of staying the same that probably means that

如果仍旧（用户评论和留存和之前）保持一致，可能意味着，

you need to go out and figure out what new things you should be building.

你需要找用户面谈了解哪些新的功能需要增加。

One thing you should be wary of is the honesty curve.

另外，你需要考虑到诚实度。

Some people will just lie to you.

一些人会对你说谎。

These are degrees of separation from you, and this is the level of honesty.

与你关系的亲疏远近不同，诚实度也会不同。

So here this is your mom, these are the friends of your friends and here are random people.

比如，你的母亲，你的朋友的朋友和一些完全的陌生人。

Your mom will use your product and she will be proud of you anyway, so she’ll be honest this much.

你的母亲用过你的产品，她会为你感到自豪并且诚实地表达（感受）。

Your friends will be pretty honest with you and give you feedback

你的朋友会如实回反馈，

because they care about you - this is assuming this is a free product -

因为他们关心你。假如是一款免费产品

and then over time as you get more and more random,

然后随着时间推移，你将接触越来越多的陌生用户,

these people don’t know who you are.

这些人并不了解你。

There are people over here who don’t care about giving you feedback.

这里面有些人根本不在乎用户反馈。

So take this into consideration when getting user feedback.

所以当你得到用户反馈时，要考虑这些情况。

So say now this is a paid product.

如果是一款付费产品。

So when it is a paid product your mom is down here.

你母亲对此（反馈）的诚实度将会很低。

She is just going to lie to you and tell you it’s great.

她会对你说谎，告诉你这（产品）非常棒。

But then it kind of goes like this (draws graph going upward).

Your friends are going to support you and give you the right feedback

你的朋友会支持你，给予正确的反馈

but it is actually these random people out here that

但实际上是这些陌生的用户，

if they really don’t think that what they paid for was worth it,they are going to really tell you.

如果他们确实觉得这些产品不值得他们付费，他们会坦白告诉你。

That’s because it is money out the door.

因为，花出去的真金白银了。

So this is another way of saying that you are going to get the best feedback if you just make someone pay for it.

所以从另一个角度来说，如果你正在开发的是款付费产品，你将得到最有价值的反馈。

That’s not to say that you should make people pay for it the first time out,

这不是指你一开始就应该让用户付费，

but it is to say that if you are going to build a product that you are going to eventually need to pay for the software or for the hardware or whatever then get to the point where you can do that very fast.

而是指，如果你要开发一款产品，并最终是要就软件、硬件或者其他什么向用户收费，那么，尽快这样做（向用户收费）。

Because that is when you can get to the more meaty stuff of how you can get more paying users in the door.

因为（这样做）关于如何获取更多付费用户，你能得到更多实质性的（建议）。

You’re getting a lot of feedback and what do you do before you officially launch the product?

得到了一堆反馈，在正式启动产品前，还要做什么呢？

You always want to be building fast and you want to be optimizing for this stage of your growth.

一般会期望快速开发，并优化（产品的）阶段性成长。

You might have 10 users at this point

如果此刻你只有10名用户

and there is no point in trying to build features for when you might have 10 million users.

为一千万用户规模而调整功能是没有任何意义的。

You want to optimize for the next stage of growth which will be 10 to 100 users.

你需要优化从10到100的阶段性成长。

What are the features you really need for that and just go with that.

（知道达到这一目标）你们（产品）需要哪些功能并专注于此。

One of the things I found when building a marketplace is that process is very important over time as you scale.

当开拓一个新市场时，我发现，有步骤分阶段进行非常重要。

You need to not try and automate everything and create software to have robots run everything.

你要学会不事事依靠自动化以及机器，

What you should do to really understand what you should build is manually do it yourself.

并且真地理解（有些事需要）人工操作。

An example of this is when we started taking on cleaning professionals on to our platform,

举个例子，当我们平台开始吸纳专业清洁人员时，

we would ask them a bunch of questions over the phone and then in person would ask a bunch of questions as well.

通过电话我们会询问一堆问题，然后面试的时候，我们又会问一堆。

And then they would go to a test clean and then they would get onboarded to our platform if they were good enough.

然后，还有一个清洁测试，表现优秀的人，我们会邀请他们入驻平台。

Doing all these questions for that many candidates we had a 3-5% acceptance rate.

这么些应聘者中，只有3-5%的成功率。

What happened over time was that we learned certain questions that we were asking

随着时间推移，我们了解到，

were good indicators as to whether or not they would be a good or bad performer on the platform through data collection and just looking at everything we could ask on an online form.

在平台上，通过数据收集以及在线调查表单的内容，是他们在平台表现好坏与否的一个重要指标。

That is when we put up an online application,

上线一个在线申请

they could apply and then we would ask them maybe several other questions during the in person interview.

面谈期间，我们会问一些其他问题。

If you try to automate things too fast

如果你急于实现自动化，

then you run into this potential problem of not being able to move quickly and iterate things like questions on an application and things like that.

可能会陷入遇到功能相关或者类似的问题时，将无法快速（采取）行动以及迭代产品的问题。

A third point here is temporary brokenness is much better than permanent paralysis.

第三点是，

By that what I mean is perfection is irrelevant during this stage.

我的意思是，在这个阶段追求完美是不切实际的。

When you get to the next stage of growth ，what you are trying to perfect in one stage is not going to matter anyway.

不管怎样，在某一阶段你试图完美化的东西，到下一阶段会变得没有任何意义。

So do not worry about all of the edge cases when you are building something,

所以规划产品功能时，不必忧虑所有情况。

just worry about the generic case of who your core user is going to be.

只需考虑普通情况下，你的核心用户群（即可）。

As you get bigger and bigger the volume of those edge cases increases over time and you will want to build for that.

当你的产品规模越来越大，边界情况的体量也与日俱增，（这时）你就需要将其考虑进去了。

Lastly beware of the Frankenstein approach

最后，谨防 Frankenstein （弗兰肯斯坦）方法

which is - great you talked to all of these users

即，和所有这些用户交谈，

and they gave you all of these ideas

他们带来的所有这些灵感

and the first thing you are going to want to do is go build every single one of them

第一时间将这些功能实现，并第二天呈现给用户，取悦他们。

and then go show them the next day and make them happier.

You should definitely listen to user feedback

你当然需倾听用户反馈

but when someone tells you to build a feature you shouldn’t go build it right away.

但，当有人让你加功能，你不能不假思索就去干。

What you should really do is get to the bottom of why they are asking you to build the feature.

你其实应该弄清楚他们为什么会要求你增加这个功能。

Usually what they are suggesting is not the best idea.

并且通常，他们并没有提供最好的解决方案。

What they are really suggesting is that I have this other problem that you either created for me while using the product

他们真正要表达的是，我遇到了其他问题，你们

or I really need this problem solved if I’m going to pay to use this product.

要么为我创建功能，要么是如果要我（为产品）付费，需要帮我解决这个问题。

So figure that out first before piling on a bunch of features which then hide the problem altogether.

因此，在堆积一大堆功能需求点之前，要先明晰那些用户反馈。

So you have a product that you are ready to ship -

现在，你的产品需要发布了-

some people at this point will continue building the product and not ship it at all.

在这个节点上，一些人会继续开发产品，一点也不宣传。

I think the whole idea of being stealth and perfecting the product to no end

秘密研发产品以及对产品永无止境精益求精，

is the idea that imitation is cheaper than innovation in terms of time and money and capital.

是出于一种观念：抄袭比创新容易得多，不管是时间、金钱、还是资本方面。

I think that everyone should always assume in general that

我想，人人都需要假设：如果你有个好创意

if you have a really good idea no matter when you launch

不管你什么时候开始着手（实践），

someone is going to fast follow you and someone is going to execute as hard as they possibly can to catch up with you.

都有人紧随其后（模仿你），甚至在尽其所能赶超你。

There is no point in holding out on all of that user feedback that you can get by getting a lot of users because he felt paranoid that someone is going to do this to you.

没必要因为认为有人会抄袭你们，就拒绝通过用户收集用户反馈。

I hate to keep harping on it but these are things that I see today with founders and something that I went through as well.

我不喜欢就一件事情喋喋不休，但以上这些是我在当前的创业者身上看到的，并且也是我亲身经历的。

And I think that unless you are building something that requires tens of millions of dollars just to start up

我觉得，除非正在建立一个需要1000万美元才能启动的项目，

there is really no point in waiting around to launch the product.

没必要等待（某时）才发布。

So say you have something that you feel ready to get lots of users on.

感觉做好了迎接大批量用户的准备。

So what do you do at this point?

在这个时间点，需要作什么呢？

I will go over various types of growth in the next slides,

下面的PPT，我会涉及到多样的增长类型，

but the one thing to note here early on when it is just you,

但，强调一件事，当只有你一个人时，

your cofounder, and a couple of other people building,

你的合伙人和其他几个人

you aren’t creating a team just for growth.

It is going to be one person and one person only.

将是一个人，只是一个人，

You really need to focus and you are going to be tempted to try five different strategies at one time.

你需要专注，在同一时间尝试5种完全不同的策略。

But really what you should do is

但你真正需要做的是：

take one channel and really execute on it for an entire week and just focus on that.

选一种策略并认真执行一个星期，专注于此。

And if that works continue executing on it until it caps out.

如果有效，继续执行，

If it doesn’t work then just move on.

如果没有效用，就放弃。

By doing this you will feel more certain that the channel you were working on is wrong and your initial hypothesis is wrong than if you only spent a third of your time on it over the course of a few weeks.

通过这种办法，比持续几周，花三分之一时间能更加肯定哪种方法、哪假设是错的，

So learn one channel at a time.

所以，每次只专注于一种策略。

Second, when you find one channel at a time and strategies that work,

第二点，当你在某次中发掘一种策略，并且这种策略是起作用的，

always be iterating on it.

可以一直重复利用。

You can potentially create a playbook and give it to someone else to iterate on it but these channels always change.

你可以交给其他人去重复使用，但，（注意）策略是一直在变化的。

Anything from Facebook ads to Google ads,

从Facebook广告到Google竞价排名广告，

the distribution channels,the environments that you don’t control change all of the time and you should always be iterating and optimizing for that.

分销渠道，环境的变化是无法完全把控的，需要不停地迭代和优化策略。

And lastly, in the beginning

最后，开始，

when you see a channel that fails just to get rid of it and go on there are lots of other things to try.

当你发现一种策略是无用的，那么丢到一边，继续尝试其他的，

But over time go back to that channel and look at it again.

但过一段时间，（需要）仔细回顾一下那种方式。

An example is that in the beginning at Home joy we had no money so when we tried to buy Google ads to get users in the door quickly - what we found was that all of these national companies had more money than us, they were making a lot more money on the job than us. So they were able to acquire users at a much higher cost than us. So we couldn’t afford that and we had to go through another channel. But today we make more money on the job, and we are better at some things. So we should probably revisit the idea of buying Google ads. That’s what I mean by that.

有一个例子就是在刚创立Homejoy的时候，我们想通过购买Google ads以快速获取用户，可是我们发现许多跨国公司也在用这个方式获取用户，它们拥有我们难以企及的财力，同时它们能够在业务上赚取我们难以企及的利润，他们有能力承担比我们高得多的用户获取成本，我们显然无法与之直接竞争，只好寻求其他推广渠道。但是到了今天，我们在业务上能够赚取更多的利润，并且我们在某些事情上能做的更好，所以，我们也许到了该重新审视购买Google ads这个想法的时候，我想表达的就是这个意思。

And the key to all of this is creativity. Performance marketing, or marketing and growth in general can be very technical but, it is actually technical, and you have to be creative because if it was really easy and bland then everyone would be growing right now. So you always have to find that little thing that no one else is doing and do that to the extreme.

当然，这一切的关键是创造力。效果营销，或者说单纯的营销和总体上的增长可能是技术活，实际上确实是技术活，所以你不得不保持创造性，因为假如它是非常简单乏味的话那么每一家公司都可以立马实现增长。所以，你不得不时刻去寻找那些他人未曾做过的小事情，并将它做到极致。

So there are three types of growth. Sticky, viral, and paid growth. Sticky growth is trying to get your existing users to come back and pay you more or use you more. Viral growth is when people talk about you. So you use a product, you really like it and you tell ten other friends, and they like it. That’s viral growth. And the third is paid growth. If you happen to have money in the bank you’re going to be able to use part of that money to buy growth.

说到增长模式，我把它分成三种，分别是粘性增长、病毒式增长以及付费式成长。粘性增长做的是回头客生意，客户除了第一次购买，还会买第二次、第三次，甚至更多。病毒式增长就是口碑效应，当你用了一款产品之后真的很喜欢它，你就会告诉你的朋友，而你的朋友也会告诉他们的朋友，这样用的人就会越来越多，这就是病毒式传播。第三种是付费式增长，如果你恰好在银行里有一大笔钱供你去购买业务上的增长，那么你就可以考虑用这种模式。

The central theme that I’m going to go through is sustainability. By sustainable growth I mean you are basically not a leaky bucket. The money you put in has a good return investment on it. So sticky growth is, like I said, trying to get your existing users to come back and buy stuff. The only thing that really matters here is that you deliver a good experience. Right? If you deliver a good experience people are going to want to keep using you. If you deliver an addictive experience people are going to want to keep using you. And the way to measure this and to really look at this and how you are doing over time with whether you are providing good sticky growth is to look at the CLV andretention cohort analysis.

无论是哪种增长模式，我要强调的关键都是可持续性。通过可持续的增长你基本上可以保证自己不会疲于拆东墙补西墙，你的金钱投入才会给你带来好的回报。所以，粘性增长，正如我刚说的，把你现有的用户不断变成回头客。这里最重要的是你要给用户一个良好的体验，对吧？如果你给用户提供很棒的体验，用户就愿意一直使用你的产品；假如你给用户提供的是让他们足以尖叫的体验，用户就会爱上你的产品。而衡量用户体验以及确认你是否获得良好的粘性增长就要看CLV和retention cohort analysis。

CLV, some people call it TLV, is a customer’s lifetime. It is basically the net revenue that a customer brings in the door over a period of time. So a 12 month CLV is how much net revenue does a customer give you over 12 months. And sometimes people will do the month and six months and so forth. So when I say cohort basically what you are looking at is, this is time, and this is percent of the users coming back to you. So at period zero you are at 100%.

CLV，也有些人称之为TLV，用文艺点的话讲就是客户生命周期价值，它基本上就是客户在某个阶段产生的净收益。比如说12个月的CLV，那么就是用户在12个月内产生的净收益。有时候也会用1个月CLV，半年CLV等等，并不固定。所以当我说队列时，基本上就是指有多少比例的客户会成为回头客，隔了多长时间再次光顾。在产品刚发布时这个数值通常是100%。

So cohort is another name for customer segments. For example you might look at the female versus male cohorts or people in Atlanta, Georgia versus people in Sacramento, California cohorts. The most common one is by month. So cohort equals month and let’s just say for this exercise we are looking at March 2012. So in March 2012, 100% of the people are using your product. Now, one month later 50% of the people might come back. Now, in the second month how many people that came in March are coming back two months later? That might be down. So over time you will have a curve that looks like this. There is always some initial drop off. The reasons that people don’t stay after first use could be that it wasn’t worth it or they had a bad experience, or something like that. And then over time what you want is for your curve to flatten out. These over here become your core customers. These are the ones that will stay with you over time.

客户队列是客户细分的另一种叫法。打个比方，你也许会把男性和女性看成一组队列，或者把佐治亚人和萨克拉曼多人看成一组队列。但最常用的还是按月份来组队列，所以客户队列通常和月份等同，我们可以举2012年3月这个例子作为练习。在2012年3月份，所有人都在用你的产品，一个月之后，也许会有一半的人会再次使用你的产品，现在，两个月过去，有多少当初在3月份使用你产品的用户会成为回头客？答案有可能是更少。随着时间的推移，你会得到这么一条曲线，通常在一开始的时候就会下跌。至于用户没能成为回头客的原因，可能是产品没有足够的吸引力，或者他们碰到了糟糕的用户体验，诸如此类。随着时间的推移，你会发现这条曲线逐渐变平缓，这时留下的用户就成了你的核心客户，也正是这部分用户对你不离不弃。

Say we are at one year later and you have built a bunch of stuff. You graph out the same thing and hopefully what you see is that you have a curve like this. That is, that even in the first period more than 50% of the people came back to you and more and more people are sticking with you. A really bad retention curve looks like this - which is after the first use they just hate you so much that no one even comes back. I don’t know what kind of business that is, it is obviously a shitty business. I can’t explain a good business that has a retention curve like that. Over time as you are thinking of strategies to increase this curve and to keep making it go up and up and up you want to keep looking at this analysis over time to see if that strategy is working for you.

现在我们看看一年后的情况，你建了一堆东西，你做着同样的事情，然后你希望能看到这么一条曲线。也就是说，在第一阶段就有超过50%的用户成为回头客，并且有越来越多的人成为你的忠实用户。一个糟糕的用户沉淀曲线看起来就像这样-用户第一次用了产品后就对你产生了满满的恶意，大家都不愿再被坑。我不知道得多糟糕的生意才能做到这个水平，这可是个技术活，一个不错的生意如果能有这样一条曲线可以去申请诺贝尔奖了。在你创业的过程中，当你不断想着各种招数去提升这条曲线，让它不断上升上升再上升时，你得回头看看我说的这些分析，以便判断你用的策略是否有效。

The second kind of growth is viral growth. Like sticky growth you also need to deliver a good experience. But on top of that you need to deliver a really, really good experience. What is going to make these people shout out loud on Twitter or on Facebook or whatever and tell all their friends and email all of their family about you. You have to really deliver a good experience. Combined with that is you have to have really good mechanics for the referral program itself. You have 100 customers who really want to talk about you. Now how are they going to talk about you?

第二种增长模式是病毒式增长。和粘性增长一样，你同样需要提供良好的用户体验。但仅仅是良好还不够，你需要提供的是超乎预期堪称完美的用户体验。如果你想要用户在Twitter、Facebook或其他渠道上积极传播你的产品，并且告诉他们的朋友和家人。你就一定要有一个非常棒的用户体验，并且建立一个良好的推介机制作为配套。这样你就有100个乐于宣传你的用户。现在问题来了，用户们该如何宣传你呢？

So in that sense the viral growth strategy is all about building a good experience, but if you have that, how do you build a good referral program. I have listed the three main parts of that. One is the customer touch points which is where are people learning that they can refer other people? That might be after they book or after they sign up. A better one is after they use the product for a while and you see that they are highly engaged, then you show them that link and get them to send it out to everyone. Another one is if you are doing more of a platform type play - for Homejoy we actually go inside their home. So another customer touch point is when the cleaning professional is inside the home they can have a leave behind and we can show them something there too as well. You want to basically put the customer touch points and the actual link to however they are going to refer their friends at a point in time where they are highly engaged and you know that they are loving you.

从那个意义上来讲病毒增长策略指的就是建立良好的用户体验，但是问题来了，如果你有很好的用户体验，你该如何建立一个有效的推介机制去宣传你的用户体验呢。我列出了3块推介机制的主要部分，第一块是客户的触点，也就是用户该从哪里学习如何将产品推荐给他人？也许是在他们预定或注册之后，还有一个更好方式的是在他们使用产品并确认他们对产品非常满意后，你可以给他们产品链接，好让他们能够发送给其他人。另一个是你是否比单纯的平台类玩法做的更多-比如Homejoy实际上就是走进用户家中来做推介。所以另一个用户触点就是当清洁产品进入到用户家中，他们可以选择留下一个试用，这也给我们提供了展示产品的机会。当你把客户触点做好，等着用户主动推荐产品给他们的朋友的时候，你就清楚这些用户是你的了。

The second is program mechanics. The most common thing I have seen is $10 for $10. You get $10 if you invite your friends and they use it and they get $10. And so you should try different types of mechanics in that sense and try to optimize for whatever works for you. It could be 25 for 25 or it could be 10 for 10, it could be any of these things. And lastly, when your friend clicks on your referral link, when they come back to the site it is really important to optimize that conversion flow of how they are going to sign up. Sometimes you need to sell them in a different manner or up-sell that a friend suggested that you use this and so forth. So with all of these combined, you will really need to play around with them in different dimensions and come up with a good referral program.

第二块是项目机制，我所见过最普遍的做法是以10美元换美元。你邀请朋友就可以获得10美元，他们这么做的话也可以获得10美元。如此你可以尝试不同的做法，并优化那些有效的做法。这可以是以25换25，也可以是以10换10，无论什么样的方式都有。最后一块，当你的朋友点击推荐链接，跳转到网站，如何优化转化流程以便他们能够注册就显得非常重要。有时你需要通过不同的方式把产品卖给他们，或者通过以“有朋友建议你使用这个东西”等方式来追加销售。通过这些组合，你可以尝试很多方法，最终得到一个有效的推介计划。

And lastly is paid growth. Some examples of paid growth are this right here. And these are some of the most obvious ones and I’m sure that you guys can think of more. Paid growth is you happen to have money you can spend - you may have credit cards or whatever - but you can spend something to get users. So the correct way to think about paid growth is that you are going to risk putting money out there so that are you going to get a return. The simple way to think about it - is your CLV, your customer’s lifetime - is it more than your CAC. And your CAC is an abbreviation for customer acquisition costs. So an example is - say you run a bunch of ads over 12 months and the customer is worth $300 to you. Each one of these ads, when you click on it the CPC costs different types of money, and then when they click on your ad they have to come to the site and sign up or buy something.

最后一种增长模式是付费式增长。这里就有一些付费式增长的例子。这些是最明显的例子，我敢肯定你们可以想出更多这样的例子。应用付费式增长模式有个前提，就是你恰好有一笔钱，无论信用卡还是其他什么东西，而你可以用这笔钱去获得用户。所以，考虑是否使用付费式增长的正确方法是将它看成是你为了获得回报而投入的金钱产生的风险。简单理解的话，就是你的CLV，你的客户生命周期价值，要比你的CAC更多。CAC是客户获取成本的缩写，我举个例子，比如说你在12个月的时间内投放了一堆广告，客户产生的价值的300美金。你点击每个广告他们产生的CPC成本是不一样的，而收益是用户点击了广告就可以看到网站，继而注册或者购买一些产品。

And the conversion rates are different for all of these ads. The CAC is calculated by the CPC divided by the conversion. So you see that there are different acquisition costs for different types of ads. To determine whether or not that is a good or bad ad all you have to do is CLV minus the CAC. If it is more than zero you are earning a profit. So you see that despite the CLV remaining the same and the conversions being higher or lower sometimes some ads that might seem good actually don’t seem so good at the end of the day.

但是广告的转化率是不一样的，而CAC就是根据CPC除以转化率得到，所以你可以看到不同类型的广告它们的用户获取成本也是不一样的。你把CLV减去CAC就可以判断一只广告的好坏，假如你得到的是正数，那么说明你的广告是有效的。所以你可以看到尽管CLV数据还是挺不错的，转化率时高时低，有些广告表面上看起来还不错但实际上并不是那么有效。

You can look at this for your whole entire customer base, aggregating all of your customers together, but the better way of looking at it is to break it down by customer segments. If you are building a marketplace for country music the CLVs of someone in Nashville, Tennessee is going to be much larger than the CLVs of someone in Czechoslovakia. I just assume that is the case anyway.

你可以通过这个来了解你的整个客户群，将你所有的客户汇总起来，但更好的方法是将它细化成不同的客户细分来看。比如你打算进军乡村音乐市场，那么纳什维尔客户群的CLVs将会比捷克斯洛伐克的客户群的CLVs大得多。当然，这只是我YY的案例。

You will want to make sure that when you are buying ads for these different types of cohorts that you know what the differences are and you don’t want to mix everything together. The last point on payback and sustainability - I think a lot of businesses get in trouble and they turn into bad businesses when they start spending beyond their means. And it has a lot to do with risk tolerance or how much risk you are willing to take on.

当你为不同的客户队列购买广告时，你将会需要去确认他们之间的不同。关于投资回报和可持续性的最后一点-我觉得很多生意会遇到麻烦并且当它们开始超支增长时，生意就失败了。要避免这点，就需要在风险承受力这块做很多工作。

So when you look at these CLVs, which is suppose you get a customer that is worth $300 after 12 months. In the first month they are worth $100. If you wait until the 12 month period then they give you the other $200. But if in the first period you are actually paying $200 for them then you are in the hole for $100 until the end of the 12 month period. That’s when you start to get into potentially unsustainable growth. Something could happen at the end of the 12 months where you don’t actually get the $200 from the customer and you end up in a very bad situation. Essentially, at the end of the day you could be running out of money. And if you are doing this with credit cards you will definitely find that you are going to have to declare bankruptcy very soon.

当你考虑这些CLVs的时候，假设你12个月后获得了一个价值300美金的客户。在第一个月，他们价值100美金，你可以选择等到第12个月然后他们给你贡献剩下的200美金，但是如果一开始你为了获取他们就付出200美金的成本，那么实际上在这12个月结束前你就一直承受100美金亏空，这样你就开始进入不可持续的增长。在这12个月结束前任何事情都可以发生，而你实际上还没有从用户那取得200美金的收益，这样你最终的情况就会很坏。实质上可以这么说，在最后你可能会花光所有的钱，而且如果你是用你的信用卡来做这些事，那毫无疑问你会发现自己很快就会面临破产。

So again, payback time is very important. Safe time to go with is three months. If you are very risk loving then maybe 12 months is better. Beyond 12 months is very much unsafe territory.

所有我觉得有必要再强调一次，投资回报期非常重要。安全的投资回报期通常是3个月，假如你是个冒险主义者，那么12个月也许是更好的做法。超过12个月则是非常不安全的范围。

The art of pivoting - Homejoy in its current concept was literally the 13th idea we fully built out and tried to execute on and tried to get customers for. And so a lot of the questions I get are,” How do you even get to that 13th idea, and how did you decide when to move on?” The best guidance that I can give on that is the kind of look at these three criteria, which is once you realize that you can’t grow, and despite building out all of these great features and talking to all of these users none of them stick, or the economics of the business just don’t make sense - then once you make that realization you just need to move on.

旋转的艺术-Homejoy目前的概念从字面上来看是我们全力打造、执行并尝试获取用户的第十三个想法，因此我会遇到很多类似于这样的问题“你们是如何得到第十三个想法的，你们是如何决定何时继续的？‘我能给出的最好的指导是你去对照以下三个标准：一旦你意识到你不能增长，并且尽管你打造出来超棒的功能，并且告诉所有用户，可还是没人愿意成为用第二次，或者这生意压根就没法做-那么，一旦你有这样的认识，你所需要做的就是继续前进。

I think the trickiest one is probably the growth one because there are so many stories out there where the founders stuck with the idea and then after three years all of a sudden it started growing. So the trick here is what you really should do is have a growth plan when you start out. What is an optimistic but realistic way to grow this business? it might look something like this. In week one you just want one user, in week two you want maybe two users and so forth. And you can keep doubling up and up.

我觉得最棘手的可能就是第一类增长，因为有很多这样的故事，创始人坚持他的想法，接着三年后它才突然开始增长。所以这里棘手的是你刚开始就需要有一个增长计划。那么看起来高大上但又接地气发展业务的法子是什么呢？它可能就是这个样子，在第一周你只想要一个用户，在第二周你也许想要两个用户，如此类推，你可以保持以翻倍的速度增长。

In week one you should basically build as much as possible to get that one user. And then a week to build as much to get two users. If you have a product that people want you should be able to maintain this growth curve pretty easily by just walking around and manually finding people. It is when you get to 100 users a week when you need these growth strategies to start working. What I tell people is usually if you are fully executing on your product, and you are working really hard, then if you go three or four weeks in a row of no growth or backwards growth, then it is time to maybe consider a pivot.

在第一周你基本上需要做的就是尽可能地获取一个用户，接着第二周尽可能地去搞定两个用户。如果你有别人想要的产品，那么维持增长曲线就会容易很多。当你一周能够获得100个用户，你就需要开始应用这些增长策略。我总是和别人说，如果你的用户好几个礼拜都没有增加，而团队似乎在竭尽全力，那么一定要停下来反思。

Maybe not in the sense that you completely come up with a new idea but you are probably fundamentally doing something wrong because at that early stage a startup should always be growing. This is optimistically what it looks like and this is the kind of growth curve that I set forth and put out when I started Homejoy, but really what it looks like is like this. So you want to make sure that when you are in a lull you don’t stop. And that is what you should wait 2 to 3 weeks. As long as you don’t stop working hard you’ll eventually get back here and you’ll see a trend like this over time.

这不是说你要完完整整地想出一个新点子，但你很有可能犯了根本性的错误，因为对于创业公司来讲初期通常都是在成长。这是乐观情况下的样子，然后这是我刚开始做Homejoy时提出并推出的增长曲线图，但是事实上它看起来是这样的。所以，你要确保自己即使面临无增长的情况也不能停止行动，即使那会使你等上两三周。只要你不放弃努力，你的增长曲线最终会回到这点，并且随着时间推移你将会看到这么一条趋势。

I can take questions at this time.

现在大家可以提问题

Q: So one question online was if your users already have a product that they are already comfortable with how do you get them to switch to yours?

Q：网上有个问题说假如用户已经习惯于用某种产品，那么该如何把这部分用户变成你的用户。

A: There is always a switchover cost. I will tell you the example of Homejoy. We were actually creating a new market in the sense that a lot of our initial users had never had cleanings before so it was pretty simple to get them on board. And a lot of people who have cleaners already really trust their cleaner. To get them to come and use something else is probably the most difficult task in the world. When you are building things and trying to get people to switch over to you what you really need to do is find the moments where your product or what you are offering is much better or very much differentiated from the existing solution they have.

A：转换成本总是存在的。我可以告诉你一个Homejoy的例子。从某种意义上来讲我们实际上是创造了一个新市场，我们的早期用户中有很多之前从来没使用过家政服务，所以把他们拉拢过来还是挺简单的。不过也有很多已经用过清洁工服务的人非常信任他们的清洁工，让他们使用别的产品也许是这世上最难的事情。当你推出新产品，尝试着让别人成为你的用户，那么你真正需要做的是去挖掘你产品中比用户现有的解决方案更棒或者有巨大差异性的东西。

So an example is someone who had a regular cleaner and maybe had a party one day and they needed a cleaning almost the next day. Because Homejoy in most areas has next-day availability they would just come to Homejoy and use it because they knew they couldn’t get their regular cleaner. And once they start using the product, then that is when they start realizing the little advantages of using Homejoy, which adds up to a big advantage. Realizing that leaving cash out or using checks was really annoying so being able to do all of your payments online was more convenient. Being able to cancel or reschedule according to your own schedule was very convenient.

打个比方，某人他有一个定期清洁工，某天他举办了一个聚会，第二天需要找人打扫下，这种情况下他只需要找Homejoy就可以了，因为Homejoy在大部分地区都提供次日服务，而这正是定期清洁工不具备的。而且，一旦他们开始使用这个产品，他们就会认识到用Homejoy带来的一些小的好处，日积月累，小的好处就会变成大的好处。考虑到忘带钱或用支票实在是烦人的事，Homejoy提供的线上支付功能就显得方便许多。同样，根据你的行程安排取消或重新安排清洁服务也很方便。

A lot of people when they build a product they are like - and these 50 things are better than the existing solution - and even if the benefits outweigh the switchover cost it is really hard to actually tell that to a user and try to get them to aggregate all of those benefits over many little things. It is better to have one or two things that clearly differentiate yourself from the other product.

很多人当他们推出一个产品他们就好像-有50个比现有解决方案更好的好处-即使这好处超过转换成本，可要把好处告诉用户并通过让他们体验许多小事来积累那些好处这样的方式来获取用户也是非常难的事情。更好的方法是让你的产品有一两处与其他产品明显不同的东西。