# user growth By [lungan](https://paragraph.com/@lungan) ยท 2022-10-27 --- ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/78027350897136790faded8a46a0efca5f84e2a8afab7672afd640d37fd41ce1.png) The talk of user growth has been around for the last few years, but what user growth teams do is not only in the Internet industry, but in traditional businesses as well. It's just that the teams that do these things may not be called user growth teams, or growth-related things may be spread across several teams. Another point to be noted is that most traditional enterprises allow users to pay for products, and there are few free products. Moreover, in the traditional sales system, there are many steps to deliver products to users. After these steps, the manufacturing enterprises cannot even establish a direct connection with the end users. So in a traditional enterprise, performance growth and user growth are similar. However, in the Internet era, most Internet companies sell their products in the free mode that the wool is paid for by the pig and the dog. The Internet makes it much easier for enterprises to connect and communicate with users. So Internet companies acquiring and retaining users are similar to traditional companies selling products to customers and getting them to buy their own products again and again. The brand Marketing Department of a traditional FMCG company is similar to the growth team of an Internet company today. Brand and marketing is one of the main points for FMCG companies to let users choose their products. This part of the work is mainly undertaken by the brand Marketing Department, which is responsible for insight and research, product concept research and development, brand positioning and promotion, advertising and media delivery, market promotion and promotion, channel development, market execution, etc. The purpose of the brand Marketing Department is to make users love and buy their own products. How it does this is not the subject of this book, so I will not go into it here. The point of this example is that user growth isn't new or mysterious in nature, it's just that at different times and in different industries, different teams or teams are doing something similar. Even in the Internet age, user growth has gone through different shifts. In the PC Internet era, search is the entrance, we want traffic generally go to buy search advertising, there are few private domain traffic, so SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization) is popular. However, in the era of mobile Internet, due to the closed nature of Apps, traffic entry appears discrete, and many apps gradually establish a closer relationship with users, forming their own private domain traffic. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/87f647debfb5537138f508be66304f60c98f6bc0da4a2b1a3c737dbbf071e8bc.png) As a result, user growth has gradually turned into App installation and activation, with major mobile Internet companies trying to install their apps on users' phones. In the early stage, the process of installing the App on the user's mobile phone and letting the user activate it was mainly achieved through various channels of advertising. In the early era of mobile Internet, smartphone shipments were increasing year by year and user dividends were high, so the simplest and most brutal way to achieve user growth was to do mobile phone pre-installation: Internet companies have negotiated with mobile phone manufacturers to integrate apps directly into the mobile phone operating system installation package, which will be directly installed into the phone when the operating system is brushed out of the factory, and some pre-installed apps cannot be deleted unless the operating system is rebrushed. The advantages of this method are low cost and large volume. In the early days, the activation cost per App was 1 yuan or less. That's 100 million dollars for 100 million new active users. Assuming 10% of those users stay, that's 10 million daily active users. If an App has 10 million DAUs, it's probably worth 1.5 to 6 billion yuan. The input-output ratio is very high for a cost of 100 million yuan to achieve such a large profit. If you want more, there are other channels to choose from. Other channels mainly include the following ways: Android phone pre-installation, Android phone manufacturer App store release, Android phone third-party App store release, SEM, Apple App store (App Store) integral wall, Apple App Store APP keyword optimization (free), Apple App Store ranking Sprint, DSP (demand-side platform)/Network Alliance advertising, Android mobile phone system brush machine, etc. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/8f42fbfc4e83eafbc49c04ad54c5eb1ebe7904c73a07057c64eb21414ef9fc1a.png) The difficulty of these channels is not big, the money can be done, is not the focus of the book, will not expand in detail. In general, in the early stage of the development of mobile Internet, the fastest way to attract new people is to saturate various channels, there are rockets to sit we will not sit in a car. However, with the cost of obtaining traffic increasing year by year, relying on channel this move fresh, has been unable to eat all over the world. So user growth is more on the table. In addition, channel delivery only solves the problem of attracting new users. Even if it is possible to mobilize users through various DSP ads plus Deeplink, it is not cost-effective. Therefore, channel delivery is not very helpful for promoting and improving user LTV. As channel costs rise year by year, many people who used to do channel gradually switch to user growth, but the skills required to do user growth are very big challenges for these people. At present, the common user growth background mainly includes: channel commerce, product, operation, data analysis, marketing, strategy, research and development, user research and so on. In practical work, I have recruited people with different backgrounds. I feel that people with data analysis, product and operation backgrounds have some advantages in user growth, while those with channel business background face relatively big challenges. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/f6d34147ced03aa7c8bef79aea66d2440d136802b4ea00fc8dbb3a0634f48bd2.png) --- *Originally published on [lungan](https://paragraph.com/@lungan/user-growth)*