Xiaohongshu is not a platform I’m good at, and I don’t have many fans there. But a recent post about an old Palm device drew more than 200 comments, and the content of the comments made me cry. I was especially surprised that because I mentioned the cooking machine community – my first step into the Internet industry, the foundation and predecessor of the minority, many old users of the year appeared in the comment area. More than a decade later, they may have become parents and have a successful career, but they still miss those good times.
Indeed, the three years of running the cooking machine community are also one of the happiest times for me: tossing around with my favorite equipment and software every day, opening my eyes, reading and sifting through every essential post, looking forward to the various kinds of posts that appear in the community cow man. Among the various technical communities at that time, the cooking machine community was certainly not the largest and the most technical, but it must have the best atmosphere and the most respect for users. That is, by operating such a community, I realized the power of Internet “co-creation”, and buried the entrepreneurial ideal of being a co-creation platform.
No matter how good an idea is, start with what you can do right now. As a self-made entrepreneur, doing “content co-creation” first is the most realistic and feasible entry point. Therefore, after the Boiler Forum, we established a minority, focused on the vertical field of “application recommendation”, and explored a set of exclusive models that authors can create freely, review and modify by editors, and then select and recommend them.
Fortunately, the establishment of the minority coincides with the take-off of the mobile Internet, applications have truly become the entrance to digital life, and knowledge payment is gradually emerging. The minority did not monetize the traffic accumulated in the app recommendation, nor did they take the “shortcut” of selling anxiety or group marketing. On the contrary, we chose to further explore the topics after and above the application: hardware, services, scenarios, ecology; with the professional accumulation of efficiency tools, we have also been able to initially establish our own paid content system; although the scale of content payment revenue It’s not big, but it has a good reputation, and it can always operate and produce well.
In this process, we also have a deeper understanding of the tools, methods and efficiency in digital life: the purpose of learning digital tools is to improve efficiency; and when efficiency is improved, we have more ability and time to enjoy life. The process of tossing may require the spirit of penetrating the horns, but the ultimate goal is not to go to extremes, but to pursue a balanced life state. Therefore, “efficient work, quality life” has become our Slogan for the next three years.
Through the practice of the content co-creation model, we have accumulated brands and resources, and established a deep understanding of user needs. Therefore, we developed a new “product co-creation” model, leveraging the excellent supply chain and innovative brands in the Pearl River Delta to customize a variety of good-looking and easy-to-use physical products, such as customized Keychron K3 keyboards , MagStone wireless charging 35W gallium nitride charger , etc.; sales and word of mouth prove that we are in the right direction.
So far, it has taken us ten years to build a content and product co-creation chain and establish a sustainable business model. It’s still not big, but we’re still loving, having fun, and feeling the potential for the future.
However, I still have an obsession with “community” in my heart. Apart from content and products, is there any way to directly put “people” at the core of the value chain, through establishing connections, learning from each other, exchanging value, and inspiring creation?
Despite this, I have always been cautious about creating another community: the experience of running a cooking machine community and the ups and downs of similar platforms in China have all made me have concerns about content hydration, worrying that I cannot maintain the focus and focus of community topics. quality.
What inspired me was the experience of running a minority membership last year. This is the first time we have done a membership service, and there are many immature and imperfect aspects. As a result, we established a member community halfway through, originally just to facilitate the collection of user feedback, but it turned out to be a highlight of the first season of membership. Due to the paid screening of the member community, the values are the same, and the discussion purpose is clear; the speeches are organized in the form of “topics” rather than scattered dialogues, which raises the threshold but also ensures the quality. Instant exchanges and collisions have formed a good complement to the minority’s traditional mode of article-based.
In fact, not long after the membership group was established, it showed excellent “self-circulation” ability: questions raised in the group, such as technology, purchase, etc., often received detailed and reasonable answers on the same day, and many times in our reply When there was a gap, they were “answered” by more experienced members; some members suggested that they could contact the local high-end movie hall resources, but they went back and forth, and finally successfully organized a small-scale offline movie viewing; “Selected Questions and Answers from Member Groups”, even if the space is deleted and deleted, it is still easy to accumulate a native discussion of 10,000 to 20,000 words.
The membership group has even benefited us as the operator: seeing that we organized a questionnaire, some members took the initiative to give opinions on the questionnaire design from a professional point of view, and even called for guidance sentence by sentence; for the customized peripherals we produced, members While enthusiastically encouraging, they “scrutinize” every detail from packaging to interaction, and feedback to us through long comments of hundreds or thousands of words without reservation.
This unexpected discovery makes me believe that with a clear entry threshold, a suitable speech mechanism, and decent operation guidance, a community suitable for in-depth discussions and self-value generation can be built; this kind of human-based value chain can Integrate and reinforce Minority’s existing content and product logic.
Based on this idea, in the new season of members, we will focus on the concept of community co-creation:
- We will continue to be a member-only community, and migrate and upgrade the existing Feishu topic group to a community module independently developed by the minority. This module is still in development and will go live later this year; its design and functionality are and will continue to be solicited from members.
- In the process of producing member content, we will continue to use voting, interviews, etc. to understand members’ reading interests and concerns, and actively adjust the direction of topic selection and content focus accordingly.
- We will invite members to participate in the process of building peripheral products, including soliciting ideas and voting on designs; perhaps soon, we will be able to witness the whole process of a new product growing from the member community and moving towards mass production.
- In addition to continuing to organize events in the official name, we will encourage experienced and qualified members to organize various forms of online and offline events on their own, and provide appropriate guidance and resources such as materials, venues, and publicity.
- We will invite more excellent authors, developers, and brand leaders to enter the community to communicate directly with everyone; we will also allow members’ ideas to have real external influence.
In the long run, we hope to connect the content and product co-creation chain through the member community to realize the high-quality self-operation of the minority; by gathering the minority, to achieve the vision of reaching and changing the majority.
In addition to this, this season’s membership has other new changes that reflect our thinking:
- Starting from this season, members will officially adopt a subscription system, which will continue to be updated and iterated.
- We will still screen and produce high-quality exclusive content, but it will not be limited to efficiency-related content, and it may not be all long texts, but long and short texts, alternating deep and wide, with both text and video.
- We will reorganize the types and contents of rights and interests, including coupons, software tutorials, commemorative peripherals, etc., which will be issued through a unified function entry and clear rules.
Going around in circles, I stepped into the technology media, the new field of quality e-commerce from operating the community more than ten years ago, and now I have included the community as the core module of minority operation. What has changed is the way the community operates. What has not changed is the ability and confidence in the value of the community. I believe that based on the accumulation of the past ten years, the new minority community will create enormous value. We also sincerely invite everyone to participate, not only to support us, to be guests, but also to become the protagonist, so that the next decade of the minority will be better.
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