成功科技产品的三大支柱丨双语

原文作者：Nir Eyal

译者：李哲

关键词：业务增长，客户参与度，变现

核心提示：初创公司如何迈出成功的第一步？本文观点认为，对创业者来说，最重要也是最难的是如何分清工作的主次顺序，正确分配资源。本文教你用GEM框架——“三位一体”，集中精力做好最重要的事。

如果你开科技公司是为了赚钱，那么很可能你的数学不好，或者是妄想症发作。因为从数据上来说，你成功的几率在“零”和“几乎为零”之间。

92%的初创公司不出三年就会倒闭。Apple应用商店里，只有1%的应用赚到了钱。即使是那些成功获得风险投资的少数幸运儿，75%产生不了投资回报率。

对创业者来说，最难的是分清工作的主次顺序。帮助创业团队专注于最重要的事情，有一个非常有用的模型，叫做GEM框架。

公司的职责是为客户、员工和股东创造持续的价值。为了实现这一目标，公司一定不要忽视它的GEM：业务增长（Growth）、客户参与度（Engagement）和变现（Monetization）。

业务增长

公司要实现业务增长，关键是要获取新用户或者新客户。根本上，就是给那些需要公司产品的人群传达正确的信息。我把这些信息称为“外部触发器”（external triggers）。“外部触发器”可以通过不同的渠道传达，包括电视广告、销售人员、电子邮件或者口头宣传。

“外部触发器”无所谓好与坏，关键看它适不适合你所在的行业。病毒式增长（viral growth）很好，但是难以实现和维持。而媒体宣传可以产生源源不断的客户兴趣（customer interest），但成本高。公司需要回答的问题是：“我们在吸引对公司产品有需求的人群的注意力上，做的够不够好？”然后把这一问题的答案进行量化，也就是不断追踪新用户或客户的数量，以及获取他们的关注所付出的成本。

还要认识到，业务增长是一种过程和实践，而不是最终状态。所以，那些对自己的增长战略沾沾自喜的公司，可能正在面临流失客户的危险。我熟悉的那些高成长公司，一直在疯狂地寻找新渠道，评估潜在客户的数量和获客成本。

客户参与度

一些产品和服务不需要很高的客户参与度，例如房地产和假期旅行。另外一些行业则需要经常性、习惯性的客户参与，像Facebook、Slack、Salesforce和Snapchat一类的应用，需要培养用户的使用习惯，否则它们无法存活。

维系客户意味着保持他们的活跃度。为了追踪客户参与度，公司需要计算那些使用产品或服务的频率达到“留存客户”（Retained Customer）标准的人群百分比。对一些产品来说，这个标准可能是一年一次，而对于另一些产品，可能是一小时一次。

变现

最后，公司需要把它们创造的一部分价值变现，否则公司很难存活。变现的方法有很多，如收取订阅费等等。

然而，不仅仅要看公司的现状如何，还要了解产品未被发掘的需求有多大。这是判断公司能否在短期内维持下去，以及预测未来公司能做到多大的唯一方法。

然而，这就需要些运气了。因为预测未来是如此之难，自以为聪明的人反而容易为聪明所误。聪明人试图通过阅读行业报告、设计模型、分析统计数据等方法预测未来，殊不知，大家参考的信息都是类似的，得出的结论也都类似。这就是为什么只有正确的预测还不够。如果你的预测是对的，所有人都同意，那么你的竞争者也会看到机会，然后进入市场，吃掉你的利润。

因此，至于长期的变现，实现方法只有一个：你得看到一个其他人还没看到的未来市场。接下来，正如巴菲特所建议的，你要在它周围打造一道“无法突破的护城河”（unbreachable moats）。保护市场的方法只有五种：规模经济、网络效应、监管保护（regulatory protection）、品牌（brand）和习惯（habit）。

“三位一体”

业务增长、客户参与度和变现是相互联系的，单靠任何一个都不够。

某一产品即使有非常高的用户粘度，如果只有少量的人花极少的钱使用，它也会失败。同样，不能持续和变现的增长也是没有意义的。最后，如果不能争取到客户并成功变现，市场潜力也只是空谈。

正如红点投资的合伙人Tomasz Tunguz所说，这三个标准能够帮助公司团队正确地分配资源。对于定期监测和传达什么才是最重要的事情，GEM框架是非常有价值的。

英文原文：

If you’ve started a tech company to make a lot of money, chances are you’re bad at math — or simply delusional. Statistically speaking, your odds of a big-time payday are somewhere between zero and almost zero.

Ninety-two percent of startups fail within three years. Only 1 percent of the apps in the Apple App Store are financially successful. And even for the fortunate few companies that raise venture funding, 75 percent will fail to generate a return on investors’ capital.

Perhaps the hardest part about running a new business is knowing what to prioritize. There are hundreds of decisions to make, and keeping sight of what’s important and what’s not is a constant challenge. But when it comes to helping teams stay focused, I have found one model to be extremely useful: It’s called the GEM framework. The origin story of the framework is uncertain, but I’ve heard a similar model was first used during the early days of LinkedIn.

A company’s job is to find a sustainable way to deliver value to customers, employees and shareholders. To do this, the company must never lose sight of its GEM: growth, engagement and monetization.

Growth

Growth is all about how a company finds new users or customers. Fundamentally, it’s about getting the right message in front of people who need what you have. I call these messages “external triggers.” External triggers are delivered through various channels, including television commercials, salespeople, emails or word of mouth.

Some external triggers, like one satisfied customer telling another about your product, cost you nothing. Others, like running ads on Google or buying billboards along the highway, can cost big bucks.

There’s nothing inherently better or worse about one external trigger versus another. What matters is whether the trigger fits your business. Viral growth is wonderful, but difficult to engineer and sustain. Meanwhile, buying media can produce a steady stream of customer interest, but can be expensive. The growth question to answer is: “Are we getting better at drawing the attention of people who need our product?” Quantifying the answer to that question means tracking the number of new users or customers over time, as well as the cost of earning their attention.

It’s important to recognize that growth is a process and a practice, not an end state. Companies satisfied with their growth strategy are at risk of losing customers to their competitors. The growth hackers I know manically look for new channels and relentlessly test how many potential customers can be found and for what cost.

Growth question: “Are we getting better at drawing the attention of people who need our product?”

Growth metric: Number of new users or customers, and the cost of finding them.

Engagement

With some products and services, customer engagement is naturally infrequent — think of the way people buy real estate or book vacation travel. Other businesses require constant, habitual engagement to survive. Apps like Facebook, Slack, Salesforce and Snapchat need to become a habit, or else they go out of business. If the service isn’t used often, these products become less useful, and eventually customers never return.

Retaining customers means keeping them engaged, whether they’re checking in on an app or checking out of a purchase. Some businesses depend on repeat customer engagement more than others. But most critical for investors, founders and employees is to understand what brings people back.

To track engagement, companies should calculate the percentage of people using their product or service frequently enough to be classified as “retained.” For some products it’s once a year, for others it’s once an hour. The question “Are we getting better at engaging people who need our product?” is answered by calculating the growth in the percentage of retained customers.

Engagement question: “Are we getting better at engaging people who need our product?”

Engagement metric: Percentage of retained users or customers.

Monetization

Finally, companies need to turn some of the value they create into cash or they go out of business. There are many ways to capture value. Companies can charge a subscription fee, sell a one-time purchase or create marketplaces where they take a share of the transaction between buyers and sellers.

When it comes to monetization, the most crucial question is: “Are we getting better at capturing the value we create?” The metric here is profits. But it’s essential not only to ask how the company is doing today, but also to understand how much untapped demand exists for the product. This is the only way to predict whether a company will be sustainable in the near term and to make bets on how big the company can get in the future.

This is where people get “lucky” with startups. While skill, diligence and process drive user growth and product engagement, predicting future markets is notoriously tough — so much so that being smart can actually be a disadvantage.

Smart people tend to try to predict future markets by reading industry reports, designing models and running numbers. However, with access to similar information, people tend to come to similar conclusions. That’s why being right isn’t enough. Paradoxically, if you are right and everyone agrees with you, competitors will see the opportunity too, enter the market and eat away at your profits.

Therefore, when it comes to monetization over the long term, there’s only one way to achieve it: You’ve go to see a future market others don’t. Next, if you can spot the big untapped market on the horizon, you’ve got to, as Warren Buffett advises, protect it with “unbreachable ‘moats.’” There are only five ways to defend your market from competitors: economies of scale, network effects, regulatory protection, brand and habit.

Without a big unseen market and a way to hold on to it, future profits are no sure thing.

Monetization question: “Are we getting better at capturing the value we create?”

Monetization metric: Profit.

A necessary trinity

Growth, engagement and monetization are interlinked, and each is insufficient on its own.

The most highly engaging, habit-forming product will fail if it’s used only by a small number of people who pay too little for the service. The overwhelming majority of apps in the App Store are never found by a critical mass because the companies behind them have failed to find a way to profitably draw users’ attention.

Similarly, an amazing growth strategy using the latest viral hacks is pointless without a way to retain and profit from the growth. Viddy, the video-sharing service and Snapchat predecessor, shocked Silicon Valley in the spring of 2012 by acquiring nearly three million users in a month. But shortly after investors ploughed $30 million into the company, it became clear the app was a leaky bucket that could not retain its users.

Finally, huge market potential is useless without a way to profitably reach and engage customers. For example, music-streaming services like Spotify and Pandora are a daily habit for millions of people, but if song owners manage to extract all the value by imposing stricter copyright terms, they have the power to destroy the streaming services.

Of course, businesses have to worry about all sorts of other things (see Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas for a more detailed analysis). But thinking through the GEM framework is extremely effective for keeping teams on track.

As Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, told me, these three criteria “help make sure the team is allocating resources correctly.” When it comes to monitoring and regularly communicating what matters, the GEM framework is precious.

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