Everyone says that 2018 is a cold winter for the Internet, but even so, a large amount of capital has poured into the social track. First, in August 2018, Maimai received US$200 million in Series D financing, and later Bullet Messenger received 150 million yuan. Then, Yinyue, a music-focused social networking app launched in November, also received tens of millions of dollars in financing, with a valuation of US$200 million. Soul, which is in the stranger social networking field, also received a large amount of financing, but it did not disclose it to the outside world. According to media reports, in 2018, more than 20 social apps received financing of varying amounts.

Not only that, on January 15, 2019, the social field staged a drama of "Three Heroes Fighting Lu Bu". Wang Xin, the former founder of QVOD, launched the topic discussion social toilet MT, Douyin launched Duoshan, which focuses on social networking among acquaintances, and Kuai Ru Technology, which previously created Bullet SMS, launched a new chat application - Chatbao.

In the field of social networking among acquaintances, WeChat's position is basically unshakable, and it has established its own business ecosystem. If you want to make achievements in the social field, you have to consider the social scenarios segmented by young people. For example, Soul has occupied its own territory in the social field through the new way of soul matching and making friends in the field of anonymous social networking.

(This article aims to analyze the operation of soul, deepen the understanding of the AARRR model, and improve the ability to analyze the operation of one's own products . Welcome to guide and communicate)

1. Market environment analysis

Market Background

1. Growth of social market size

According to the "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet", as of June 2018, the scale of Internet users in China reached 802 million. The number of new Internet users in the first half of 2018 was 29.68 million, an increase of 3.8% compared with 2017, and the Internet penetration rate was 57.7%.

In terms of mobile Internet users, the scale of mobile Internet users in China has reached 788 million. The number of new mobile Internet users in the first half of 2018 was 35.09 million, an increase of 4.7% compared with 2017. The proportion of mobile Internet users has climbed to 98.3%.

Based on the growth of the scale of Chinese netizens, the scale of mobile social netizens is also increasing. According to the data of 753 million mobile netizens and 632 million mobile social users in 2017, there is still room for growth in the field of mobile social networking. In addition, judging from the proportion of user usage time in popular industries of mobile Internet, netizens are highly dependent on mobile social networking, accounting for 37.2% of the time.

As life becomes more and more convenient, users will no longer be satisfied with a single social model. They will hope to meet more needs on social platforms and have more ways to play. Creating new mobile social scenarios will be a new breakthrough point in the mobile social field, and niche social scenarios will also be a new direction for mobile social networking.

2. The Internet Generation is Coming

The Internet Generation refers to mobile Internet users born after 1995 and 2000. QuestMobile data shows that as of October 2018, the number of users of this generation exceeded 369 million. In the first 10 months of 2018, the total number of Internet users increased by 37 million, of which 15 million were born after 1995, accounting for a much higher proportion than other groups.

This group is more willing to accept the new economy of the times, embrace new changes, and are accustomed to solving social, entertainment, learning and other needs through the Internet. They have several characteristics of the times: being lazy at home, chasing stars, loving beauty, and having a stronger desire to consume. The portrait of this group has also become the focus of attention on the Internet.

2. Product Status Analysis

1. Product Introduction

Product Introduction

Soul APP uses stranger empathy and social interaction as its entry point, actively exploring similar relationships between strangers and the behavioral paradigms of young people based on Chinese. By matching users through subjective dimensions (personality, interests, world views) and content (UGC), we can recommend people that users might like with one click. The original intention is to enable people to find good friends with whom they have chemistry.

Product slogan

Follow the soul to find you

2. Demand Analysis

User Profile

1) The ratio of men to women is not much different

2) The user group tends to be younger, generally under 35 years old

3) Most users are in developed cities and regions

4) Have a certain scale of overseas users

User characteristics

Desire to make friends: Want to meet new friends

Desire to express: Need a place where you can release your emotions and stress without being known by others

Curiosity and prying desire: Similar to liking gossip, there are many strangers' inner thoughts here, which can satisfy curiosity and prying desire

Killing time: Daily chat, find strangers to kill time in spare time

Hope to gain recognition: An anonymous environment allows people to let go of their "idol burden" and freely communicate with strangers and express their own preferences and ideas, thereby gaining a sense of recognition

3. User comments and feedback

Keywords: warmth from strangers, having a soulmate, seeing stories from around the world, creative inspiration, hiding oneself, bits and pieces of life

As an anonymous social platform, what users are most concerned about is the accuracy of the matching mechanism and the quality of the community environment. From the five-star reviews, we can actually see that Soul has done a very good job in creating a community atmosphere and matching mechanism, which can make users feel warm and recognized. At the same time, they can also obtain some intangible value on the platform. This also shows that soul’s content operation is very successful.

Most of the one-star bad reviews for soul are due to problems such as many bugs, high power consumption, too many pop-up notifications, the matching user is too far away, voice matching cannot find people, and charges for voice matching. Based on these feedbacks, Soul’s next step should be to make more optimizations on the product itself (bugs/power consumption). As for the problem of pop-up screen push, Soul should not change in the short term, because pop-up screens can increase the frequency of user opening, increase user usage time and improve daily active data. Soul, which is in the growth stage before profitability, needs this data support, even though it will sacrifice some user experience .

4. Version iteration record analysis

Soul's version iteration speed is still very fast. Basically, there are three version optimizations a month, and some new small features are released every month. This shows that Soul officials still pay great attention to user experience and are very active in product exploration. At the same time, in the Apple App Store, Soul developers respond frequently to one-star user feedback.

In the optimization of the early version of soul, we can find that soul paid great attention to the product experience of overseas users in the early days, and also identified the characteristic of Chinese people having lonely souls overseas, and developed and accumulated a considerable number of overseas users. This is also something that soul is currently very proud of, because in the traditional subconscious of China, the ideology of "foreign = advanced" exists, which has also played a role in soul cultivating domestic users and improving the quality of domestic users.

Iterative Formulation and Analysis

For a product, the most critical point for long-term user retention is to provide users with long-term value, that is, content accumulation and emotional connection , and Soul also does this in iteration.

Judging from the summarized and decomposed iterative records, soul has made a lot of vertical optimizations in the past year, especially in content production and user relations. We can also analyze that soul attaches great importance to content production and has put a lot of effort into it, such as optimization in shooting and the launch of an anonymous assistant, which allows users to be deeply anonymous, refuse private chats and viewing, and release more passion. The shortcoming is that Soul still has a lot of shortcomings in video products. Now is the first year of the short video era. The gameplay of video and how to lower the threshold for video shooting will be Soul’s new content exploration direction. The first year of vlog in China is also about to come. In terms of user relationships, soul is also actively helping users to establish emotional connections more easily.

Horizontally, Soul is also exploring new ways of socializing, including fuzzy LBS social networking and voice social networking that suits the young people of the new era. LBS social networking is actually more suitable for older groups who have less time and are more direct. Voice matching is more novel, young people like to try it more, and it is very entertaining. Judging from the recently launched competitors Yinyue APP and Zhiya APP, they have already proved the existence of the voice social market. They are all social products with voice as the main breakthrough point. For soul, the gameplay of voice social is still relatively simple and limited to matching functions. The next social direction can also focus on voice social and explore more gameplay.

(SOUL just launched the PIA drama a few days ago, which is also a new way to accumulate content and connect emotions)

5. Product functional structure

6. Product core business logic

As a stranger social software, Soul has a relatively rich gameplay, and its functions can be decomposed according to the KANO model.

Basic requirements : matching

      Normal matching; Planet user selection; UGC self-selection

     chat

                       Text; emoticons; pictures; voice messages; short videos

Expected demand : matching

     Voice Match

      chat

                      Connect to the microphone and make a call

Excitement needs : screen opening

Use user contributions as the startup page, changing it every day

match

     Love Bell

chat

                      Self-destructing messages; chat assistant; link and location sharing

User needs will evolve. Soul initially focused on voice dating, which was an exciting need of users, and used this as a differentiated feature to advertise on various platforms. However, as competitors began to imitate, voice dating was no longer new to users, and the exciting need was downgraded to an expectation-based need. Therefore, in terms of exciting matching needs, Soul launched the new love bell matching in December to fill the gap.

In terms of basic needs, Soul has achieved "he has it, and I have it too"; in terms of expected needs, it also meets the expectations of users; in terms of exciting needs that exceed user expectations, Soul is also exploring. In summary, Soul is very healthy in solving user needs.

For a platform that is still in its growth stage, it is very important to continuously optimize users' expected needs and continuously meet their excitement needs. This is how Soul was able to achieve 12 consecutive months of rapid growth throughout the year during the Internet winter season in 2018.

7. Product Life Cycle

summary

From the above data and data curves, we can conclude that after Soul’s impressive performance in user scale growth throughout 2018, the growth rate of user scale will slow down, and the product life cycle will also transition from the early growth stage to the middle and late growth stage, and begin to explore commercial monetization. The Soul coin launched in January is a signal that Soul has begun to explore commercial monetization.

According to the media's interview with Soul staff member Xile, Soul's current registered users have reached 50 million, and the daily active users are around 5 million, which is close to the user scale when Momo acquired Tantan for US$700 million, with 60 million users and 6 million daily active users.

2. AARRR model analysis

1. Introduction to AARRR Model

Acquisition: channels for acquiring users, quality of acquired users, number of new users per day, cumulative number of new users

Activation: downloads, registrations, daily activity, daily push clicks

Retention: next day retention, one week retention, daily return flow, weekly return flow, daily usage time, average user usage cycle

Revenue: Paid apps, in-app purchases, advertising monetization

Referral: number of user shares and number of user invitation registrations

2. Acquisition

Channel diversion

Weibo: Cultivated a big V account with 1.21 million fans - still the British big brother, and also carried out advertising

WeChat public account: repackaging and secondary dissemination of excellent content on Soul.com. The average number of views of a single article has exceeded 10,000.

Advertising on major platforms such as Zhihu, Douban, NetEase Cloud Music, Tik Tok, Facebook, and INS

Brand Cooperation

Cooperated with the iQiyi "U Can U Bibi" program team and made a program placement based on the topic of big data love matching

Recommended on the site

Sharing of result pages of various interesting tests

Excellent UGC content sharing

Amway SOUL

3.Activation

Soul Test

Use curiosity and desire for others’ evaluation of you

Soul Match

Friendship Orientation

Voice Match

Curiosity + Friendship Orientation

Excellent UGC Plaza

Excellent content that is closer to life and reality, allowing users to spend time consuming it

Pop-up screen

Officials' daily playful greetings create a friendly official image

Official Operation Activities

The official has 10 topics/activities a week, which is actually quite frequent. It can also be concluded that the average participation rate of Soul topics is around 7K. Topics above 10K can be considered excellent topic makers, and topics above 20K are explosive topics.

A hot topic basically meets one of the following two conditions:

1. Low threshold, wide coverage, interesting and curious users, such as "Tell me my nickname". Almost everyone has a nickname. It has a low threshold, covers a wide range of users, and can also showcase oneself.

2. Strong hormonal drive, because many users come here to make friends from the beginning, and this topic fits their purpose. There is also "love at first sight or love over time", which contains emotional debate and can express one's own emotional views, meeting the user's potential needs for expression.

The frequency of publishing fun tests is basically three times a week. Compared with other social platforms, this is an operating advantage of Soul, because fun tests are a way of playing that young users like very much. Because they are young, they are still relatively confused and curious. Subconsciously, they want to be recognized by others and want to know what others think of themselves. When the evaluation meets their expectations, they will share it. They may share it on the site or on social platforms outside the site, but no matter which one, it will not cause any harm.

The selection of interesting test topics generally meets three points:

1. Time nodes (Year of the Pig, Chinese New Year, Winter Vacation, Lantern Festival)

2. Hormone explosion point (emotional fortune, celebrity pairing)

3. Characteristics of young people (star chasing, zodiac signs)

4. Retention

Product function optimization

Continuous exploration and optimization of the anonymous assistant's deep anonymity, love bell, face pinching function and other functions

Warm community environment

Posts about birthdays, illnesses, etc. will basically have a lot of interactions of blessings or concern, and the amount of interaction is even more than that in the circle of friends. If these are posted in the circle of friends, they will appear pretentious. In the anonymous environment of soul, users' emotions are released, and they also get the warmth and comfort they want. Unconsciously, they will become dependent on this environment.

Emotional Link

They have already made new friends, are eager to establish a deeper emotional connection, and have already invested time. Giving up will make them feel "loss aversion"

User incentives

Soulmate lighting mechanism

The problem with anonymous social networking is that when the transition from strangers to acquaintances occurs, users will switch to WeChat or QQ for social networking among acquaintances. Soul's mechanism of lighting up soulmates prevents this phenomenon to a large extent. Most users will establish a prerequisite of "light up xxx letters before sending WeChat or meeting each other." After switching to the circle of acquaintances, users will definitely be grateful and miss the place where they first met. Lighting up the eight letters of soulmate will be the motivation for them to continue using soul. After the eight letters are lit up, a function similar to a couple space will be activated and the avatar will become a dual avatar. It is understood that the average time to light up eight letters is about 6 months.

Excellent content display

Soul's content recommendations are divided into: top and recommended

Choice of pinned content: Audio and video are mostly music-based, showing more musical talent. The content covered by pictures and text posts is relatively broad. Here are some of the more common ones: photography posts are pinned on the top, with high-quality shooting and the ability to reflect some humanism or stories; food posts are pinned on the top, mostly food tutorials, with high-quality pictures and clear tutorial steps; other posts have several prominent points, one is the emotional controversy point, for example, being cheated on, ambiguity, scumbag, etc., the other is the beautiful expectations of emotions, warm family affection, friendship, or meeting on soul and then meeting in person, etc. The third type is special sentimental posts, which express special feelings towards a certain person, thing or object, triggering emotional resonance among people of the same type. Graphics and text posts must be of good quality, well-written, and have emotional resonance. There are about 20 items pinned every day.

Instant content recommendations: Basically, what users see are contents produced within ten minutes, which makes it easy for users to interact. For content producers, being able to gain instant recognition is a good incentive. It’s like why people like to play games, because games have the characteristic of instant feedback, which makes you excited quickly. This is the advantage of the timeliness of content recommendation.

User recall

SMS recall: birthdays, special days

When you wipe the background of the homepage, there will be a text message notification

5. Revenue

Soul Coin

Soul currently does not have a clear profit model. The only source of income is Soul coin recharge and increasing the number and time of voice matching.

6. Refer

User dissemination opportunities

Excellent content sharing: mostly pinned content, followed by particularly excellent recommended content, but this part is rarely shared.

Sharing of fun tests: This is a viral method, and the sharing channel is directly placed on the results page, which greatly increases the amount of sharing outside the site.

7. Operational summary

The community is composed of users, content and activities. Let’s summarize how Soul builds the community environment from these three aspects.

Seed user accumulation

According to some media's early reports on Soul, Soul started from Douban and placed a large number of advertisements on Douban, followed by Zhihu. Douban is an interest community platform with a literary and fresh community environment, while Zhihu is a knowledge sharing platform with a high-quality user base. Therefore, the quality of users that Soul acquired from these two platforms in the early days was very high, which also laid the foundation for establishing a literary and fresh community tone. Furthermore, in an anonymous environment, it is easy to produce a lot of vulgar and offensive content, which provides a very poor user experience. However, attracting new users on these two platforms can effectively avoid these problems.

Determine content selection criteria

High-quality users require a high-quality community environment , and content is the key factor in determining the direction of the community atmosphere . For the community, worthless self-entertainment and water posts, as well as advertisements, false information, and pornographic information are very fatal to the construction of the community atmosphere. In soul, you basically can't see these things. From this, we can also conclude that soul handles these contents very well during content review.

As for content selection, according to my experience, there are the following points:

1. Highly topical and easy to interact with, such as some interesting, hot and weird things, etc.

2. Closer to life, more real emotional expression, such as being sick and needing comfort, birthdays and blessings, very tragic experiences, etc.

3. Cute pets can easily make people feel better.

4. High quality, requiring certain abilities, such as photography, painting, piano, etc.

5. Warm and easy to make people look forward to it, such as those who met through Soul, became good friends, gave warmth, met in person, etc.

6. Highly controversial and easy to arouse hatred, such as cheating, cheating, being cheated on, etc.

Judging from the selection criteria of these high-frequency content recommendations, they all reflect the community, and are high-end, loving, interesting and real. Based on such content review and recommendation standards, the development direction of Soul’s community atmosphere is established.

Event Planning

Have content value and social value

When users do not understand the product and the product has no stickiness, they will not actively produce. So when we organize activities, we need to meet the rules of entry barriers, let users participate in our activities first, and then cultivate users' daily production habits. Activities must also have content value and social value. Only if they are valuable can they retain users.

Soul's early method was to check in, and it launched the "30-Day Recall Challenge", which requires users to check in every day to recall the corresponding events in a given activity form. The content is of high value, sentimental, and has a low threshold, and can accumulate and retain users quickly. To this day, there are still users who voluntarily participate in it. After that, Soul will launch some check-in activities every once in a while to increase user engagement. After having a certain user base, we have also launched some topic activities with high thresholds but high content value, such as new singing of old songs and short story relay.

summary

High-quality users who are literary, fresh and sentimental + interesting, loving, high-quality and authentic content selection + activities that have content value and social value and are in line with user characteristics = a "free, expressive, warm and clean" community. Such a community atmosphere will affect users and influence the direction of UGC content in the direction expected by operations, which is a virtuous circle.

In addition, Soul attaches relatively high weight to operations for female users. In terms of UI design, topic selection, content packaging, and advertising promotion, most of them are oriented towards the direction that women are interested in.

8. Weaknesses and suggestions

1. In addition to pictures, texts and audios, the video function should be improved, and some video gameplay should be added, such as educating users to post vlogs.

2. The pinned content is all high-quality content that has been accumulated. You can add some extraction functions such as filtering, sorting and classification to the historical pinned content to allow these high-quality content to be consumed again

3. Currently, product consumption is mainly based on browsing UGC content, with less entertainment. We can add some social mini-game functions to improve product entertainment and provide new social entrances within the site.

4. Currently, the chat mode only exists for one-to-one chat, and a group chat function can be added.

3. Personal experience and thoughts

I have been using Soul for 227 days. My first impression was that I was attracted by its literary and fresh UI. The anonymous environment gave me more courage to post some things that I wanted to post on WeChat Moments but didn’t dare to post. I found a picture in Soul that well explained the meaning of Soul and WeChat Moments to me. I believe that most users feel the same as I do.

Commercial realization point

In terms of functionality, I expect it to do more exploration in voice-based friendships. As for video, it can be postponed and wait for changes, because video may not quite fit in with soul's most basic anonymous environment, while voice is anonymous and has a lot of playability. There are also many apps that can verify the voice market in terms of products, and even voice is a profit point, such as voice live streaming, because soul has accumulated a large number of excellent high-quality voice users, and Lizhi, which does voice live streaming, has begun to poach high-quality users on soul to be anchors.

As for soul content, he has accumulated a lot of life stories and other high-quality content. Can he use them for commercial purposes? For example, soul story sessions are published regularly, and audio and video content can be watched by scanning QR codes.

Development challenges

I think the challenge that soul will soon face is how to solve the embarrassing situation of meeting acquaintances in an unfamiliar environment when the user scale increases. After all, most users on soul hope to avoid the circle of acquaintances.

In addition, Soul’s current short-term value (product entertainment, basic gameplay) can no longer keep up with its long-term value (content accumulation and emotional connection).

Source: cong77