An analysis of the entire process of Keep’s customer acquisition: How to gain 140 million users in 3 years

In October 2017, Keep surpassed Yuedongquan Running for the first time to become the most-used fitness app, and its reputation became extremely popular. In August this year, Keep completed its Series D financing , with its user base exceeding 140 million.

This article attempts to explore how Keep broke through the red ocean and became the most popular fitness app before the product was launched.

1. Overview: Keep acquired 140 million users in three years, surpassing its competitors and becoming the industry leader

Back to before February 2015, Keep faced competitors such as Gudong , Bohe, Tangdou Square Dance , Ledongli, Xiaomi Sports, and Yuedongquan Running.

According to conventional thinking, in the Internet era, time is the best competitive advantage. Products that are deployed first will generally quickly occupy the market and become industry leaders, which will be difficult for latecomers to surpass. But Keep overcame numerous difficulties and became an industry leader from 0 to 1 within three years.

Therefore, looking back on Keep’s growth and breakthrough process can provide reference for a product’s process from 0 to 1, from starting up to breaking through. So let’s start with keep’s growth path.

1. 50 days after going online, the number of users exceeded 1 million and it received Series A financing.
2. After one year online, the number of users exceeded 10 million, surpassing Xiaomi Sports for the first time to become the second most active app in the same category, and received Series C financing.
3. After one and a half years online, its user base has exceeded 50 million, far surpassing Gudong and becoming the second most active APP in terms of user activity.
4. After 2 and a half years online, it has surpassed Yuedongquan Running and has a user base of over 80 million, becoming the fitness app with the largest number of active users.
5. As of August 2018, the user scale reached 140 million and the D round of financing was completed.

Figure 1 Performance of active users of fitness apps from 2014 to 2018 Image source: Analysys Qianfan

Figure 2 Keep user growth and financing process Image source: self-made based on network data

In an era where traffic is king, users are the most fiercely contested resource among various apps. As can be seen from the above figure, since its launch, Keep has been growing in users and the number of active users until its user scale reached the first in the industry.

In the process of user growth, Keep is far ahead of its competitors, which is enough to prove that Keep's product route and strategy are very effective. It can be said that Keep has successfully grasped market demand, found opportunities and user pain points in the market, and used effective solution strategies to meet user needs, so that it can use its super competitiveness to impress users.

2. Background analysis: The awareness of national fitness has been awakened, but there are few fitness venues and they are not open enough

Back to the background before Keep went online, in October 2014, the state issued the "Several Opinions on Accelerating the Development and Promoting Sports Consumption", which marked that national fitness has become a national strategy.

At this time, the country released data from a national fitness survey. Compared with 2007, the overall number of people participating in national sports and fitness increased by nearly 8 percentage points, especially among people aged 20-40, the number of people exercising doubled.

Coupled with the promotion of mobile Internet stars such as "Yuan Shanshan's vest line" and "Zhang Yihan's 10 kilometers", which have made exercise synonymous with positive energy in life and the awakening of national fitness awareness, more and more people will start from scratch to make fitness a part of their lives.

Figure 3 The proportion of people who regularly exercise in China from 2007 to 2014 Image source: iResearch

Figure 4 Baidu Index of Sports and Fitness Keywords from 2012 to 2016 Image source: iResearch

However, venues are the foundation of national fitness. Compared with the 16 square meters of fitness space per capita in the United States, my country has 1.46 square meters of sports venue resources.

Moreover, most of the fitness venues in the city are concentrated in schools and are not open to the public. In cities, people with high fitness demands cannot find suitable sports venues, which is an important reason that hinders them from exercising.

People aged 20-40 are the backbone of society, with strong entertainment and consumption needs, and higher C-end consumption value.

To sum up, the awakening of national fitness awareness and the shortage of fitness venues have laid a historical opportunity for the development of keep.

More and more people are starting to look for weight loss and fitness tutorials on video websites, but the mainstream fitness tutorials on the Internet are only the 2004 version of Pump it up from abroad and South Korea's Zheng Dayan's weight loss exercises. There are fewer choices for users, and their pertinence and scientificity are not strong.

The strong demand for fitness guidance among the public was demonstrated by Zheng Duoyan’s appearance on the popular variety show Happy Camp in May 2014.

3. Competitive product analysis : The needs of fitness novices have not yet been met, and large-scale products have not yet appeared

When a product is first launched, it is necessary to understand who the users of similar products on the market are, what the characteristics of their core users and mainstream users are, how their core functions satisfy users, and what their core competitiveness is. Is there still a gap in the market? What users’ needs are still unmet? What are your strengths and accumulation? What are your weaknesses? Can you solve the above-mentioned users and needs? Only by answering these questions can we differentiate our positioning and gain a foothold in the market.

User characteristics of major competitors

According to research, there are significant differences in the forms of exercise between men and women. Men spend more time on leisure exercise, and on average, men travel farther for recreational activities. Men prefer to exercise and relax alone, while women pay more attention to social relationships during leisure activities. Men often choose outdoor sports such as basketball, tennis, and swimming.

Women are more likely to participate in indoor fitness activities such as running, yoga, and dancing. As people’s fitness time becomes fragmented, fitness apps are needed to provide services anytime and anywhere.

Among the major fitness apps on the market, the main ones are Gudong, Tangdou Square Dance, and Yuedongquan Running.

• Gudong has the largest number of users, who tend to be young, but the overall user base is mostly male;
• Tangdou Square Dance has relatively few users, with the elderly being the mainstream users and female users being the majority;
• Yuedongquan has slightly fewer users than Gudong, with the largest proportion of middle-aged and elderly users, and slightly more male users than female users;

From the above analysis, it can be seen that the user needs of young women in the market have not been met in mainstream fitness apps, and they have become the mainstream users of Keep when it entered the market later, providing an opportunity for Keep's differentiated positioning.

Figure 5 User positioning of competing fitness apps in the market Image source: self-made by the author

Choosing this kind of user positioning has very important characteristics:

• Young women have higher requirements for body shape and appearance, and their main fitness goals are weight loss and body shaping. The user habits of young users have not yet been formed, and their fitness habits can be cultivated through a series of measures. As product habits are cultivated, they will become the main force dominating the market in the future, and can break the market and settle user habits in the future.
• The purchasing power of female users is relatively strong, and there is great potential for user payment conversion in the future. Women have relatively more social activities and are relatively fond of sharing, which is very beneficial to the later promotion of the brand .
• There are relatively few options for outdoor sports for women. With the trend of time fragmentation, we can consider meeting user needs through indoor fitness methods that cater to women's sports preferences.

The core competitiveness and core functions of competing products

The core competitiveness of a product is generally strongly correlated with the product and is also one of the important reasons why users choose the product. It is also an important moat for the product. Weak core competitiveness means that the moat is not strong and is easy to be replaced.

• Gudong's core competitiveness lies in its preemptive user accumulation, but in 2015, Gudong's daily active users did not exceed 3 million, indicating that this moat does not have obvious competitiveness. Its functions are more inclined to meet users' outdoor sports needs, such as running, mountaineering, etc.
• Yuedongquan Running has been online for less than a year at this time, and its overall explosive power is strong. It has accumulated a large number of user groups who are more sensitive to red envelope activities by using red envelopes for walking and gamified running incentives. Its core function is only to meet the basic fitness exercises such as runners and a series of incentives around the running process.
• Tangdou Square Dance is quite different from other fitness apps. It is mainly a short video APP based on square dance, mainly targeting square dance participants, providing them with teaching, demonstration and other venues. Its users initially migrated mainly from Tangdou.com, and later on it relied mainly on the differentiated positioning and functions of its products to attract users.

To sum up, although there are many products on the market, there are no highly competitive products.

Although each product has millions of daily active users, the functions of Gudong and Yuedongquan running products are similar and lack innovation. They only meet the needs of being a sports recording tool , and the social and emotional needs of users are not met.

Gudong is a product that is relatively similar to Keep. Although it has a relatively large number of users, it was launched in 2011 and based on the user accumulation of the original bracelet, it is the first App to record exercise trajectories. Its overall function is biased towards outdoor sports and cannot meet the indoor sports needs of women.

Gudong, Yuedongquan and Niketraining focus on step counting functions such as running and walking. The purpose of user exercise is to stay healthy and maintain a beautiful figure, and running and walking are just basic means.

The space and time required for running and walking are relatively large, and in the era of fragmented time, they cannot meet the exercise flexibility requirements of most office workers.

At the beginning of 2015, although Ruijian Times, which used fitness training as a solution strategy, was established as early as 2013, it had not yet been launched. Both Keep and others are following the path of "attracting users with high-quality content and depositing them in apps and new media ."

However, Zhu Xiaoxiao, founder of Fittime, believes that "although the number of novice users is huge, their willingness to consume is actually not high and is very unstable." They prefer to serve more professional fitness enthusiasts with more professional content.

The demand for scientific fitness guidance, mainly for fitness novices, is still not met.

User composition analysis

Usually a product will have several types of user groups at the same time, and there can be user portraits for different groups of people, but in general they can be divided into core user groups and mainstream user groups. Such division is also of great significance for product analysis.

Core users are the most loyal users and are also the most difficult to poach.

They are most consistent with the product's temperament, and the product also meets their needs relatively well. They will use most of the product's main functions and contribute the greatest value to the product. They also have a driving effect, that is, they act as opinion leaders to attract other users, so they also need to be maintained.

Mainstream users account for the largest proportion of product users. They usually use some of the main functions of the product, and their needs are lower than those of core users. The following table shows the approximate composition and characteristics of user groups of Keep’s main competitors.

As can be seen from the above table, the core users of Gudong are the early users of Gudong. They have formed stable offline running circles in various cities. For them, Gudong is no longer a tool but a lifestyle and social bond. These people are the seed users of Gudong and are difficult to poach.

A small number of people who love sports and share their experiences are proud of being featured on Gudong. Because of their achievements in sharing on Gudong, it is more difficult for them to migrate than ordinary users. People who participate in Gudong events are also more difficult to migrate because of the event cycle, event registration fees, and the sense of achievement they get.

However, most users who use Gudong as a running recording tool only use Gudong's attributes as a tool. As long as they can accurately count steps and record tracks, they don't care which app it is.

In addition to a few core users who love running and sharing, Yuedongquan Running uses games as a way to guide users to PK and return bonuses after paying a deposit and achieving their sports goals. For users who participate in PK, it is often more difficult to migrate for the benefit of the group or the deposit than for individual sports.

But for most users who use Yuedongquan as a pedometer, in addition to daily check-ins and other bonus red envelopes, they face the risk of user loss as long as there are similar apps that give more red envelopes or once Yuedongquan stops issuing red envelopes.

As mentioned earlier, the existence of Keep is to meet the needs of young fitness novices, users who have difficulty achieving their fitness goals through outdoor sports due to time and space constraints, or users who cannot go to the gym or go to the gym without private guidance and need to find effective and scientific ways to exercise or lose weight. These are exactly the users that are not satisfied by several other apps.

Later, the features launched by Keep were designed for this group of users. At that time, when many users had no way to lose weight, the changes in the Baidu index of the popular "Zheng Duoyan Weight Loss Exercise" can also illustrate this point. After keep was launched in 2015, the search index of Zheng Duoyan's weight loss exercise gradually declined, and keep gradually replaced Zheng Duoyan as the first fitness training coach for many boys and girls on the road to weight loss or fitness.

Figure 6 Zheng Duoyan's weight loss exercise attention trend Image source: Baidu Index

4. SWOT analysis of the birth of Keep: External opportunities far outweigh threats

Internal advantages : During Wang Ning’s internship at Yuantiku , he went through a lot of training and partnerships, laying the foundation for entrepreneurship ; during the weight loss process, he grasped the user pain points and application scenarios.

External opportunities: awakening of national fitness awareness and insufficient outdoor fitness venues. In the era of mobile Internet , users' demand for scientific guidance on weight loss and fitness is not met; although competing products started early, they have not yet formed a scale and are highly homogenized, and have not yet met the needs of fitness novices for scientific guidance.

Internal risks: lack of resources, lack of technology, and little industry experience.

External risks: Competitors started relatively early and have accumulated leading experience in the industry.

It can be seen from this that although the internal advantages are weak and the risks are high, the market opportunities brought by the launch of Keep outweigh the threats.

5. Product positioning and strategy: A coach for mobile fitness novices

As a challenging new product, it is critical to decide which core needs of users to solve, how to solve them, and what functions to provide to better solve them at the beginning. Looking back now, from the perspective of the major demand paths, there are two areas: fitness guidance and fitness social networking.

The above are the needs, and we know several core sports functions of keep: how do fitness training and fitness social networking match?

Regarding fitness, let's take a closer look at the process: User A goes home for the Chinese New Year and finds that he has gained weight and wants to lose weight, so he goes to various forums and BBSs to search for how others lose weight, and then does weight loss exercises based on the guides. However, all the competing products currently online are unable to match the strategies and fitness guides searched by Xiaohong. This is also the reason why Keep set up the fitness training and discovery sections when it was first launched.

On February 4, 2015, keep was launched with the positioning of "mobile fitness coach", accurately entering the market gap of unmanned fitness guidance and solving the needs of fitness guidance and social interaction.

The solution is to guide fitness novices through targeted fitness training live broadcasts and synchronized videos of athletes. You can get fitness tips and fitness friends through discovery, cheer yourself up by posting status and give more users a better fitness experience, while discovering more people who are cheering you on. By socializing, users’ higher-level needs can be met. Yuan Shanshan can convert fans from haters to fans by showing off her abs, and many unknown users can also achieve self-identity through Keep’s social circle. In this way, the needs from fitness to social interaction form a closed loop.

6. Get the first batch of users: Find the right people

The first batch of users is very important to the product, especially for community products. They determine the atmosphere of the community and also determine the development and future of the product. The first batch of users must be able to settle down and grow together with the product earlier, promoting product iteration and optimization, and at the same time crossing the gap in product development.

For example, without the community atmosphere built by Zhihu's early invitation system, there would not be open registration for mainstream users, which would have brought in more mainstream users.

For a technology product, it is easy to find seed users early on, as long as you determine the core value of your product, that is, find the right people.

For Keep , how to find the right people: go to where they are looking for answers and give them the answers they want.

The first famous mine-laying plan uses low-cost new media as a means to post in community groups , gain attention, and quickly complete the APP user conversion . Cleverly use Weibo and WeChat to leverage third-party traffic to sort out "experience-feedback" and build good product reputation before the product goes online.

Summarize:

The success of Keep's "mine-laying plan" and third-party operations lies in the fact that this group of early users themselves have great interest and demand for fitness, which is exactly the user group that Keep targeted when it was first established. Their use can test whether a tool-heavy product like Keep can meet the basic needs of users, thereby providing feedback and evaluation on the effectiveness of the Keep training courses.

7. Version Iteration and Data Growth: From Focus to Expansion

Figure 6 Important update and iteration stages of Keep since its launch. Image source: drawn by the author

As can be seen from the above figure, overall, keep has not changed much in the main functions of the product, the theme framework is very stable, and several core functions such as training, discovery, and exercise recording have been completed before version 2.0. The new versions that are continuously released are also being optimized and polished around the core functions, which also shows that the initial product positioning and goals are very clear and effective.

Discovery and social networking, as core functions, appeared in the first version. Even basic functions such as training data recording were ranked behind them, which shows that its functional focus is very prominent.

The functions of viewing local updates and adding local entrances to the discovery page will be launched one after another after version 2.0. In particular, the function of publishing updates requires a certain number of users to settle down. Launching it too early may result in too little content and the inability to build a community atmosphere.

The most competitive training course guide was launched in the initial version, directly hitting the user's pain points and playing a major role in accumulating its early users.

From the user activity graph, we can see that after the basic functions of version 1.0 were built, the first batch of users were obtained. The 2.0 version of the product combines all-round three-dimensional promotion of operations and market, strengthens the construction of social networks in terms of functions, imports WeChat and Weibo friends, shares to third-party platforms and other measures, and fully utilizes the good reputation formed by the social relationship chain of early users to promote the product.

It was not until version 3.0 in 2016 that the company began to compete with competitors in terms of functionality in the sports section of their products, gradually adding running, yoga, diet, cycling and step counting functions. This further verifies our product strategy of focusing on indoor sports user movement as the pain point for Keep. At this point, based on a certain amount of accumulated users, the functions began to expand to meet more user needs, and the product also began to transform from a "mobile fitness coach" to a "free sports field."

Versions after 4.0 explore and improve subdivided functions based on all previous frameworks, such as adding new AR running methods and allowing data centers to set sports goals. In February of this year, the number of Keep users exceeded 100 million. Keep launched Keepland and its first smart treadmill, starting its offline exploration of commercialization. Further form a closed loop of user experience and explore more usage scenarios for users.

8. Major operational events: A good slogan quickly attracts fans and works closely with the product to ignite the market

Figure 7 The relationship between important operational events of Keep and the number of products and active users since its launch. Image source: drawn by the author

The success of any product is inseparable from effective operation, especially keep.

Operations should have done a lot of complicated work in user maintenance and growth, content improvement and promotion activities. Here we will only briefly look at its actions in promotional activities to see the coordination between its operations and product positioning.

Before 2016, the basic functions of keep were basically built and the first batch of users had gradually settled down. Its main operation purpose was to acquire mass users through marketing promotion , through exposure on the most popular TV programs among young people such as "Real Men" and "Happy Camp", or through the topic of Chen Yihan's sports trajectory in "Flowers and Boys", and through the hot spots of the programs, to convey product and brand exposure.

Through this, a large number of target users were gained. In addition, keep makes good use of user social networks, such as launching activities such as squat challenges, and using social media promotion such as Weibo and WeChat to gain a large number of users. At this point, keep's basic sharing functions such as publishing updates and sharing to third parties have been completed, laying a hardware foundation for subsequent operations. This shows the clever coordination between keep's operations and products.

16 years later, an advertisement with the slogan “Self-discipline gives me freedom” struck a chord with the public and attracted a large number of users. At the same time, in conjunction with the launch of the mall function, Weibo launched the #WearSelf-discipline,BeBoldlyFree” campaign, which enabled users to access the mall function of Keep through the distribution of coupons. At this time, the number of users had exceeded 10 million.

Keep's image as a fitness coach has been deeply rooted in people's hearts, but if