With no money and no resources, how did Keep gain 60 million users through “dirty work”?

As a post-90s campus entrepreneur with no resources or background, Keep founder Wang Ning said that in order to make Keep explode the market as soon as it goes online, they chose the dirtiest and most tiring new media operation method to warm up the APP.

He said that no one does the dirty and tiring work, so it is easy to produce results . Thanks to its deep cultivation in new media , Keep has successfully completed the most difficult cold start for a startup.

Keep is a mobile fitness tool app focused on fitness. The first IOS version was launched in February 2015.

In just two years, in October 2016, the number of Keep users exceeded 60 million, and should exceed 100 million in February of this year. These are all real registered users, not activated and downloaded users.

What I want to share is what we did before Keep was officially launched, so that this APP could become a hit as soon as it was launched.

Because for any startup team, cold start is a difficult and important thing, because it may determine how consumers react to you when your product is actually released.

Our preparations mainly focus on two aspects, new media operations and mine laying plans.

How to preheat the market for products? Hype the founder and spend money on advertising? It's not realistic for us.

Why choose to approach from these two aspects?

I am a post-90s campus entrepreneur with no background. The founder himself does not have any charisma. It is impossible for me to go out and sell my feelings and say that I want to make the best fitness app in the Eastern Hemisphere.

So it is unlikely for us to hype the founder.

Second, we were poor. My first angel investment was RMB 3 million. I spent less than RMB 1 million on product development, leaving RMB 2 million in reserves, which was not enough to keep the team alive for a year.

Therefore, it is not realistic for us to spend money on advertising. 2 million RMB is equivalent to putting one dollar of your own money in the Bohai Bay.

So at that time we forced the team and told them that if there were no results in three months, we would go bankrupt. What can we do with two million in hand in three months?

At that time, I felt that dirty and tiring work was the easiest to produce results, because if we did things that others didn’t like to do, there would definitely be results, so I started with new media operations.

New media is a very dirty and tiring job, but don’t give up. It is a particularly good way of operating a product in the early stages of a cold start, especially under zero-cost conditions.

We started operating the new media account in January 2015 and now have 2.7 million followers, making us the absolute No.1 in vertical fitness, with more followers than the second, third and fourth place combined.

To date, when Keep does any online activities, we do not need other big accounts to help us forward, because our own two new media channels are fully sufficient to promote it.

Personification, originality, and hot topics are my requirements for the new media team. We work tirelessly around these three points.

● Only original works

New media content editing is a very hard job. An ordinary new media account needs 4-6 editors to work on it almost every day and produce a large amount of original content every day. Many public accounts also adopt the method of copying high-quality content, but I think this kind of new media is not sustainable.

Although our entire operations team only had about three people at that time, I still made a requirement for our team: only do original work.

● WeChat account anthropomorphism

We position our new media as a sunny boy around 26 years old. This boy is a little bit naughty and clever, and knows a lot about fitness and sports. He can help many people exercise and live more healthily.

● Spare no effort to catch hot spots

We have to attack all the hot spots. I think our operation and maintenance team is like paparazzi. We will attack wherever there is a hot spot.

For example, "Flowers and Youth" is a very popular variety show. How do we capture the hot spots of this program?

There is a star in this show named Chen Yihan, and we found that she runs every morning. So we went to Weibo to find out about her. She is a woman who loves sports very much. We compiled her sports diary and let all users know her.

The article eventually received 1.6 million views.

●Respond quickly

Provide quick feedback to users. I require new media operators to respond to all statuses or messages with unique insights. And I require fans to like similar topics they post, to tell users that Keep has been paying attention to them, which will quickly narrow the distance between users and us.

●Mine laying plan

The "mine-laying plan" is to bury your product among your core users, and then use the core users to detonate the vertical field.

At that time, our APP had not yet been launched, so we sent our new media operations to go to the Douban Weight Loss Group, Baidu Fitness Bar, Baidu Weight Loss Bar and other more than 60 group owners and well-known forums every day, quietly sneak in, slowly become active, and become a familiar person in the group, so that everyone will have affirmation and trust in you. This is how we lay the groundwork and lay mines in social groups.

When the product was launched, our new media started to speak out and said, "I found a very good weight loss product," and then put Keep in the group so that everyone could try it.

What is the effect of preheating in advance? Since the launch of Keep APP, we have not done any online swiping and have not spent any money, but it has always ranked first in the vertical APP hot search list.

To achieve such results, we should say that the core users of our mine-laying plan helped us a lot.

Starting a business is like losing weight. Try to do the simplest things well. The rest is just persistence.

The road to entrepreneurship is actually similar to losing weight and exercising. It's not something that happens naturally, it's just something we persist in doing every day. Very few people are born with a good figure, and most people maintain it later through daily practice.

The same principle applies to starting a business. It’s not like I can go public or raise funds just by closing my eyes and opening them again. It’s actually just doing simple, hard work over and over again.

It is precisely because we did a long period of preparation in the early days and had a firm product strategy in the early days, and because of our continued persistence, that in the end all these will slowly come back to us and slowly bring us a lot of benefits.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @王宁 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!