With lightweight operations and products that have great reputations, what are the secrets of Keep that have attracted 50 million users?

Wang Ning, the founder of Keep, was born in the 1990s and was once "slightly fat". In order to keep fit, he spent six or seven months collecting and studying fitness information, and successfully trained himself from a fat man to a man with a very good figure. He once said, "I think I am a person who knows very well how to collect and obtain information through the Internet," but it took me so long to sort out the content on how to exercise. This should also be the starting point for him to do Keep.

Therefore, he made the product based on his own urgent needs. The fitness information on the market is very difficult to collect and takes a lot of effort, which is a pain point.

What pain points has Keep caught?

I think there are three:

1. High-quality private lessons are very expensive. What should I do if I want to exercise but lack funds?

2. If you don’t go to the gym, what kind of exercise can help you lose weight?

3. Even if I know how to exercise, but I don’t stick to it, what should I do?

For those who really want to exercise or lose fat, these three pain points hit the mark.

Keep has developed solutions to these three pain points, turning the gym's professional courses into free standardized courses, which is very effective. Users can indeed lose weight by training in these courses.

In addition, these standard and effective training contents are free for users to use, and the set fitness check-in tasks help users show off their bodies and encourage themselves to stick to it. These solutions can just solve the pain points of the target users, so Keep has also achieved explosive growth in users.

How big will the market capacity be for fitness demand?

From the market perspective, the keyword "fitness" has tripled in Baidu Index from 2014 to 2015. In 2014, the per capita GDP of eight provinces in China exceeded US$10,000. As the middle class gradually emerged, the number of obese people exceeded 40% of the total population, making China the second most obese country in the world. In 2014 and 2015, a fitness trend emerged worldwide and the market was extremely hot. Following the trend, keep launched its first version on February 4, 2015.

This is an earlier version of keep. From the UI point of view, there is not much difference from the current UI, which is also where Keep is very competitive. The first picture is the core product architecture of Keep, which divides the entire product content into: first, my training, second, my updates, and third, me.

Keep's main product value lies in providing users with standard, fragmented and effective fitness training content.

What are the secrets for content operations in the early stages of keep?

After such a product is launched, what content should be included in the first phase? Who should be found to test the content internally? How can we ensure that the first version will have a good effect when it is launched?

Develop standardized content based on user needs

This is a course schedule posted in March 2015, which was found on Keep’s Weibo account. At the beginning, Keep designed the course content according to five aspects: beginners, weight loss, muscle gain, body shaping, and home training, and made a one-week schedule, which included ten training courses.

So when Keep was first launched, it did not offer a large amount of content, but because it understood user needs very well and added some professional classifications, the first version included the ten courses that users needed most at the time.

The picture on the right is the current content classification of Keep, which has added courses such as relaxation, yoga, basic running, office fitness, stretching, massage, and strength and muscle building. These newer courses are designed based on user feedback, with training content gradually increasing from elementary to advanced levels.

Therefore, the earliest content is in line with keep’s initial user positioning scenario.

Gamified clearance

How can we keep users sticking with the content after we have it? One of the pain points for users is that private training at the gym is very expensive. I will make it free, but how can I ensure that users can stick to the course and achieve fitness results?

Keep provided a solution in the form of gamification. You can see from the picture on the right that this is a model body development plan. After the user completes the training, Keep will automatically ask the user to mark his/her mood and then check in. This is very similar to the feedback system in the game world, where you can get feedback from the system by checking in and sharing.

With such a product design, how can we make the product explode as soon as it goes online?

Before going online, conduct internal testing

Keep started internal testing in November 2014.

For the first plan, they found an internal testing team of about 4,000 people from fitness-themed QQ groups and social media. According to data published online, sending a link to a group of one thousand people resulted in an average of more than fifty downloads, which is a conversion rate of about 5%, which is already very high.

This wave of users are targeted users.

The second plan is the mine-laying plan. Keep on Douban and other major fitness communities to continuously update how to exercise.

For example, in this case, in 3 months, Rouyuan turned into a handsome man. At first, these posts were just sharing their own fat loss experiences, just to increase the number of readers, and there was no mention of keep.

After 1.0 was released, Keep started updating its long-standing hot posts that there was a product like Keep that could help with fat loss! At that time, the entire fitness community was discussing the product Keep, which brought in more than 40,000 downloads, and the product's volume began to grow.

When going online, find accurate big Vs for promotion and cooperation

On February 10, 2015, the memory vest helped them to promote the nine-square grid for APP downloads. On March 17, 2015, keep teamed up with Weibo account app Mushroom to do a joint promotion of the nine-square grid. In addition, as its own product was quite good, keep was recommended as an excellent new application by the AppStore in February 2015, and was recommended as the best APP by the AppStore in March.

Through a series of mine-laying plans and app dissemination, and after various continuous iterations and updates, Keep achieved 10 million users in November 2015, and 50 million this year. The entire product basically maintains an iteration speed of one version every two weeks, and updates mainly focus on core functions.

Continue to deepen content and community

The updates during this period revolve around three points:

First, my training, mainly the amount of courses, began to increase. Because a lot of accumulation has been done in the early first version, there are not many changes from the update log, and some optimizations have been added. The number of courses has increased from a dozen at the beginning to more than two hundred.

Second, community. The main tone of the community is to encourage users to post content and select good content. In this stage, Keep has added new features such as finding more interesting people and training updates, sharing, filters, and replying to comments. And at this time, keep added location sharing, laying the foundation for future fitness social functions.

Third, ecology. That is, how to maintain the content of the community, avoid bad practices, and expel good practices. Therefore, Keep has implemented user reporting, blacklisting, advertising harassment, etc.

Discover high-quality KOLs in the community

On August 27, keep launched version 2.0, adding a personal data center and many social traffic locations, such as the expert list, recommendation list, and newcomer list. These lists are designed to tap into the KOLs in the community, help KOLs get more traffic exposure, make them feel satisfied, and leverage KOLs to publish content.

Introducing WeChat and address book friend relationship chains to ignite the product

At the same time, in this version, keep also added a time-based training plan.

In this major version, keep could only do one task training per day before. Adding time categories means fragmenting time and training once every two minutes. Users can use keep every morning, noon and evening. This is to increase the frequency of use and duration of stay of users. At the same time, a relationship chain function for WeChat and address book friends was added to share the training data through social media and use the relationship chain to promote the product.

The left picture shows the data center, where you can see the history of all your training, what kind of exercise you did on which day, how many calories you burned, and how long you exercised in Keep in total. This gives users a great sense of accomplishment.

Keep's advantage is that its products combine marketing and operations. Every time a major feature is released, we will do a round of marketing communication to let more users know about the new feature and guide them to use it. Then, we will iterate and optimize the feature based on market reaction and user feedback.

When keep2.0 is launched, users can see a page similar to the Alipay annual bill when they open the APP. You can check your keep effect, how long you have been with keep, how many minutes you have trained during this time, and how many calories you have burned. This is the spread on Weibo after the release of keep2.0.

On October 7, Keep added a training achievement system, which still revolves around three aspects: training, community , and ecology. The training content is constantly iterated and optimized, and the community has added tags, @ functions, a draft box for posting dynamics, popular tag topic pages, cool stickers, and other functions that can enhance community activity and content creativity.

The creation of an ecosystem has been put on the agenda at this stage. I think things like leaderboards, achievement systems, and medals all belong to the community ecosystem.

At this time, how can Keep detonate the entire product?

On June 16, Keep released the IP AD version, which brought the number of Keep users to a new level. On August 28, the promotion of Keep’s new features brought Keep 4.75 million readings and 12,000 discussions. On October 31, Keep launched a round of advertising on "Happy Camp", which boosted Keep's popularity. This launch brought about one million new downloads to Keep.

Community operation is remarkable

During the period from June to November 2015, in addition to the continuous iteration of product functions and market launch, its entire community operation was also remarkable.

The picture on the left shows some content and activities released by several official accounts in the Keep community. These contents and activities are synchronized on the APP, WeChat and Weibo. During this period, Keep will organize quiz activities with prizes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, allowing users to ask some very simple questions, such as what is the best food to eat to gain muscle, soreness during exercise, whether the training posture is correct, and other very popular questions.

Keep will continue to interact with users. Users will post comments below. Keep will select the one with the best answer, announce it the next day, and give them prizes.

There is also a column called "Ask Me Ask Me". Every Thursday, Keep will find some very professional people to answer everyone's questions about fitness. In this way, there will be activities every day. People from the Keep team said that they have one day every week which is a centralized delivery day for the operations team to give prizes to active users.

The one on the right is for daily useful information . In addition to community interactive activities, it is also necessary to output some correct fitness concepts and useful information on how to exercise efficiently.

From November 2015 to February of the following year, the number of keep installations remained stable. Its core functional iterations are still being optimized. At the same time, a course schedule has been added, and users can customize a fourteen-day course schedule according to their needs, such as fat loss, body shaping, etc. Keep recommends corresponding courses to encourage users to stick to the program step by step. Even those who have no fitness foundation and don’t know how to exercise can join the class schedule.

At this stage, Keep has a very effective operational strategy, which is the recruitment plan for course testers. They designed a set of courses based on some of the courses that users reported they most wanted to learn, such as leg slimming training. But they were not in a hurry to launch the course. In order to verify whether the course was really effective, they set up an internal testing laboratory, invited users to sign up for the internal testing, and created a WeChat group where users gave feedback on the course.

These users said they had really lost weight after exercising, and then the courses were repeatedly polished before being launched into the market. This is a very good content feedback mechanism.

What has Keep done to build its brand and realize monetization?

When the product reaches a certain scale, we have to consider how to monetize it. Keep chose to monetize it in the form of a mall. In version 3.0, it also added an entrance to the equipment selection mall to help you buy more high-quality equipment. In subsequent versions, we continued to iterate around products such as fitness, shopping malls, and class schedules, and added group functions to allow users to show off in their own circles.

In June this year, Keep launched its first promotional brand film: Self-discipline gives me freedom. On June 3, Zou Shiming's boxing course was launched, coupled with some advertising, which once again achieved product success.

After analyzing the entire development path of Keep, what impressed me most was the combination of its products, operations and marketing. However, the most critical point is how it made this product from scratch, how it became popular, and how it expanded rapidly in the end.

At the beginning, Keep’s path and goal were very clear, which was to create a standardized product for fitness novices. Therefore, its early product functions focus on training content and the experience during the training process. Combined with community UGC content production tools , such as dynamic posting, filters, stickers, selected topics, etc. to improve user activity and retention

Because Keep has a very clear positioning, when it was first launched on the market, it was able to give users a very clear core value, that is, a product that fitness novices will like very much.

In the mid-term, with the close cooperation of product, marketing, operations and other departments, the functional points of each major version will be made into hot spots, and then communication activities will be carried out, including long-term topics and content output. By reusing new media and original APP content, the path from APP to WeChat and then to Weibo was opened up, saving a lot of manpower costs.

After laying a solid foundation in the early stage, Keep carried out a detonating promotion in October 2015 and made an advertisement on "Happy Camp".

After the number of users increased dramatically, Keep began to stratify users and maintain core users to build an ecosystem.

In the later stage, we gradually upgraded the courses from beginners to more advanced courses. At the same time, we added course beta testers to expand the course categories and enhance the interaction between users. These operational strategies are very worth learning from.

In June this year, Keep started to do integrated marketing, and the advertisement of "Self-discipline gives me freedom" made the Keep brand well-known nationwide.

Keep founder Wang Ning said he cares a lot about the brand. He wanted to turn a proper noun into a representative, popular verb. For example, when a user wants to search, he or she will say "I want to Google it ." We also hope to instill the Keep brand into all users who are eager to exercise, so that everyone will remember Keep, and when they want to exercise, they will naturally think of "I need to keep". This is their wish. Driven by such a concept, Keep's products, operations and marketing are closely integrated.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

The author of this article @Huang Tao Compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion), please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!