Behind the scenes of Keep, an app for weight loss: How did it reach 2 million users in 3 months?

In this era that is very tolerant of entrepreneurs, the origins of many projects are the feelings after a painful experience: since no one has come out to do this after waiting for so long, I have to do it myself. The mobile fitness app Keep was born out of the founder Wang Ning’s first painful weight loss experience. At that time, he had no idea how to start losing weight and could only frantically collect information on the Internet. However, he could only smile bitterly when describing the process: "I consider myself to be a person who knows very well how to collect and obtain information through the Internet, but it took me 6 or 7 months to sort out the fitness information that was pieced together."

During this long and painful process, there was no product that could help Wang Ning solve his confusion. So after finally succeeding in losing weight, he decided to use his experience and abilities to save other compatriots who were suffering. Because of his own pain, Wang Ning positioned Keep on the three pillars of basic (lightweight), standardization (foolproof) and mobility (anytime, anywhere).

Fitness demand surges from 0-70 points

In 2014, the per capita GDP of eight provinces in China exceeded US$10,000. Just as developed countries have experienced, abundant material economy will inevitably lead to health problems, such as the rapid increase in the proportion of obese people. The number of obese people in China with a BMI of over 28 has exceeded 100 million, and the total number of overweight people exceeds 40% of the population, making China the second most obese country in the world after the United States, and young people have become the main force of the obese army.

Obesity and fitness are logically linked. As the number of obese people increases year by year, people's attention and involvement in fitness topics are increasing. Before starting his business, Wang Ning used Baidu Index to search for the popularity of keywords such as “fitness” and “yoga” and found that the steady growth from 2006 to 2014 was suddenly broken. “From 2014 to 2015, it tripled in one year, which means a surge in demand.” Mobile fitness-related keywords remained stable in 2013 and before, but almost doubled in 2014 and 2015. This phenomenon is certainly related to the development of mobile devices themselves, but more importantly, it shows that most people are confused about the topic of fitness. There are many people who stand in the gym or in front of the yoga mat, not knowing where to start, and just take out their phones to search. Many people don’t even know the importance of body fat percentage - online sales data of weight scales show that the sales of body fat scales are only a quarter of those of simple weight scales or even less.

Wang Ning was also a member of the army of fitness novices back then. He defined himself and most fitness users as users who pursued 70 points. The needs of this group of users are simpler and more straightforward. "Maybe they just want to lose weight and reduce fat, or reshape a certain part of the body, and they hope that they will look better in clothes." According to the online tutoring thinking that Wang Ning is familiar with at Yuantiku, the need for improvement from 0 to 70 points can be quickly solved by online tutoring, while users with precise goals after 70 points require more customized products rather than standardized solutions.

Keep's product positioning targets the broad population with scores between 0 and 70.

The number of users has rapidly expanded from 4,000 to 2 million

In the early days, Wang Ning and his team found an internal testing team of about 4,000 people through social media. Wang Ning himself also "lurked" in many fitness-themed QQ groups. After getting acquainted with netizens, he carefully threw out product download links and recommended group members to try it. "For a group of thousands of people, sending a link can bring more than 50 downloads on average."

These 4,000 people became Keep's earliest loyal users. With their enthusiastic help, Keep completed the online version with perfect functions. In the following three months, the number of 4,000 quickly grew to 2 million. However, even so, Wang Ning does not think that Keep can be called a "hot" product. Because except for the period when Keep was placed on the homepage of the App Store as a featured product, Keep's user growth has remained stable without any explosive and obvious peak. In response to this growth trend, Wang Ning insisted on low-cost investment in new media.

Since its initial launch, Keep's operations team has targeted nearly 100 vertical communities with an action code-named "Mine-laying Plan", including Baidu and Douban groups with huge traffic, and serialized high-quality posts on fitness experiences for a long time. These posts have cultivated regular readers and received high exposure in SEO. When the product app was officially launched, Keep simultaneously detonated these posts, almost overnight, using the authors' voice to inform readers that these valuable experiences were maintained through a mobile tool called Keep. "During that period, it seemed that almost the entire Chinese BBS with fitness themes was talking about us, and the daily download volume of Keep on the iOS channel reached more than 40,000."

Currently, more than half of Keep's users are those born after 1990. On the one hand, young people pay more attention to their image. On the other hand, this group's strong curiosity and acceptance of new things will form a chain reaction, which is a great benefit to those cutting-edge entrepreneurial projects. "We often see that a person in a university dormitory starts to practice with Keep, and after sharing various data graphs and fitness photos, he soon impresses everyone in the room and starts using it," Wang Ning expressed cautious optimism about the prospects of Keep. He has always emphasized the "pollution-free" attribute of Keep. Compared with other types of products with a stronger commercial atmosphere, Keep's promotion path has a unique advantage.

Since then, Keep has continued to rely on user operations and social communication to stimulate the joining of new users. "It may be related to my past experience at Yuantiku. In the team at that time, many colleagues who came from NetEase were very sensitive to news and had indeed tasted the sweetness of making a small effort to achieve a great result," Wang Ning said. At this stage, he did not dare to invest in the purchase of channel resources, although a few dollars for an activation was already very cheap, "but you will end up staring at the remaining budget all day long, and it is also difficult to identify the trend of natural growth and feedback to adjust the product direction."

In fact, this idea is consistent with the overall communication trend of the fitness industry on the Internet. Because novice users account for the majority, valuable and content-rich experiences and live broadcast posts are likely to attract extremely high attention. Most of the communication materials chosen by Wang Ning are carefully selected original content, which are more valuable to users than other repeatedly reprinted information sources. The Keep information included in such content can not only win users but also gain trust. This kind of trust is exactly the asset that Wang Ning hopes the Keep brand can slowly accumulate.

Exploration of business models for fitness apps

As early as 2011, the fitness and fat loss guidance website Bohe.com received its Series A financing. At that time, Bohe.com, which made its profit model by selling online fitness courses, could be said to be one of the most successful weight loss communities. However, this model did not continue. After SIG, DCM and Qualcomm, three US dollar funds, completed their Series B financing for Mint in 2014, this community with 20 million users had to turn to e-commerce for weight loss foods. The three apps it launched did not receive good market results because their classifications were too detailed.

Gudong, a fitness app that also started very early, also had a good start. However, after obtaining a valuation of US$150 million in 2014, Gudong shifted its product focus from smart sports hardware back to software and community. This repetition actually represents the common confusion among fitness apps about product form.

There is always a dilemma for fitness products. If the product is too light, it is likely to become a mere tool. Once novice users form a fitness habit, they are likely to be abandoned - just like the food calorie query of Bohe.com and the running count of Gudong. However, if the product functions are too complicated, it will not be suitable for fitness usage scenarios. To address this problem, Keep attempts to solve it using two modes: clearance and sheep pen.

At present, more than 600 courses have been stored in Keep. In fact, more courses have been recorded. Wang Ning controls the updating of courses in the way of iterating expansion packs in online games. "It's like passing a level. You release a new course every week, which will keep deep users active and follow, and slow down their churn rate."

American futurist Jane McGonigal wrote an influential book called "Games Change the World". She believes that the design of games is guiding the development of the real world. For example, the feedback system, every time a monster is killed, the game player will gain experience points and some gold coins and props. This reward mechanism constantly stimulates users to go deeper into the game world and gain psychological pleasure. Therefore, this design is also widely used in corporate management and software development, and can significantly improve the happiness of the people it interacts with.

Many details of Keep also reflect this concept. It guides users to check in and share ("after sharing, they may feel embarrassed to give up halfway"), accurately quantifies calorie burning, helps set periodic goals, etc., all of which help stimulate user stickiness. These minor functions have been handled as lightly as possible, and it is actually quite simple to break down Keep's current structure: a combination of PGC courses and a not-so-rich social feed function. "We hope to keep it simple at the beginning, so that users can come with their problems and find solutions that suit them. This will make their experience particularly easy and help them build confidence after using it."

Regarding the profit model outlook behind the accumulation of course content, Wang Ning gave a simple example to illustrate his thinking: "In abstract terms, what Keep is doing now is building a sheepfold, and those courses are fodder. We try to make the fodder as abundant as possible to allow more and more sheep to come in and eat grass. After that, there are many things I can do. From a business perspective, I can either be the wolf myself and eat all these sheep, or I can sell tickets and let the wolves outside in." Keep's focus will fall on the two major profit models of e-commerce and O2O.

The logic of e-commerce is relatively clear, and it is also an old path that other industries have taken. When users need to exercise, they will have consumption demand for goods, such as equipment, clothing, and even food with scientific recipes. As long as there is a user scale, Keep will not have much problem seeking revenue in this direction. What Wang Ning is thinking more about is O2O, that is, services that connect people.

"It may not be realistic in the short term, but in the long run, we will slowly try to break the unspoken rule of 'packaged integration' between gyms and fitness coaches. In fact, there are already many 'private schools', which are fitness coaches separated from the commercial venues that endorse them. However, matching customer resources is a big problem, and this is what O2O is best at solving." Wang Ning envisions that one day, Keep's users will be enough to support those service projects that vary from person to person, and the "Uber-style" Internet economy will be able to arrive naturally. Fitness can be both online education (YY model) and door-to-door service (compared to O2O businesses such as massage and manicure).

as well as……

According to App Annie's statistics, Keep's ranking in the App Store has gradually stabilized in the Top 5 under the "Health and Fitness" category. Ahead of it are three towering mountains: Dayima, Mayu, and Xiaomi Sports.

Wang Ning values ​​data, but he is more impressed by Google's branding. "It turns a proper noun into a representative popular verb. When users want to search, they will say "Google it." We also hope to instill the Keep brand in 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."

Finally, he added, "This is my wish."

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