Soul Product Analysis Report

Lonely souls will attract each other. Different from apps like Tantan and Momo, which now seem to have been defaulted to "hookup", the soul social networking proposed by Soul seems to give this boring world a different flavor. Between traditional blind date apps and hookup apps, Soul has explored another path.

1. Product Overview

1. Product Introduction

• Product Name: Soul
• Product Type: Stranger Social
• Product slogan: Follow your soul to find you

2. Experience the environment

• Phone model: Redmi Note 7
• Experience version: 3.46.3
• Operating system: Android 10

2. Market Analysis

1. Policy environment

From "iiMedia Report_2019-2020 China Mobile Social Industry Annual Research Report"

The policy supervision of social software has always been strict, especially in terms of content review, pornography, protection of minors and privacy security.

On June 29, 2019, nine apps including "Soul" were removed from the shelves indefinitely due to the presence of illegal and irregular content such as spreading historical nihilism and obscene and pornographic content. After being re-listed, Soul has set registration age restrictions and updated the youth mode.

In actual inspections and data, it was found that Soul not only repaired software loopholes in accordance with regulations, but also invested a lot of energy in risk control, and adopted measures such as credit assessment, double review, and anti-fraud reminders.

2. Competitive environment

From "iiMedia Report_2019-2020 China Mobile Social Industry Annual Research Report"

Soul’s strict competitors include domestic companies such as TanTan, Momo, and Jimu, and foreign companies such as Tinder and CMB and other stranger social software.

However, if the scope of competition is expanded, other sub-sectors of mobile social applications, such as content, pictures, sports, entertainment, live broadcast and other markets, also provide solutions for stranger social networking and are competitors worthy of vigilance.

From "iiMedia Report_2019-2020 China Mobile Social Industry Annual Research Report"

In the "2020 China Mainstream Mobile Social Evaluation" conducted by iMedia, Soul is weaker than its competitors in terms of functional diversity, fun, and ease of operation, which are areas that need improvement.

3. User Demand Analysis

1. Basic User Attributes

iiMedia Research Report 2019Q1 China Stranger Social Market Quarterly Monitoring Report

In terms of gender ratio, Soul has a similar ratio of male to female users, and the ratio of female users has slightly decreased compared to 55.54% in 2018 (data from iResearch in 2018). Attention should be paid to maintaining the male-female ratio. If the number of female users further decreases, the anti-harassment mechanism should be strengthened.

In terms of age, the age distribution given by different media varies greatly. The more authoritative iMedia and iResearch Consulting give the proportion of users under 24 years old as around 25%, and the main user group is users under 35 years old, accounting for around 85%.

2. User Profile

After using the software for a while, the author divided the users into four types according to their purpose: love type, bored type, marriage type and YP type based on the self-introductions and private chats in the square, and drew user portraits based on their characteristics.

1) Romance type

Su Su, female, 20 years old, sophomore at Normal University

Su Su has been an introvert since she was a child, and she also hopes to have a love relationship after entering university. However, there are more girls than boys in school, and it is difficult to be single. Through the advertisements of Soul on other websites, Su Su learned about and downloaded Soul.

There were many recommendations the first time we went online, and we met some nice people. Susu is very passionate about the software. But gradually, as the number of software users increased, Susu encountered more and more harassing messages, which made her tired of dealing with them and her enthusiasm for the software also declined.

2) Marriage type

Fang Shilin Male 32 years old Project Manager

The 32-year-old Shilin had just come out of a failed relationship. The two had been fighting each other for years and finally broke up just before getting married. Seeing that many of his friends have found their other half on Soul, he also wants to try his luck.

He introduced himself in his updates and often shared his life (with coordinates). Soon, many suitable girls came to him, and he exchanged WeChat with several of the girls he wanted to develop a deeper relationship with. After a while, he formally established a relationship with one of them and uninstalled Soul with his girlfriend.

3) Boredom

Ningjing female 22 years old UI designer

The longer I wander outside, the more things I have on my mind. I can't talk to people around me, so I can only vent my troubles through the Internet. It would be even better if someone could respond to my troubles and offer help. I have people I know on QQ and WeChat, but there are too many police on Weibo. Soul is safe and non-toxic.

However, negative energy is always unwelcome. The popular posts on the square are usually fishing, connotation jokes, controversy, funny and achievements, which are either controversial or make people happy. Ning Jing's complaints make her less attractive.

Every time Ning Jing sees his own reposts, comments and likes and those of others who were trolling him, he feels a little jealous, but the real him has a lot of troubles, so he can only laugh at himself.

4) YP type

Wang Kainan, 28 years old, salesperson

I am married and under a lot of work pressure. I wanted to release stress in another way, so I downloaded Soul on the recommendation of a colleague.

Chatting requires efficiency. Within a few minutes of the start of the chat, they will ask for WeChat, photos, or ask if they can talk about interesting topics. Sometimes they will use some fake information, jokes and fishing posts to increase their attractiveness and catch more prey.

3. User pain point analysis

1) Low-quality content producers

Dynamics is very important on Soul, but its publication lacks guidance.

Many users do not post content, or post a large amount of text-based, negative content, which causes them to become less "attractive" in the software. But even the "tree hole type" would like to receive more feedback to help them reduce the impact of negative energy and show more of themselves.

2) Lack of active channels

The recommendation mechanisms on Soul, except for the Square, are basically passive matching. Users cannot subjectively decide what kind of person they want to find. Everything can only be decided by the recommendation system. Even the square is controlled by the recommendation system. If users want to see the content they are interested in, they have to go to the third-level page, which has a deeper entrance.

3) The recommendation system is not accurate enough

First, the assessment dimensions are not comprehensive enough. This problem has been improved to a certain extent after the improvement of Gravity Signature. Second, the feedback is not perfect, and it is difficult to block topics and people that are not of interest.

4) Single social scene

Because of the first three reasons, users lack understanding of each other and there are no more interesting activities to break the ice, which makes it easy for them to fall into awkward conversations.

Moreover, due to the single social scene, both parties can talk more about topics related to gender relations. This is one of the reasons why stranger social networking often falls into the dilemma of "YP software". In the same game with stranger social attributes, you can often see couples playing together.

5) Privacy Leakage

For example, location information, occupation information, etc., while it helps users to better match, it also exposes users' privacy. For example, after I filled in my occupation, I often encountered requests for internal referrals and consulting work, so I had to delete this label.

6) How to break the ice

This is a common question: how to start the first sentence after the user is matched.

7) Users are moving towards social networking among acquaintances

A common problem in stranger social networking is that after a successful match, users switch to social networking with acquaintances and the software is uninstalled. It’s not a user pain point, it’s a product pain point.

8) False information and gray industries

This is also a common problem in social software and requires a lot of effort to solve. However, I feel that the proportion of fake photos and gray products on Soul is lower than that on Tantan. This may be because Soul information is more open and photos are not mandatory.

4. Product Analysis

1. Product Highlights

1) Gravity Signature

Users add attraction signatures on their personal homepages. The attraction signatures include information such as occupation, special experiences, interests and hobbies. After adding, they can be used as a matching reference, and the common attraction signature of the two people will be displayed on the chat page. Compared with mandatory filling out, gravity signature has a lower threshold and a more obscure way of expression, which is more suitable for the social attributes of Soul.

2) Voice Match

The founder of Soul mentioned in an interview that the usage rate of voice matching is around 10%, and the most commonly used methods are still text chatting and posting content. But after the voice matching function appeared, Soul has always been dubbed as "voice social". As an exciting demand, it increases the fun of the product and reduces the cost of acquiring customers.

3) Planet

The planet is located on the homepage of Soul. The interactive design is very exquisite. Each planet represents a user. Click on the planet to view the user's moments, and shake it to change a group of users. The design of the planet has a romantic feeling of "meeting you in the vast crowd", which is consistent with the concept of Soul.

4) Light up the Soulmate letters

When users send messages to each other more than 30 times, the letters "soul mate" will appear above the chat interface. As the chat time increases, the love pool on the chat interface will also increase. When the love pool is full, a letter will be lit up. The later it is, the more love is needed to light up the letter.

In order to light up all the letters, some users will continue to use Soul to chat. It not only satisfies users' desire for romance, but also prevents users from leaving after establishing a relationship.

2. Solution

1) Integrate various instant publishing channels

Solving pain points: Low-quality content producers

Problem analysis: There are currently two problems with instant release. First, the locations are scattered. The camera is in the upper left corner, and the instant release is in the bottom middle, so the camera is easily overlooked. Second, content release prioritizes text content and lacks guidance.

Referring to the leading apps in the social field such as Weibo, Tieba, QQ, Xiaohongshu, and ins, we can find that they generally adopt the method of further selection after clicking, tending to use pictures and videos to guide users' information transmission.

Change plan: After clicking to publish a moment, you will no longer go directly to the editing page, but there is one more step. Here users can choose to publish the moment directly, select pictures from the album, take photos or record audio to show themselves. This not only integrates the publishing channels, but also makes users more inclined to publish pictures, audio and video content.

In addition, if you enter the editing page after adding the picture (Xiaohongshu, ins, and Oasis do this), the editing function provided by Soul can also be used.

2) Create an environment where users can show their true selves without causing trouble

Solving pain points: low-quality content producers.

Problem Analysis: Everyone has positive energy and negative energy. If a place supports positive energy and resists negative energy, then these users will be lost to other places. Think about the psychology of users when they complain. There are several demands: 1. They hope that others can see it; 2. They want to get positive feedback; 3. They don’t want to disturb the impression they have on others. Now Soul only meets the first requirement, the second and third requirements are yet to be met.

Improvement plan: Add an emotional catharsis entrance in the moment (refer to 1). After entering, there are various negative vocabulary labels, and users can select a label. For example, if the "Sad" label is selected now, there will be a "Sad" label at the bottom by default after entering. To the right of "Sad", the status is set to "Visible only in the square" (newly added). Putting emotions out in the open can give users an idea of ​​how to post a moment; the topics below ensure that the topic is seen by more people in the circle and can give more positive feedback; being visible only in the square proves that this moment will not affect the person's personal image, nor will it affect people who have empathy and can chat with her (him).

3) Summarize tags based on interests, so that users have something to say and content to read

Solve pain points: low-quality content producers and lack of proactive channels.

Problem Analysis: Tags are a very commonly used function, but currently lack management. This is another interview with the founder. She mentioned in the interview that 1/3 of the content will have tags. It can be seen that this is a very commonly used and important function. By looking at the labels on the square, we can divide them into three categories: circles, content highlights, and topics. The circle can be an interest circle such as skateboarding, photography, JK, and Hanfu, or it can be a fixed topic of funny life such as "Hahahahahaha", "The little thing about going to work", and "Weekend life".

Compared with circles, topics are shorter-term and have a narrower scope of discussion. Common ones include "Travel with Soul", "Boys ask questions and girls answer", "Renting a house for a lifetime VS buying a house for a lifetime", etc. The content is emphasized because there is no threshold for creating tags, so many users will use tags to emphasize the main content, such as "I", "good", "cute", and "Yeah". The content emphasizes mostly one-word tags, which can be read together.

Currently, Soul treats these three labels the same, but from a viewing perspective, I think a distinction should be made.

The circle is relatively fixed, does not change frequently, is viewed frequently, and opinions are expressed many times, so it should be more convenient to view; people who are interested in the topic will pay attention to it in the short term, can accept recommendations, but will not actively read it. Generally, they will only express an opinion on a topic once. They do not need a fixed entrance, but need new topic recommendations. Fixed emphasis has no practical significance and can be ignored.

In addition, the entrance to the currently followed tag is relatively deep. If you want to check out the topics you are interested in, you have to go through three steps: Square-Follow-Tag.

And when you finally overcome all difficulties and get in, you will find that the viewable content on the first screen is only half of the screen, user recommendations take up one-third of the screen, and each user has a small close button in the upper right corner. Every time I log in, I will close the user recommendations for a long time. After closing them all, I no longer have the mood to continue reading.

I really don’t understand this function. Among social products, I have only seen a similar function in Maimai - the circle creation list. However, as a workplace software, Maimai has focused discussion content and most of the active group members are KOLs, so it is worth paying attention to. As a social software, Soul should be decentralized, and users’ topics diverge instantly. It is impossible to quickly obtain information of interest by clicking on it, which is a distraction from finding like-minded people.

Improvement plan:

• Tags with many followers and high activity levels are manually created as circles, which will be displayed in blue in the tags. Move "Discover Sound" to the upper left corner, and change the upper right corner to a circle square for discovering circles. Move the circle entrance from the follow to below the recommendation. Swipe right to switch circles. After switching, the circle will be recommended based on popularity, time, etc.

• The circle square is divided into my attention circles, recommended circles, popular circles and various interest groups. My Following are the circles I have followed, and I can sort and unfollow them here.

An entrance to topic discussion is added in the release moment. After entering, there are 20 random topic cards. The cards will display the topic and the popular moments under the topic (new topics only show the founder's comments). Shake to change a batch of topics. Users can initiate new topics in the upper right corner, which will be displayed here after review.

The purpose of this design is, firstly, to increase the participation of topic tags, and secondly, to provide users with ideas for posting moments, ultimately increasing the activity of the square.

4) Other suggestions

The sharing button in the lower left corner instantly changed to private chat. The sharing function is used more frequently in content products, but it is rarely used for social networking with strangers (222 likes and 3 shares in the picture), and secondly, it involves privacy. Therefore, it is recommended to switch the location from private chat. After users see the content they are interested in in the square, they can directly greet the other party to help break the ice.

Added label option to dislike reason. Currently, there are only three types of tags: machine-captured keywords, not interested, and not liking the author. I don’t quite understand why there are no tags more obvious than keywords. Improving the feedback mechanism can improve the accuracy of recommendations.

Add a game room to provide more social scenes. As social scenarios become richer, the romantic attributes of stranger social interactions will decrease a little. After users establish a relationship, they can also play games together, and it can also help users match and break the ice. You can refer to Douban and Tieba for hot searches, and pay more attention to the content produced within the platform, rather than following Weibo and making information-related hot searches.

Add a love bell distance in privacy, you can choose not to match people within XXkm, or add a fuzzy switch within 1000m. The current love bells are sometimes too accurate. It is easy to guess the address within 100m + direction + in an instant. For personal safety and privacy, it is better to keep it a little vague.

Users can set themselves to be “unsearchable” instantly. This is also a suggestion for privacy reasons. The inspiration came from a recent post titled “Uncovering secondary Weibo accounts by searching for keywords”. Socializing with strangers is inherently private, especially when public opinion is still biased towards this aspect. We hope that user privacy can be adequately protected.

Author: sansuny

Source: sansuny