“Soul” product operation analysis!

Social needs are the third need based on physiological needs and safety needs. In addition to communicating with relatives and friends, most people also yearn for fresh interactions with strangers, men and women. Good looks can quickly arouse our hormones, but the two-way recognition of personality compatibility seems to be more conducive to solidifying friendships.

In the early days, through soul tests and algorithms, Soul allowed users to communicate with "like-minded" people while getting rid of the heavy social network of acquaintances. However, with the development of the product, Soul’s community content has gradually become uneven, and more and more people say that "Soul has changed."

Now, Soul is not only losing its early users slowly, but is also facing the pressure and crisis of the rapid development of other social and entertainment products such as Tantan and Zuiyou. How can Soul break through this embarrassing situation and continue to develop itself while maintaining its existing product tone?

01 Product Architecture Disassembly

02 Competitive product selection

SOUL's product area is stranger social APP, and its target users are mainly young people. It currently has launched matching, chatting, community and other businesses. Combining these characteristics, and the fact that Tantan and Jimu have a large user base, they can serve as competitors to SOUL.

Although Zuiyou mainly built a youth entertainment community in the past, it also began to explore some social functions such as matching and making friends in the middle and late stages of its development and began to expand its social business. Therefore, it can be analyzed as a competitor of SOUL. Although Momo has achieved good results in the field of stranger social networking, its main development direction is now live streaming and short videos, and its positioning has also changed to a pan-entertainment and pan-social platform. Therefore, it is not analyzed as a competitor this time.

Therefore, this report finally selected Jimu, Tantan, and Zuiyou as SOUL’s competitors.

2.1 Business Distribution

From the business distribution diagram above, we can see that:

• Although these products all provide matching services, SOUL’s matching method is more comprehensive. From personality to location, voice, and video, users can filter and match. Although the live broadcast services of Jimu and Tantan can recommend nearby users, this method is more of a one-way recognition and is less likely to build friendships than video matching.
• In addition to SOUL, Jimu and Zuiyou have also launched social methods based on personality and interests . There are many ways to match users’ interests. Its interest tag screening can also be regarded as a kind of “spiritual social interaction”. Compared with personality tests, it lacks professionalism, but it lowers the user’s operating threshold. Zuiyou is originally a youth culture community that brings together a large number of young people who gather together because of common interests, so Zuiyou has certain advantages in this regard. Tantan always places the focus of matching on appearance.
• Each community business has its own characteristics. In the music radio section of the SOUL community, users can publish music in the form of playing and singing, covers, etc. Listeners can filter music types and interact with music publishers. Tantan’s community mainly recommends content to nearby users based on location. In addition to users sharing their daily lives, the Jimu community also has many tourist attraction check-ins and shopping guides. Its development direction is similar to that of Xiaohongshu , a consumer word-of-mouth database . The content of Zuiyou community is more diversified and the topic guidance is the most detailed.
• Both Tantan and Jimu have begun to explore their own live streaming businesses , from recommending nearby live streaming to live streaming of pan-entertainment content. Live streaming can not only provide an immersive social experience and improve user retention to a certain extent, but also is an exploration and attempt at commercialization. SOUL has launched the group chat party function in internal testing. Without the need for matching, users can communicate and interact through voice in the same room, using sound to create a broader social scene.

2.2 Development History

From the development history of SOUL and its competitors summarized above, we can see that:

(1) SOUL

SOUL's core gameplay of soul matching initially helped SOUL accumulate a group of users who did not have such a strong need to meet in person and needed more companionship. Now, in addition to the most basic personality matching, SOUL has gradually added more matching methods.

These various matching methods also provide SOUL with a variety of monetization methods, such as purchasing more matches and call time, accelerated matching, location screening, etc. SOUL is also constantly improving its camera, such as various filters, stickers and other beauty functions, encouraging users in the community to show their appearance independently and increase the passion for interaction between users. The newly launched Facekini matching function is a type of video matching. Although the two users who are matched at the beginning are wearing masks, as the chat time increases, they can take off the masks and see each other.

Soul's community section has been built into a tree hole and spiritual garden. Under refined operations, it has produced a lot of high-quality UGC content. The official will also release daily topics to increase user activity. All these show that SOUL is trying to break the circle to find more users and break through the limitations of the user group brought by the initial soul matching .

(2) Tantan

Tantan entered the market in 2014 and seized the opportunity to accumulate a large number of users. It was later acquired by Momo, which can bring in more funds and potential users. Tantan’s core function imitates Tinder’s extremely simple left-right swiping function for matching.

In the early days, Tantan completed its cold start using users of the street photography community it had previously established. Although the user scale was not large at the time, most of the users were trendy men and women. Users felt happy while using the product and the retention rate was also high.

Tantan has also developed a product mechanism to prevent harassment for a large number of female users, and this initiative has also accumulated a large number of female users. Tantan does not have many product iterations, and its focus is on continuously improving the existing stranger social functions based on appearance.

(3) Accumulation

Jimu acquired its first batch of users through offline activities. These users mainly came from various niche cultural circles, including hip-hop, skateboarding, and the second dimension. This also laid the foundation for Jimu's "Purpose Social". One of the highlights of Jimu is that users can comment on other users' photos in the form of barrage, which also increases the fun and interactivity.

Jimu is positioned as a "youth culture social platform", which also provides more direction for the construction of content communities. For example, in 2019, Jimu added new merchants and a fan system, and began to build a consumer word-of-mouth database.

After being acquired by Inke, Jimu gained more attention and attracted more users. In general, Jimu has been targeting niche cultural groups with specific hobbies to build youth communities and social platforms.

(4) Far right

The term "Zuiyou" originally refers to the user comments that are first forwarded on Weibo, which are often the funniest and most resonant comments. This is in line with the value that Zuiyou wants to provide to users: saving unhappiness.

Zuiyou launched a topic community in 2015, allowing users to find content that is more interesting to them within the product. Later, Zuiyou began to explore various social functions, such as paper airplanes, expanding the list, and playing with language. Various interactive mechanisms can more effectively consolidate relationship chains, meet users' communication needs, enhance user stickiness, and to a certain extent improve retention rates. While saving unhappiness, they can also help users find like-minded partners.

Zuiyou’s target audience is relatively younger, and both the community and social sections have introduced a large number of young people’s gameplay and rhetoric.

2.3 Data Performance

The table shows the data performance of these apps in November 2019 (data source: iResearch Qianfan). Among them, the specific data of JiMu cannot be found in iResearch Qianfan, so it is not analyzed here.

From the table above we can analyze that:

• The number of active users of Tantan is much higher than that of SOUL and Zuiyou, which is partly due to its earlier entry into the market. The number of active users of Zuiyou is also higher than that of SOUL. The reason is presumably that Zuiyou’s community business is more fully developed. In addition to social interaction, users can find more interesting content in the community.
• The average number of daily launches per person and the average daily usage time per person are both important indicators for determining user retention rate. Both data of SOUL and Zuiyou are higher than those of Tantan. It is speculated that the reason is that SOUL's functional design has more two-way gameplay, such as pia games, soul mate cultivation, etc., which makes the stickiness between users stronger, and the entire relationship sedimentation from strangers to acquaintances can be completed on SOUL. The community businesses of SOUL and Zuiyou have also developed relatively well, which also helps users click on the products multiple times to view new content and interactive messages. Among them, Zuiyou has the most complete community business and richer content, so the average daily usage time per person is the longest.
• The difference in average monthly usage days per capita among the three products is not too big, among which SOUL has the highest average monthly usage days per capita. This may be related to the fact that in addition to the anonymous social function, SOUL also has the attribute of a "private blog". More and more young people are gradually beginning to stop posting on WeChat Moments, escaping from the social network of acquaintances, and tend to communicate with invisible but "spiritually connected" strangers.
• The next month retention rate is also an important indicator to measure user retention rate, but the next month retention rates of SOUL and Zuiyou are both exceptionally low, which contradicts the previous data performance. The data in the table comes from iResearch Qianfan and is not accurate internal data. It is speculated that there are problems with the data collection standards and statistics, so no further analysis will be made on this indicator.

2.4 Competitive Product Summary

In general, SOUL's advantages are mainly reflected in the high stickiness and retention among users. Although SOUL's product tonality helped SOUL attract some young users in the early days, it is precisely because of this product tonality that it is difficult for SOUL to break out of the circle now . Therefore, if SOUL wants to find more other young users and people of different age groups, it needs more strategic and business breakthroughs . This is why SOUL is constantly expanding its matching methods and improving the community.

03 User Persona Map

In order to better reflect the needs and relationships of products and various types of users, the SOUL user role map shown below was drawn, in which users are divided into three categories: friend seekers, content producers and content viewers. In actual situations, there will be intersections and overlaps among the three types of users.

3.1 User Profile

According to the figure below, we can see that the male to female ratio of SOUL users is almost 1:1. The user age group is mainly concentrated in the young user group under 30 years old, among which student users under 24 years old are the largest; and the user group over 30 years old accounts for about 1/3 of the total number of users. Geographically, users are mainly concentrated in the more developed coastal areas, such as Guangdong and Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. In general, SOUL's typical user group is young people in first- and second-tier cities.

(Data source: iResearch Index)

After more detailed observation, the following five user portraits and usage scenarios were formulated.

3.2 User Feedback

Through channels such as the APP Store, SOUL’s official Weibo comments, and super chats, I have preliminarily summarized some specific problems that Soul currently has.

(1) Social

Matching: Unable to match users, often matching with duplicate people and people of low quality.

Chat: Matchmaking is too awkward, most people disappear after a few words; sometimes you can't find a specific room in the group chat, there is no high-quality karaoke room when you want to listen to music, and there is no room to play games when you want to play games.

Not to the game room.

(2) Community

Instant Release: The content often fails to be released and is lost; the flow is often limited for unknown reasons.

Square: The content is very messy and mixed, and you can’t see what you want to see.

(3) Commercialization

Member: Even if you recharge your membership, there are still many things you need to pay for, so I feel that membership is not very meaningful.

Soul Coin: The number of free matches is too small, and you need to recharge after playing for a while.

(4) Others

Account blocking: A large number of users reported that their accounts were blocked for unknown reasons, they failed to pass the review, and the customer service was slow to handle the matter.

Overall user experience: The entire product environment is less humane than before, and it is difficult to find someone you can really chat with.

3.3 User Research

In order to have a deeper understanding of the above issues and put forward more reasonable suggestions for various issues, I conducted an in-depth survey of 6 Soul users, 4 of whom were deep users from Soul Super Topic and 2 from Soul Square. Among these 6 users, 3 frequently use the group chat function, 2 frequently use the square function, and 1 frequently uses the matching function.

This survey was conducted via WeChat and phone calls, with each interview lasting approximately 30 minutes.

3.4 Research Summary

We can divide the needs of SOUL users into two main categories:

• Basic needs: Find a tree hole to express yourself; kill time and relieve loneliness.
• Expected needs: To find friends who you can talk to and even keep in touch and accompany for a long time, so as to achieve the purpose of making friends.

The matching function mainly helps users meet their needs for making friends, the content on the square mainly helps users pass the time, and group chat is in between the two. It can not only produce good content, but also provide users with a broader social platform.

We found that many users made friends in group chats and squares, and even established more solid friendships. Although SOUL accumulated its initial user base through soul matching, we can also see from the above survey that the community business and the newly launched group chat business have attracted many new users to SOUL and also increased the user's stay time and retention rate. Therefore, I think if SOUL wants to break out of its circle and move to the next stage of development, it should focus on these two businesses.

(1) Matching

Among the 6 users in this survey, 4 users often use soul matching, and 2 users like to use voice matching. All users surveyed indicated that it was difficult to find someone to chat with. Most users will decide whether to start a conversation with the other party after viewing the other party's homepage. If the user finds that the other party is not someone they are interested in after viewing the homepage, they will end the conversation directly.

In the survey, two users said that it is easier to chat with people who have the same hobbies as themselves. For example, if they see the tag "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" on the other person's homepage, they will chat with them about the game. The soul matching test involves many details and judgments in daily life, but does not involve shallow topics such as interests and hobbies that can be quickly talked about. It is difficult for users to directly engage in conversation through soul matching.

(2) Group chat

Among the 6 users surveyed in this survey, 3 are intensive users of the group chat function. The most frequently visited room types are the chat and speed dating rooms. Two users mentioned that they often participate in voice games such as Werewolf, and one user expressed the hope that there would be game settings in the group chat. Users indicated that the advantages of the group chat function are its content diversity and simple design, while the disadvantages mostly lie in bugs and complaint review.

In addition, two users mentioned that because the gifts could not be withdrawn, they switched to other platforms or stopped recharging and giving gifts.

Through in-depth interviews, we learned that some users will spontaneously organize board games in group chat rooms , among which Werewolf appears most frequently. These game rooms usually have a large number of people, and you need to wait in line for a seat. The game process is more dependent on the hosting of the room owner and manager, and there are often problems such as inconvenient conversations and an unsmooth gaming experience. During the survey, some users indicated that online board games can not only kill time and provide fun for the game, but also provide the opportunity to make friends during the communication process.

In addition, through observation of group chat rooms, I found that in addition to Werewolf, which was mentioned by almost all group chat users in the survey, many users also independently launched rooms for singing and PIA dramas.

In its early days, Soul attracted a lot of young users who liked singing and voice acting, which can be seen from Soul's existing "Music Radio" and "Two-Player PIA Drama" functions. So I think increasing the diversity of board games by setting up rooms for singing and multiplayer PIA games can retain more users and attract more other users.

(3) Community

Among the 6 users surveyed in this survey, 5 users said that it was difficult to see the content they were interested in on the homepage of the square, and 4 users said that the quality of the content in the square was uneven. Two users stated that in order to gain more exposure, they would include topics when posting moments; one user stated that out of interest he would pay attention to topics such as "zodiac signs" for a long time.

Almost all users indicated that they would browse the square through "Recommendation" and "Follow", and no user chose to browse the square through "Latest". In addition, two users expressed their love for the music radio feature because the music on the radio is of relatively high quality and suitable for companionship.

Through in-depth interviews, we know that most users say that the information in the square is too messy and they cannot see the content they are interested in in the square. In addition, the "latest" content distribution method is not very popular. Therefore, we can consider weakening the "latest" content distribution method, creating interest circles based on topics, reintegrating the content and then redistributing it to users.

During the survey, users indicated that they hope to see content related to their interests, such as "photography" and "fashion" on the homepage, and they also hope to meet friends with the same interests and hobbies.

(4) Others

Three users indicated that they had experienced situations where their messages could not be sent out for an instant and the reason was unknown. Two users said they felt very frustrated because they had written a lot but it was in vain and they needed a place to temporarily store the content.

04 Functional optimization

4.1 Added board game mode

Based on user research and observation, we found that users would spontaneously create game rooms in group chats, but problems such as having to wait for a seat and an unsmooth gaming experience often occurred.

Suggested changes:

• Added board game mode to group chat. Online voice board games are a way to quickly narrow the distance between strangers online. It can help users quickly break the ice and is also conducive to the accumulation of relationships between users.
• A new Werewolf game room has been added. Almost all users who use group chat told the survey that they have played Werewolf in group chat. It has also been observed that Werewolf game rooms often appear on group chat pages, which shows that this game is quite popular among group chat users.
• Two new game rooms have been added: Grab the Microphone and Sing Along and PIA Drama. These two games are in line with the tone of Soul and the hobbies of some niche user groups.

Modified part of the interface :

4.2 Add a new circle

In-depth interviews revealed that most users said that the information in the square was too cluttered and they could not see the content they were interested in. In addition, the “latest” content distribution method was not very popular.

Suggested changes:

• Consider weakening the "latest" content distribution method
• Create interest circles, reintegrate content and redistribute it to users. During the survey, users indicated that they hope to see content related to their interests, such as "photography" and "fashion" on the homepage, and they also hope to meet friends with the same interests and hobbies. Setting up circles can better integrate high-quality content and distribute it to users more accurately, which can help users find people with similar interests and allow users to build their own relationship chains in the circles, thereby improving user retention and usage time.

Modified part of the interface :

4.3 Added Draft Box

Many users have said that they have experienced problems with not being able to send content immediately, or having to write a lot but the content is lost.

Suggested changes:

Create a draft box for temporary storage of content.

Some pages after modification:

Summarize

When I was thinking about iterations, I still hoped that Soul could maintain the tone of "socializing without looking at faces". After all, this is its most unique feature.

The demand for online companionship does exist, but this demand can be easily met in some pan-entertainment products, and the experience is better than products with C on both ends. This is why I think Soul will continue to expand into broader social scenarios and even make some pan-entertainment attempts. Following the idea of ​​"improving the community ecology and expanding broader social scenarios", I finally decided to reintegrate community content, establish circles, and add a board game mode.

When I was almost finishing writing this article, I found that Soul had released a new version of the internal test with very big changes. This updated version deleted the original 3D planet interface on the homepage and concentrated all matching entrances at the top of the chat page, weakening the initial soul matching . Instead, the community has been strengthened. In addition to deleting the planet, the biggest change in this version is to separate [Discover] from the square as a separate page (on the same level as the chat and square), and present it in the form of cards mainly with pictures and videos .

This change is still to encourage users to show their faces more (the previous Soul camera and facekini matching have already shown this idea). After all, we have to admit that most of the profitable stranger social products in the world are based on the model of lbs plus real photos; without physiological stimulation, it is indeed difficult for users to trigger the behavior of establishing relationships. This change is likely to lead to more loss of old users - after all, the deletion of the planets has greatly weakened the attributes of soul matching and spiritual social interaction, and users may feel at first glance that it is a completely different APP.

I still hope that this attempt can break through the limitations brought by the original tone and bring more possibilities for attracting new users and developing new businesses. Bless Soul.

Author: Mei Bao

Source: PeterpanYevsky