According to the "2020-2026 China Online Sports and Fitness Industry Market Competition Landscape and Future Development Trend Report" released by Zhiyan Consulting, data shows: With the rise of Internet technology, the sports and fitness industry has entered the "Internet +" era, and the application of technology has played a boosting role in the upgrading of the industry.

Internet fitness products and services are quickly accepted by the market, the number of users is increasing year by year, and user needs are constantly differentiating, which drives the rapid development of the Internet fitness industry. From 2017 to 2020, the scale of sports and fitness client users in China continued to grow, but the growth rate slowed down. It is estimated that by 2020, the user scale will reach 352 million, with a growth rate of 12.1%.

Under the influence of the epidemic, online fitness software represented by Keep has become popular. Compared with other fitness apps, Keep has an absolute advantage. This article will discuss with you how Keep designed a model centered on user growth .

A brief history of Keep's growth

In 2014, Wang Ning, the founder of Keep, was still a senior student. Determined to lose weight, he visited almost all the weight loss communities on the Internet and read all the content related to weight loss. At the same time, he noticed two key points: first, people who want to lose weight don’t actually need any piece of content, but the certainty of successful weight loss. They will desire one thing, hoping to find a definite way to lose weight; second, although it was already 2014, the fitness videos that could be found on the Internet were still from the era of Schwarzenegger, Zheng Duoyan, and Ma Hua, with no new content or new IP.

But in fact, private training can solve the first problem very well. However, the price of private training is too high, so Wang Ning plans to teach himself fitness, and if he fails, he will die. After spending 6 or 7 months piecing together his knowledge, he completed his knowledge structure, and through unremitting efforts, he successfully lost 40 kilograms and was completely transformed. So he became the person that people around him consulted, and he first made a PPT to share his knowledge. Let’s take a look at Keep today. Its format is still very similar to PPT. Each action is a page of slide, and the combination of different slides becomes different training plans. Later, at the suggestion of a friend, they made an APP to replace the PPT format, and thus version 0.5 of Keep was born.

Keep's V0.5 has implemented the MVP principle very well. For example, the video content is a compilation of existing online materials. This action is Zheng Duoyan, and the next action may be Schwarzenegger. However, each action has a detailed explanation. Although it is rough, the core delivery is in place. At the same time, Keep set its own slogan in V0.5: Self-discipline gives me freedom. Later, this sentence with spiritual energy deeply resonated with countless people, and this is also the psychological energy that Keep provides to users.

In October 2014, with its unique market insight, Keep successfully obtained RMB 3 million in angel financing. After obtaining financing, Keep hired two models, one male and one female, and spent three days using a SLR camera to record action videos with its own copyright. The whole set cost 30,000 yuan, and this is the 1.0 version of Keep.

As of today, Keep is already in version 6.4. In addition to fitness, it has added major categories such as running, yoga, cycling, walking, etc., serving nearly 300 million users. The action library of Keep has also increased from 150 actions in version 1.0 to 1,600.

Keep's core delivery and enhancement loop

Keep actually has no innovative content, it just completes the core delivery.

Keep only makes the basic products look good, satisfying users with scores ranging from 0 to 70. Among the 1,600 actions, not a single one is original to Keep. It is like a restaurant that does not invent new dishes but serves tried-and-true ancient dishes with good presentation. If it can serve users who need products with a score of 0 to 70, it can cover a large proportion of the population. In recent years, many companies have done this by improving the appearance of some basic products, improving efficiency, and serving users with demand scores of 0 to 70 points, and have achieved huge success, such as Three Squirrels, Miniso, Perfect Diary, etc.

However, Keep not only provides core delivery, but also designs enhanced loops, making users less willing to give up the app the more they use it.

The data recording on Keep is an obvious reinforcement loop. The accumulation of historical data makes users reluctant to give up Keep. Just like if you are used to reading on WeChat, the cost of migrating to reading on Get will be very high, and you will also need to reconfigure your bookshelf. The favorite sentences you once recorded will be gone forever.

Now, a large number of start-up companies have fallen into a misunderstanding, which is to only provide products. When selling coffee, the core delivery is coffee; when selling air tickets, the core delivery is the air tickets. Only one delivery is designed, and no enhanced loop is designed. So how do you generate repeat purchases from users? We are used to spending 200 yuan to acquire a new user, but we are not used to spending 200 yuan a year to retain an old user. In the early days of the Internet, this was no problem. There were hundreds of millions of new users every year, and it was impossible to recruit all of them. But at this time last year, WeChat’s monthly active users exceeded 1.1 billion, declaring that all Chinese people were online. The Internet has officially bid farewell to the era of new users and entered the competition for existing users. Solving the problem of credit non-transfer is no longer just a macro-business issue, but a micro-issue that concerns every user.

In this new era, the user enhancement loop should be part of your product design. Without it, you can’t win.

Keep's Network Effect

In addition to core delivery and enhanced loop design, Keep also did network effect design.

Wang Ning said: "We often see that when one person in a university dormitory starts using Keep to practice, he will share various data graphs and fitness photos, and soon everyone in the room will start using it."

This is a very clear and strong scenario, and it is easy to spread and participate in, which can form effective user fission.

Due to the rise of Pinduoduo, social fission has become a hot topic and a new benchmark for entrepreneurship. However, most of the so-called social fission is actually just inducing sharing, and does not think about what the user motivation is and what the user's recommendation behavior is in the real scenario. Teacher Liang Ning once said: "Opportunity is a very specific thing. The clearer your feeling of the scene is, the more likely you are to hit the pain point or itch point."

We compared several sports apps, including Keep, Gudong, and Yuepaoquan, and Keep is the only one that provides yoga category. Among these sports apps, Keep was established the latest. When Keep 1.0 was launched in 2015, Gudong and Yuepaoquan had already completed round A financing and had a very good user scale. If Keep had not started as a niche fitness app, but instead competed with Gudong and Yuepaoquan for running users, it would have had no chance.

In the small category of fitness, Keep went through a very smooth cold start and natural growth period, but when it reached 30 million users, it encountered a bottleneck in user growth. At that time, Keep's decision was to expand its product categories, adding two major categories: running and yoga. The user's purpose is not to run or to exercise, but to be healthy and to improve their body shape. The product categories that Gudong and Yuepaoquan stick to are actually not user demand-oriented. Therefore, Keep's expansion of product categories actually meets user needs. Starting from expanding its product categories, Keep started a new round of user growth and surpassed its previous big brothers Gudong and Yuepaoquan.

Many people don’t understand why Keep opened a yoga category, but this is actually an important part of Keep’s network effect because it has attracted a large number of female users. Xu Zhibin talked about in "Small Group Effect" that if the community population has "three similarities and one opposite", the community will become popular, that is, they are geographically close, similar in age, similar in interests, but opposite in gender. It is just like King of Glory reduces the difficulty in all dimensions, thereby attracting a large influx of female users, and further increasing the game's network effect and participation popularity. Keep's yoga category also produced a similar chemical reaction.

Clear scenarios, simple participation, and chemical reactions have formed the network effect for Keep's growth.

Service Reshaping Based on New Infrastructure

If we look at Keep, personal trainers, Jane Fonda, and Jung Da-yeon in an abstract way, the essence of what they deliver is the same: fitness knowledge services.

The same set of movements and the same set of knowledge are delivered to users in different ways by Keep, personal fitness trainers, Jane Fonda, and Jung Da-yeon. Their own business models are also different: personal trainers have the lowest leverage and sell their own time; Jane Fonda is a knowledge service for fitness in the television era, and completes the business loop by selling copyrights to television stations; Zheng Duoyan is a knowledge service for fitness in the DVD era, and collects royalties based on DVD sales; Keep is in the mobile Internet era, and has done all of this again with new infrastructure. You could say that there is nothing new in its core delivery; the knowledge and actions have already existed. However, based on the new infrastructure, Keep has created user enhancement loops and network effects that previous service providers could not achieve, and achieved a user scale that previous service providers could not achieve. This is an innovative model and also Keep’s moat.

Keep's network effect has enabled Keep to grow rapidly and form a barrier to compete with Gudong and Yuepaoquan. However, in the Internet ecosystem, there are also competitors such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu that have stronger network effects. Today, when you open popular apps such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, you will find a bunch of experts and tutorials that will help you stay fit. If Keep only delivers knowledge, it will also fail. But users need a place to continuously record their fitness data, which allows Keep to protect itself in today's competitive landscape.

Author: Pete

Source: Houchang College