Soul is an APP focusing on stranger social networking. It was launched on the App Store in September 2015. From May 27, 2020 to August 2020, it has long been ranked in the top 6 of the App Store's social free list, even surpassing the two giants of stranger social networking, Momo and Tantan, in the free list. So how did Soul achieve its current success?

This article will analyze Soul through its user analysis, product positioning, business function logic, version function change history, and business model.

1. User Analysis

According to iResearch data, the male-to-female ratio of soul users is close to 1:1, and the users are mainly concentrated in three age groups: under 24 years old, 25-30 years old, and 31-35 years old. Those born in the 1990s are the main user group, which is in line with its positioning as a social software for young people. Geographically, they are mainly distributed in provinces or municipalities with more developed economies and denser populations.

After researching and reviewing a lot of information, we learned that this type of user is young, educated, willing to show themselves, pays attention to interests and topics, and prefers content social networking.

Soul has placed advertisements on three platforms: NetEase Cloud Music, Bilibili, and Zhihu, and there is a certain degree of overlap in user attributes.

The social needs of this type of users include: expanding their social circle, relieving loneliness, seeking resonance, killing time, showing talents, sharing life, venting emotions, finding a partner, falling in love, and having sex offline.

The data is from iResearch, and the chart is made by the author.

From the above age groups, it can be seen that Soul’s user groups are mainly college students, newcomers to the workplace, and young people around 30 years old.

For the above three groups, three typical character models and APP usage scenarios have been extracted, as shown below:

The above three user usage scenarios can be summarized as follows:

1. Matching social
2. Content-based social

For the above two social modes, users will have the following social pain points:

1) How to socialize without appearance in this age of appearance

Loving beauty is human nature, and looking at faces is also human nature. Coupled with the influence of traffic stars on the market in recent years, this has created an era that values ​​faces even more. People who are good-looking have a natural advantage in socializing. A beautiful photo of them can attract the active pursuit of many people of the opposite sex. How can people who are not so good-looking and have average photo-editing skills get social satisfaction on the Internet? Is it true that I can only be swiped left again and again on social software? (In the Tantan product, swiping left on the other person's photo means passing and not being interested)

2) A social player who has no one to chat with, has no interesting topics to talk about, and is not very proactive.

It’s hard to find a good chat partner, and I’m not very willing to take the initiative to find someone to chat with.

I have someone to chat with, but I don’t know how to start the conversation mode.

3) Show talents and vent emotions.

WeChat, QQ, and Weibo are all old acquaintances. Some emotions or content are not suitable to be displayed and shared there. We need a new territory, a new identity, to show ourselves and share our lives.

2. Product Positioning

Product introduction: Soul is a stranger social software that matches and makes friends based on interests, hobbies, and world views. At the same time, you can express yourself, share content, and discover interesting strangers in the community section.

Product positioning: Follow the soul to find you, healing chat, interesting, warm and true expression.

Product vision: To make sure there is no lonely person in the world.

The above is the official positioning and product vision of Soul. Here we mention the positioning of Momo and Tantan to make it easier to see the differentiated positioning of Soul.

Momo slogan :

Nice to meet you and get to know me through video.

The phrase "getting to know you" shows that Momo's positioning is to make new friends, but it does not emphasize what stories will happen after getting to know each other or what the ending will be. At the same time, it emphasizes getting to know people through videos. Combined with Momo’s current main business of “live video streaming”, the relationship between most users and hosts is very consistent with this kind of relationship of getting to know each other. It can be predicted that Momo’s focus will continue to develop on video dating.

Tantan Slogen :

Help you find the person in your life. This sentence is very romantic and profound. Tantan's positioning is to allow users to find special people and have in-depth communication with each other. The main way to make friends is to browse each other's photos and establish social relationships.

Soul Slogan :

Follow the soul to find you, it is a bit like Tantan's Slogen, the difference is:

Soul emphasizes soul (three views, personality, hobbies) social interaction, focuses on inner social interaction rather than appearance, and avoids the photo and video social forms of Momo and Tantan, solving the problem of users having difficulty in social interaction due to appearance.

You can show yourself and express your emotions on Soul. The community atmosphere is positioned to be real, fun, and warm, which addresses the users' needs to express themselves freely.

3. Business Logic & Product Functions & User Social Process

Core page display

Users in Soul mainly socialize through matching and content. Here is a summary of Soul's business process diagram and the core product path that users must go through to establish connections with each other:

The core business of Soul products is: matching system and community square. Users can connect with other users through the matching system and community square.

1. Matchmaking system

Through the matching system, the process of establishing connections between users is as follows: when users enter the APP, they must first undergo a soul test. After completing the test, they can use the matching function. The test content includes: world outlook, personality, and hobbies. Completing the test will generate visible test results, which will affect the allocation of subsequent soul matching to a certain extent.

Then the user only needs to click on the matching method, and the system will automatically match chat partners with similar test results and connect two strangers. The connected users can communicate on their own, and the friendship can be upgraded by completing key interactive actions during the communication process. Smart matching includes: soul matching (matching based on personality test results), voice matching, facekini matching (video matching with cartoon avatars replacing human faces), and love bell (the system automatically connects users with high matching degrees and who have turned on the love bell).

This process does not require users to actively look for chat partners, which solves the need for users to have chat partners without being proactive, and also ensures a certain degree of matching adaptability. Users can see the tags set by the other party, which provides topic guidance for the chat between the two parties.

The results of the soul test and the matching mechanism will make users pay more attention to their inner qualities in social interactions and strengthen the mindset of soul social interaction among users. At the same time, users cannot use real avatars and can only use cartoon avatars provided by the product, which dilutes the influence of appearance in social interactions.

2. Community Plaza

The essence of Soul's community square is content social networking. The success of content social products such as Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, and Weibo has proved the feasibility of content social networking.

The social atmosphere of Soul's content is generally similar to that of Weibo, and is more inclined towards life-oriented expression. Most of the content in the community is about daily life, excluding pornography, gambling and drugs. Soul does not have any requirements on the quality and length of the content published.

The low threshold allows all users to participate in the production and release of content. The types of content that can be published include voice (ordinary voice, built-in karaoke accompaniment), voting, music, photos (with built-in filters and beauty functions), and self-made emoticons, meeting the user's needs for pan-entertainment expression. The above solves the pain points of user expression and display mentioned earlier.

Content consumers can learn every little detail about strangers through content. Their curiosity is satisfied and amplified. If they want to know more, they can have a private conversation with the content publisher directly. At the same time, consumers can like and comment on the content and follow the content publishers. These actions allow content publishers to gain social recognition and motivate creators to continue producing and publishing content.

3. Operational actions, version iterations, and functional point changes

Since Soul is positioned as a social network of soul and content, how does Soul do it step by step to achieve soul and content social networking and meet the needs of the above users? Let’s take a look at Soul’s product logic through the entire product’s version iteration and product growth curve.

1) Exploration period

Soul was launched on September 14, 2015. By September 2016, it had not accumulated a large number of seed users. Starting from September 26, 2016, the application market had 4,000 downloads per day.

On the eve of National Day, on September 30, Soul launched version 2.21, which was a major version update: UI upgrade, increase in the number of soul test questions and test results, and addition of a test entrance.

After this version, the number of users has steadily increased, and on June 17, 2017, the number of Soul downloads reached 3.7 million. During this period, Soul's Baidu Index remained stable and did not change. It can be inferred that Soul did not make pan-channel exposure during this period, and the product growth was self-growth. We define the period from the product launch to June 17, 2017 as Soul's product exploration period.

During this stage, Soul focused on verifying the feasibility of the product by polishing the planet testing system, the publishing and display of square content, and the personal homepage and private chat page of the social system.

Four of the subdivision features were cancelled in future updates. There are two guesses:

1. Segmentation results in less content and fewer matching people, and this is perceptible to users, leaving them with the impression that the software has too few users.
2. Segmentation gives users more choices, but more choices require users to spend more energy to make decisions, and these choices do not bring users a good experience.

2) Growth stage

From June 18, 2017 to November 3, 2018, the number of Soul downloads increased from 3.8 million to 5.5 million, which is defined as the growth period. During this period, Soul's Baidu Index rose from 1000+ to around 6000. At this stage, Soul began to carry out pan-channel brand exposure and promotion.

After verifying the feasibility of the product during the exploration period, Soul began rapid iteration in the growth stage, focusing on improving various functional modules. The key points are: a social system for establishing connections between users, a plaza for users to display and share, and interactive content formats.

Although the square module has added a voice matching function, it can be seen that Soul is improving the square and social system at this stage.

3) Growth period

From November 4, 2018 to December 8, 2019, the number of Soul downloads increased from 5.5 million to 30 million, which is defined as the growth period.

During the growth period, Soul began to explore its business model and launched four major modules: membership, face-shaping, gifts, and functional props. It also added some new matching systems: love bells and facekini. The updates on product functions in this stage are much less than those in the previous stage, which indirectly proves that the product functions are becoming more complete.

4) Maturity

December 9, 2019 - To date, Soul downloads have increased from 30,000W to 50,000W, which is defined as the mature stage.

During this stage, Soul's downloads grew faster than before, but in terms of product updates, they were all bug fixes and performance optimizations, with no new features or modules added. During this stage, Soul’s focus should be on polishing and optimizing existing functions, providing users with a better experience, and improving user retention rate.

4. Business Model

Soul's current profit model is mainly based on social interaction. Paying money can allow users to get more matching chat opportunities, while gifts and guardianship bring people closer and upgrade intimate relationships. The value-added services Soul provides to users are very consistent with the core purpose of users using the product.

To increase the business model, in terms of stranger-to-stranger friendship, Soul can focus on Momo and Tantan; in terms of content community, it can focus on content-based social products such as Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and QQ Space.

IV. Conclusion

Although Soul entered the market relatively late, there were already two major stranger social networking leaders, Momo and Tantan. The main reason for its breakthrough was that it grasped the needs of its user groups for free expression and sharing, and created a content community plaza where users can express and share freely in social scenarios. At the same time, it focused on a differentiated soul social model and avoided the fiercely competitive field of appearance social networking.

Based on the early verification of the product's feasibility, we innovated and optimized the corresponding services for the two major directions of content social networking and soul social networking, targeting the product's user groups. In the process of rapid iteration and verification, we found the business model while also step by step creating a product with first-class user experience.

Author: Potato

Source: Potato