Who Is Keep
Keep is the most popular social fitness app in China right now offering variety of services including online course videos, articles, social features and ecommerce. Key milestones achieved and metrics are as follows
· Keep has grown to hit 140 millions user mark within merely three years. They reached 1M users in first 100 days in 2015.
· Keep has been ranked as the Top 1 app in Fitness category of iOS App Store for consecutively three years. They received 825k reviews for average 4.9 star rating in China.
· Keep just broke the record to receive 127M Series D funding, the largest single round in fitness sector history in July 2018. Total funding raised is 174M.
Key To Success
It would be naïve to attribute Keep’s overall success to one single factor and effort. High level and top key contributors include but are not limited to: Overall fitness market growth in China, Timing to enter the market, Team’s capability, Well-designed product with gorgeous UI, Rapid prototyping and feedback loop from users, and Growth hacking tactics. I will share all aspects above into details later, but today the only focus will be their early growth hacking tactics.
0 to 1 Decoding
Keep officially launched its first App back in February 2015, but we are focusing on some of what they have done even BEFORE the launch, which represent the early growth hack tactics to contribute significantly to the later success.
Day -126 (October 1st 2014) before launch
Content Marketing For Lead Nurturing. They opened official social media accounts (e.g. WeChat, Weibo), and started to post in-depth high quality fitness articles including scientific knowledge, Q&A, and workout routine plans.
Day -34 (January 1st 2015) before launch
Influencer Marketing but no budget? No problem. They decided to create their own influencers by themselves to get prepared for the incoming launch. They called it “Project Landmine (埋雷计划)”. They targeted almost 100 social network groups and forums associated with fitness, and created various entirely new identities, nothing to do with Keep at all, and started to share high quality content for fitness, and engage with fitness community as opinion leaders. By doing this, they had gained real followers for their virtual influencers, and they didn’t mention anything about Keep at all until the later day when it was about to launch the beta test and official version. Due to the trust built in long term and the true benefit their virtual influencers had bring to the community, when they recommend Keep to their followers in the first time, the experience and conversion is seamless. As a result, in one social group they even achieved 5% conversion rate for app download (100 downloads from a social group of 2000 users).
Day -13 (January 22nd 2015) before launch
Beta test + Social Media Giveaway. Keep released news in their social media accounts to offer beta version for its early adopters. They created an exclusive and honored title name for their testers called “CTO — Chief Testing Officer (首席体验官)”. Meanwhile, they use Giveaway technique to ask followers Follow+Share to enter the lottery to have a chance to get an iPhone. In return, they gain paid virality and more exposure.
Before officially launching their App, Keep had been able to gather 4,000 early adopters using those tactics above.
By The Way
Keep received an angel round for US$440K in November 10th 2014. Don’t forget to factor this in though.
Hope you enjoy it! I will share more details about other key sucess factors of Keep later when I get a chance.
Comment, feedback, or suggestion? Definitely let me know.
