[Original #1] The Last Thing You Need for the Tough Winter

Compared to the United States, China began its fitness wave much later. Since the State Council issued the National Fitness Program in the half of 2016, fitness industry and culture became promising and gradually popular among all generations, especially those young adults who hold high-standard for their body shapes. As what is shown in figure 1.1 from Baidu Index, a platform sharing online searching data, the search for keyword “fitness” steadily climbed since 2014. 

Figure 1.1 The search for “fitness” from 2011 to 2017 on Baidu

Doing exercise regularly is a healthy way to keep fitness and desirable body shape. With more and more studies on losing weight, eating healthily and keeping fit, latest research has shown that dieters always end in gaining weight back by dieting inappropriately and damaging their metabolic rate. Then people start looking for proper and longer lasting approaches to staying slim or becoming muscular. Meanwhile, since modern life moves so fast, most of the young generations lack time, money and space. 

Targeting mainly young contemporaries who want to lose weight, stay slim or build muscle, Ning Wang, who is on Forbes's list of 30 outstanding Asian entrepreneurs under 30 in 2016, created Keep, a social fitness app.

Ning Wang is very smart. By cooperating with popular creators followed by numerous users on relatively mature social network platforms such as Weibo, Keep attracted multifarious testers in its primary stage of development. At first, Keep limited its functions by only providing carefully-designed training courses including aerobics and anaerobic. After making people familiar with courses and gaining enough quality users, the team of Keep designed for them a social platform——helping users building relationships and communities. Users started the search and follow other users sharing similar goals or with great fitness plans. That’s how the community was built.

With advanced technology and connected people who are able to obtain what they want, Keep keeps its way on gaining popularity and has more than 100 million keepers in the second half of 2017.

I've been using Keep since it was first launched in 2015. My 2017 Keep report tells me it has been my training company for more than 2 years and accompanied me during all the accumulated 17316 mins of training. It’s easy to get started. After entering this app, you simply click one course that has its specific purpose such as to build abs or to burn calories, and you could start whenever and wherever you want, providing solutions fast and saving much time and money. That’s exactly what busy users want.

Now Keep has evolved into an app with various functions like online courses & shops, food recipe recommendations, built-in social platform, and customized training plan etc. Via this app, I could choose multifarious training challenging myself and get inspiration from posts created by quality users I followed who stick to their fitness goals and have great shape. Most importantly, sharing real-time progress online tracks my training and builds my sense of achievement. What a nice app ——feeding you both physically and mentally.

However, Keep still needs to figure out how to make profits since its active users expand so quickly. As we all know, free instrumental products sooner or later have to face commercialization. Currently, Keep doesn’t embed ads and do sell its own brand sports products. Nevertheless, I believe as the users rely more and more on the free solutions provided by Keep, they would buy in even if those solutions charge fees later. Besides, by accumulating its 10 million users’ working out data, Keep could analyze their habits and figure out profitable programs. That shows Keep has huge potential for its profitability. 

Nowadays, many creators forget the original feature and purpose of creating their apps. They are dying to attract users and thus blindly imitate whatever the hottest features welcomed by net citizens. Needless to say, user stickiness only lasts for a short period of time under such circumstance. On the contrary, Keep keeps its originality and soberly tailors features according to keepers’ needs. When any of my friends ask me to recommend a social fitness app, Keep will be the one!