Image source: Visual China
Reporter | Wu Yangyu Reporter | Wu Yangyu On April 21, Keep held the 2021 strategy and new product launch conference. In addition to upgrading the Keep App to version 7.0, it also launched important updates on its content and hardware product business lines, including three premium IP courses and Keep Intelligence. Two smart hardware products, the spinning bike C1 Pro and the Keep bracelet B2 member special edition. Keep, launched in 2015, has grown into an App with 300 million users and 6 million daily activities. In terms of the country’s nearly 700 million people with sports needs, Keep believes that there is still room for growth. In six years, its growth path is also very clear. In the three years after 2015, it relied on tool attributes to achieve a scale of 100 million users. With the further exploration of user needs and the inevitable monetization attempts, starting in 2018, it began to build its own sports consumer brand from scenes such as eating, wearing, training, etc., while continuing to promote online businesses with higher profit margins such as membership and advertising.化 means. Today, after three years of commercial testing, Keep is about to enter the next stage. Earlier, some media reported that Keep planned to go to the United States for an IPO in the second quarter of this year (or July), and submit a prospectus to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as early as the end of April. According to Sina Finance, Keep recently appointed a new CFO, established an investor relations department, and recruited an investor relations director. In this regard, the Keep official has not yet responded. 
If the news is true, this strategic announcement may be the last important adjustment of Keep before becoming a listed company. Can it win the support of users and the trust of investors?
What is an open sports platform?
From the perspective of Keep, the company has reached the third stage of its development.
The positioning of the first stage is the most well-known, a mobile fitness app for users, emphasizing the attributes of tools; the second stage is the commercial landing of eating and wearing exercises around the family scene, with the goal of becoming a new generation of sports brand.
After tools and brands, Keep aimed at the “open sports platform” at this stage. Peng Wei, co-founder of Keep, said that the focus of this stage is to provide users with more value-added services.
In fact, if you look back in the past, you will find that Keep is still continuing the business pattern that has been formed before.
In June last year, Keep partner and vice president Liu Dong told Jiemian News that Keep’s commercialization pattern is divided into three quadrants: A, B, and C: A and C are the existing foundations, which respectively refer to the user scale (currently 300 million) And the sales scale of sports consumer goods (existing 1 billion GMV), on top of which is the value-added business B that provides users with sports solutions, including but not limited to members and live lessons.
Therefore, what Keep does can be attributed to three directions: user scale, sales scale, and consumer products or App functions that may generate value-added services.
Back to the present, content and hardware products will become the two most important tentacles of Keep in the third stage. Hardware products stimulate sales, content supports value-added services, and the two share the task of user retention.
On the content road, Keep has crossed the threshold of winning by quantity and made it clear that it will pay more attention to quality. However, high-quality content is also a high consumption of team capabilities. In order to ensure that output efficiency is not affected, Keep’s idea is to increase investment in self-developed IP while building an open platform and introducing PUGC and brand institutions as another content source.
It is understood that there are currently more than 1,200 self-developed PGC courses on the platform. The three courses of temperament ballet, hot sweat yoga, and fat burning party launched at the press conference are the further development of Keep on self-developed IP. explore. In addition to recorded classes, Keep’s current live classes have also covered 8 am to 10 pm.
As for “opening up”, Keep said that 3,000 athletes have settled on the platform, including Pamela, Xiao Ma, and Saturday Ye, who are on fire on content platforms such as Station B and Xiaohongshu. At the same time, overseas content IPs such as Zumba and Laimei have also been introduced.
Keep’s determination is obvious. Prior to this, user feedback about the various messy entrances of the Keep App interface was by no means a few, and the updated App 7.0 version absolutely reserved the home page for “content”, and the “mall” including sports consumer goods was brought to the end. unit.
“Users can better find courses that meet their own needs on the homepage, and the efficiency of searching has become higher.” Peng Wei said. From “I want to show users everything” to the refreshing interface with content-oriented, the goal that Keep wants to achieve the most now is very clear.
For another link hardware product, Keep made it clear that technology will be the next trend in hardware products.
Take this smart spinning bike C1 Pro as an example. It broke the price range of Keep’s control of related categories at around 2,000 yuan and reached 4,999 yuan. The main reason was the addition of a 21.5-inch screen and a number of smarter ones. Interactive features.
The highlight of the screen is the ability to switch between the bicycle interface and the App interface system by flipping. Users can also participate in other recorded and broadcast classes and exercises while using the bicycle.
In addition, 80% of Keep’s spinning users will practice with live classes. In the past, when the coach reminded to increase the resistance, the user was required to twist it manually, and the C1 Pro added the ETM electromagnetic control system, which would intelligently adjust the resistance of the bicycle according to the rhythm of the music under the coach’s preset, and also combined with the user’s day The status is adjusted.
Of course, as one of the implementation paths of the open motion platform, the opening of Keep hardware products will be reflected in the connection of data.
“In terms of hardware, we have also connected to nearly 20 manufacturers, including Huawei, and all data can be interconnected.” said Liu Dong, a partner and vice president of Keep, who is mainly responsible for the sports consumer goods business. “So The current Keep experience, including content and data, has become richer and diversified, and we are evolving towards platformization.”
Keep 3.0 How to commercialize
As a startup company that has recently completed $360 million in Series F financing and frequently reported IPO plans, Keep is obviously no longer the age of storytelling, but has to go to its own sustainable ecology and healthy business model every step of the way. Move closer.
Are content and hardware good business?
The outside world has no way of knowing the scale of Keep’s investment in content research and development and hardware products, but Liu Dong said in an interview that the main investment directions of financing just completed include live lessons, premium content IP, international content IP, and intelligent hardware AIoT.
According to Huang Jingjing, vice president of Keep, the commercial value of content is divided into three levels: the first is to help brands establish communication and contact with users to reduce customer acquisition costs; second, it is part of the service, which can also be said to support The basis of membership scale; third, it can bring brand premiums.
The return on content seems to be difficult to measure at present. The recorded and live broadcast lessons on Keep retain some of the free content and package the rest into membership rights. Although the compound interest of content products is extremely high, it is clear that both rely on users’ recognition of the value of membership rights. How to design Keep’s membership products to continue to attract users is also a difficult point.
In fact, when discussing “value-added business B”, Liu Dong said that it will mainly appear in online forms such as membership and paid courses. The core of this business line is content payment. When the live broadcast class was just launched, this content format was also speculated to be Keep’s touchstone on the road to content payment. However, since the live broadcast class went live in August last year, the commercial form of the live broadcast class is still being explored. It is temporarily related to membership rights. Get through instead of adopting a separate payment model.
“When we evaluate the commercial value of live lessons, we will still return to the origin of sports. For example, we will look at live broadcast data such as the user’s exercise duration to assess whether it helps users exercise.” Huang Jingjing explained, “Live If we did it for less than a year, we still have a lot of gameplay to explore, and we haven’t reached a mature state yet.”
As for the sports consumer goods business, including hardware, although its annual GMV has stabilized at a scale of one billion yuan, it has actually experienced some small disturbances in products such as konjac flour and sports underwear.
Liu Dong said frankly that Keep has also made detours on this commercialization route.
For example, when Keep was making clothing, he noticed that brands like Li Ning and FILA in the entire industry have adopted a sporty lifestyle, which is biased towards a sense of design. This attracted Keep to make the same choice, but the sense of design also means ” Non-standard products”. Looking back, Liu Donghui discovered that not only the sense of design varies from person to person, but also the fault-tolerant mechanism such as the channel capabilities of traditional clothing brands such as Li Ning that Keep does not possess-this may also be the reason for the small bumps.
“So we went back and started from functional clothing again. When you do yoga and running sports bra, you will find that the comfort of the fabric is still relatively standard.” Liu Dong said, “So this is regarded as a consumer product. We have taken a little detour, but we are still able to adjust back.”
It is not difficult to understand that Keep’s sports consumer goods will be a strong cash cow, but because of the low gross profit margin (close to the industry level), it will not become Keep’s main source of profit, satisfying multiple rounds of income generation and high gross profit margin. Payment is a weapon to improve the company’s overall profitability.
In fact, this income structure may also indirectly determine Keep’s strategy for content and hardware at this stage.
Previously, Keep stated that the company had achieved overall profitability in March 2020.
“But whether we want to continue to make profits depends on our future plans.” Liu Dong said, “We believe that we need to make some investment at this stage, because we have already made it clear from the strategic point of view that in terms of platform, content, and smart hardware Going up is to invest in this matter.”
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