Keep, which sprints to the "first stock of sports technology", is difficult to define

A few days ago, the sports technology company Keep publicly submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, intending to sprint to the "first share of sports technology".

Founded in 2014, Keep initially positioned as an "online fitness APP", successfully attracted core users in the fitness vertical field with the role of "mobile fitness coach", and seized the opportunity of the online fitness market in the stage of vigorous development of the Internet, established nine rounds of financing in seven years, held high to seize market share, and finally became a super online fitness platform with more than 300 million users.

As the head platform of the vertical field, Keep's impact on the first share of sports technology has attracted a lot of external attention and discussion. As the "first share", there is no clear benchmarking enterprise in China, and its business model and future growth space have become the most concerned issues for the outside world.

Constantly evolving and iterating, keep out of the circle of ambitions

At the beginning of the launch, Keep was a "good use of the movement tool" for users. At that time, young people had a large number of fitness needs, but the market lacked systematic, professional knowledge supply, Keep aimed at the market gap, through the App to provide free training courses, circled the first batch of seed users, accumulated traffic, and in just one year to obtain 30 million users.

After getting positive with good online content, Keep sees the diverse needs of users for sports. To this end, Keep upgrades the content of online courses, broadens categories, launches a customized intelligent training plan "member service", and extends the content advantages to offline, opens Keepland, and launches smart hardware and other sports consumer goods around the user's "eating, wearing and practicing" life consumption scenarios, with content as the core and products as the carrier to provide users with a more diversified sports experience.

On the basis of user scale and business service scale, Keep hopes to provide users with better sports services and create higher value. Keep sees that its most core users are in the crowd of home sports, so in 2020, it will fully focus on the family sports scene, and through the provision of one-stop sports solutions, meet the full needs of users from the sports chain such as sports awareness, equipment, content and social networking, forming a closed loop of services.

At the latest public strategy conference, Keep announced that it will enter the third stage of development: through continuous upgrading of content and products, the introduction of live broadcast forms, etc., to enhance the user's sports experience, reduce the sports threshold, increase user stickiness, enhance the willingness to pay with a good experience, and break through the commercial ceiling.

In August of the same year, Keep officially announced Yi Yi qianxi as the brand spokesperson and made a new interpretation of the brand spirit of "self-discipline gives me freedom": to exercise, but also to be happy. The deep meaning behind the "happy movement" must be the "generalization and out of the circle" of sports and fitness - to achieve the "national movement", then the "elitist" tendency of fitness must be disenchanted.

Combing the path of Keep's development, it is not difficult to understand the original intention of the exploration of this vein:

In the depth of product services, by providing high value-added sports content such as live classes and customized training plans, it can serve the core circle users, and by providing more value-added services, it can increase user stickiness, enhance the willingness to pay, and increase the unit price of customers and increase the VALUE of ARPU - the prospectus shows that members and online paid content are the most profitable parts of Keep's business lines.

In the horizontal expansion of services, Keep through the expansion of consumer goods business, open offline gyms, on the one hand, continue to cover the "pan-demand" of fitness users in addition to the core fitness needs (sports content) - diet, dressing and small equipment that can be used during exercise, on the other hand, in addition to maintaining the family fitness scene, the tentacles will be extended to the urban scene and even more general outdoor scenes: a few days ago, it cooperated with offline gyms to launch a 49 yuan group exercise class, and "tentative" during the Winter Olympics. Launched a series of winter sports, ice and snow sports related courses.

Obviously, Keep does not want to be limited to the family scene, and wants to "go out of the circle" to achieve greater scale ambitions, which is very obvious.

The Chinese version of Peloton? Keep doesn't stop there

By combing through the iterative process of Keep since its launch, it is not difficult to find that the current Keep business covers a wide range of aspects: the content business that provides online sports content, the consumer goods business that provides sports-related products (including smart hardware, health food and other fitness equipment, etc.), and the offline gym that provides group exercise classes.

Such a business layout, for Keep, can cover all the direct and indirect services generated by the sports and fitness population based on the "fitness" needs. However, this also creates an immediate conundrum:

In the field of content, content platforms such as b station and Xiaohongshu have made efforts to build fitness content; in the field of intelligent hardware, its competitors are not only elite players such as Apple bracelets, but also strong competitors such as Xiaomi and Huawei that have fully occupied market share in the hardware field; in the field of sportswear, Nike, Adi, Anta, Li Ning and even lululemon, which has gradually become popular in recent years, are players who are difficult to shake; in the field of more subdivided fitness food, there are also subdivision competitors such as Wang Fengfeng...

This has become an important reason for the external expression of "not understanding" Keep: there is no company that can fully benchmark, but Keep does have a number of competitors.

At one time, Keep was labeled "China's version of Peloton", citing the "content + hardware" business model: through hardware terminals such as bicycles to reach and interact with users, and through paid content to generate long-term links with users. It is also because of this that Peloton's stock price has risen and fallen, and it has also had a direct impact on the external judgment of Keep.

In fact, there are considerable pattern differences between Keep and Peloton. First of all, from the macro environment, Peloton's North American market, the crowd fitness awareness is high, the market is mature, Peloton does not need to make too much investment in market education - at the same time, this also means that how to achieve the growth of the relatively saturated market, but also need to explore. This is also an objective reason for the recent decline in Peloton's stock price.

Keep is facing a nascent market, more and more people are being stimulated by macro policies, objective epidemics, subjective needs "troika" to stimulate fitness awareness, at the same time, the rise of young, upward, consumerable people, for Keep to provide more imagination. Whether it is from the current density of products and services, or the gushing demand, Keep's market prospects are not the same as Peloton.

Secondly, in terms of service model, Peloton is bottom-up, that is, from hardware to user development, starting with bicycle hardware, and on this basis, the terminal is used as a tentacle for content development and coverage. Keep, on the other hand, is top-down, grabbing users through content and then expanding other services such as hardware. Obviously, many players in the market are currently taking the previous path, which is undoubtedly more labor-saving and faster, but the first content and harder road chosen by Keep is a path of deep cultivation and slow return. As an industry expert said, "If the product can reach the user, from the bottom up to win, then NIKE, Adidas has already won." ”

Third, in addition to digging deep into the fitness content and covering the full cycle of exercise needs, Keep has a longer-term plan: to create a light social sense. The platform actively encourages users to punch in the results of fitness, use the sharing desire of young groups, and establish a user growth system - this practice is not to really let users directly produce social behavior, but to let them form a sense of companionship and pk. As we all know, the behavior of sports is inherently competitive, and this "fitness + pk" model improves the user's exercise enthusiasm, indirectly improves the exercise time and user stickiness, and lays the foundation for future membership conversion and intelligent fitness equipment sales.

Since the development of China's Internet, whether it is a large factory or a small player who explores and cultivates in the vertical field, the service model will eventually have its own path even if it originates from Europe and the United States. Tencent to ICQ, Alibaba to eBay, Weibo to Twitter, no less. The same is true of Keep, which is similar to the Peroton service field and the needs of the crowd, and cannot be simply and crudely equated with "xx version of xx".

When the Peloton market is good, the media calls Keep China's Peloton; when the Peloton market is not good, the media also calls Peloton China's Keep, but just like the strategy and attitude of China and the United States against the epidemic are different, Keep and Peloton may have the same destination, but the core is different after all.

Of course, from the perspective of service ideas, keep and Peloton's "industry change" in their respective markets is very similar to the social significance. Although the two parties enter the market in different ways, they ultimately point in the same direction: reach a large fitness group with growth potential, output a more full-link sports solution for them, and in the process let them get a better experience and harvest the positive feedback brought by sports.

To be more specific, from the perspective of the entire family sports market, Peloton has changed the cognition and habits of the North American sports population in just a few years, and has also completed the reshaping of the US fitness market pattern - similarly, in the Chinese market, I believe that Keep, which already has hundreds of millions of users and is more focused on service quality, will inevitably bring real innovative changes to this developing market in the future.

In addition, more importantly, Keep's "innovative change" has a more tangible user insight and realization path, that is, to make sports simpler and happier.