Soul founder Zhang Lu and his team work together to create a social trend, and see what the interview says

As a social trend app today, Soul is inseparable from Soul Zhang Lu and his team. Previously, according to statistics, Soul topped the App Store social free App rankings, and won the 5th place in all free APP rankings. Today, through the earlier interview with Soul Zhang Lu, let's see how Soul Zhang Lu and his team helped Soul create social trends.

See the truth: We see the data saying that Soul's daily life is almost ten million?

Zhang Lu: Our growth is indeed very fast, but the specific number is not convenient to say for the time being.

See the truth: you guys are also downloading the first. Has Interest Social re-entered the golden track in the past few years? How did you and your team decide about social interests at the time?

Zhang Lu: Previous social products have used a single social portrait, such as A-side information such as selfies, age, and occupation. But Soul's comprehensive social portrait is multi-dimensional, and its underlying logic is based on the user's social profile, to recommend the content they like and the people they can talk about, so that they can get emotional resonance.

Soul is actually a supplement to WeChat. As an instant messaging tool, the core of WeChat is to maintain existing acquaintance relationships. But users also want to expand new social relationships, communicate with people in new circles, get more information from communication, but also self-expression, get more sense of identity from feedback, and cure loneliness. This is an underlying need of social networking, and it is also a demand that is not fully met online at present.

See the truth: I read a user survey report, and a total of 23% of users believe that WeChat does not meet their social needs. 23% means that the size of the user base is clear, so where is the boundary of Soul? What will the maximum space look like?

Zhang Lu: These surveys are limited, for example, you ask Android mobile phone users whether they meet the needs? In fact, most of the needs can be met, but when apple mobile phones with a certain differentiated experience appear, some people will choose such products, and behind this behavior is not that the needs are not met.

Social networking is an eternal demand, any product has its life cycle, intergenerational is always there, only products with a high proportion of young people will continue to grow. Young people want to be led by products to play, in other words, products are ahead of demand. The product experience gathers users and draws them into this party and group, playing in a better game.

Because this product meets the lowest level of needs, you can do as much as you want.

See the truth: Some other social products were unknown for a long time before the outbreak, but in a certain period of time, they exploded into the emerging forces in the industry. Have you ever wondered where the tipping point of the Soul outbreak is? Or does a key piece of data explode when it reaches a certain stage?

Zhang Lu: I think it should be related to two key data:

The first is equipment penetration (equipment coverage). That is, the proportion of devices with Soul on mobile phones in the population. For example, in a certain population, 40% of the equipment ownership may usher in an outbreak opportunity.

The second is the user's relationship intensity. It is possible that the number of deep relationships per capita in the DAU (Daily Active Users) will explode when it reaches a certain level.

See the truth: Soul's relationship will be divided into different types such as souler and soulmate, where users may need to communicate for half a year before they can become soulmate. How high is the threshold for becoming a soulmate in Soul, compared to other social products?

Zhang Lu: Compared with stranger social products, the threshold and cost of Soul's relationship building are very low. Compared with acquaintance social products, it will be a little worse. So, we're actually thinking about how to break out of relationship density further.

See: In terms of relationships, in what directions will you lead users? Is it an acquaintance relationship, or is it a pure interest direction?

Zhang Lu: I think interest is definitely a good direction, because interest is to obtain information as the goal, with tool-based value. For example, if I want to consult and buy a bag, I can ask the relevant experts in the group and keep in touch with them. Acquaintance direction is another dimension.

See the truth: Remember that you are from a consulting background, you should have little contact with product development, how can you pay attention to such a narrow need of young people? What was the story at the time?

Zhang Lu: The needs behind Soul are not discovered through consulting data, but an insight from the side. The story is that I want to send a thing, posted in the WeChat circle of friends may not be appropriate, sent on Weibo no one returned to me, and finally posted in the QQ space, and only visible to themselves. As a result, I feel that there are some needs that are not being met, such as free content distribution and someone interacting with me.

This demand is actually very simple. When we are young, we just send what we want to send immediately, and we express what we want to express immediately, and soon someone will interact with us. So, I thought, if I could post a piece of content anytime, anywhere, without pressure, and someone got some responses within five minutes, I would end up talking to them about it. I'm actually starting from a purely individual perspective, hoping to see a social tool that can meet this simple need.

So, I used two dimensions in Soul to meet this need: one is the way to publish content, and the second is to directly match chat. These two approaches are mutually reinforcing, and are also the underlying logic of Soul.

Soul's two paths to social relationships can be divided into two types: first, publicly posting content – receiving interactions – building relationships – more people following; Second, one-on-one sharing — building relationships through matchmaking — grabs each other's attention. This is the same logic as WeChat, but the relationship on WeChat is imported offline, and Soul is distributed through big data to distribute relationships and content, so that users can get a fast interactive experience.

Therefore, I hope that Soul will not only have a peer-to-peer relationship in the future, but present a network of relationships, based on user portraits and AI technology, and finally become a social platform full of identity.

See the truth: When we discussed the data inside Tencent at that time, we found that more than 90% of the user tags were similar to each other such as love food, music, and travel. In other words, most users rarely label it as truly personalized. How do you pull out different, personalized labels?

Zhang Lu: We never rely on users' self-labels, because users do not have the frequency of maintaining "moments" or other behaviors on the platform when it comes to setting and maintaining labels. Therefore, the social tags we master are not marked by the users themselves, but are mined from the user's behavior.

See the truth: usually social relationships will go from two directions, one direction is to precipitate down into a strong relationship, the other direction of the weak relationship is easy to be abandoned, users turn to find new points of interest. From the perspective of product operation, how to attract users to continue to operate their relationships? At the same time, how to keep users' activity on Soul within a certain controllable range, rather than moving to other products such as WeChat?

Zhang Lu: In fact, these weak relationships are always in the process of demise. On the one hand, such a process reduces the cost of maintaining relationships; On the other hand, the cost of building a new relationship will also be low, so if they can't form their own strong relationship, they will open a new relationship, which is a long-term state.

Because no one thinks they've got enough information and friends. Today's young people's perceptual tentacles are open, they are not only concerned about the life in front of them, but also want more new information, observe the lifestyles of other young people, and socialize with curiosity. Soul provides a social platform that allows them to constantly access new information and find more new relationships.

See: How can you define it as living?

Zhang Lu: Life is more of a decentralized circle of friends content, topics can include movies, games, music, sports, diaries, pets and other interesting content, but there are few jobs, acquaintances, stock speculation or self-media attributes.

See the truth: In terms of products, what are the completely different starting points for Soul compared with WeChat and QQ?

Zhang Lu: Weak relationships have advantages and disadvantages. The downside is that the relationship is not very stable. The advantage lies in the fact that social pressure is small, social networking is more lifelike, and it is easier to get rid of the limitations of the circle layer, find people with similar interests online, and then generate deep relationships.

For example, most of the in-depth conversations between acquaintances occur offline, and the communication between online circles of friends may be relatively shallow. However, because there is no conflict of interest in weak relationships, it is not afraid of others to leak secrets, making it easier to communicate deeply online.

See the truth: For example, the launch of functions such as "group chat party" and "soul matching" in the planet plate will attract more users to use it?

Zhang Lu: These functions are only auxiliary function iterations, not as big as the magnitude of sending "moments" and chatting. They are all around the underlying logic I just said, which is convenient for users to get more efficient expression and faster interaction, but the scene is different. It's hard to see a spike in users on social products, but group chats can be a feature that raises the level of activity.

See: What will be the direction of your development in the future?

Zhang Lu: First, I just mentioned some. The second is that the general direction is to develop from the perspective of an open social platform. Users can find the content they want and the people they want to associate with, the function cold start faster and more accurate, the efficiency of the recommendation function becomes higher.

See the truth: How many users does Soul naturally add every day without delivery?

Zhang Lu: Our growth rate is indeed very fast, but the specific data is not convenient to write.

See the truth: What is the churn rate of newly registered users when they experience product guidance? Is there a more efficient strategy for tagging users? Like a recommendation algorithm?

Zhang Lu: Yes, the recommendation algorithm will be the core of the next step, and we will eventually go to the big middle stage, using data to drive, which may be very similar to today's headlines, including using data to accelerate the cold start of a function.

We believe that user activity is a retained contribution, and we can increase the overall user activity by increasing user retention or reducing user churn. Because the total number of people is limited, only by infinitely improving the efficiency of user browsing, interaction, discovering new relationships, establishing new relationships and maintaining new relationships can we continuously improve user retention.

See: What is Soul's current monthly net income?

Zhang Lu: We only started to pay from October last year, under the current DAU volume, the monthly income is indeed very impressive, but the specific number is temporarily inconvenient to the outside world.

See the truth: what is the grayscale test, user and market acceptance?

Zhang Lu: The grayscale test is currently only carried out in-house.

See the truth: Soul's core goal now is to do user growth, do you and investors set over-long-term or short-term goals?

Zhang Lu: In fact, investors have not set goals for us, we have our own ROI model, under the premise of knowing LTV, we can calculate the cost of customer acquisition in our acceptable range, and we can fully earn it back. In this case, as long as we can raise money, we can increase the amount indefinitely.

See the truth: Soul's daily life and income today usually quickly attract huge amounts of capital to quickly follow. So, soon there will be big financing announcements?

Zhang Lu: Our data is very good, we will always focus on products, good service users, specific capital we are not convenient to announce to the public, thank you for your attention.

See the truth: After you get the money, will you go to a lot of new and promote?

Zhang Lu: No, I haven't done it yet, I want to take another look. The first is to look at the density of relationships, such as whether there is a network relationship after the introduction of some new features. The second is to see whether the efficiency of the recommendation algorithm is high enough.

The above is part of the interview, from the above dialogue, it is not difficult to see that Soul Zhang Lu and his team have a clear plan for Soul's situation and development trend. At the same time, they have also been insightful into the social needs of young people and are ready to update Soul at any time, so that It is not difficult for Soul to pay attention to the needs of users to become a social App with nearly 10 million daily lives. Let us look forward to the social trend created by Soul Zhang Lu and his team for young people, and I believe it will bring different surprises!

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