The Body-Fat Scale: The First Entry Point for Life Data

On June 25, Ant Group's health AI app Afu launched a campaign called "Lose 100 Million Jin Scientifically" (a jin is half a kilogram). A body-fat scale with a list price of 99 yuan could be had for 1 fen (0.01 yuan) plus a 9.9 yuan delivery fee. More than 100,000 were claimed within 8 hours and more than 300,000 within 24. Over the next three days, 184,700 people stepped on the scale and lost a combined 102,600 jin, about 51 metric tons. Afu is a health AI app with more than 100 million users and over 15 million monthly active users, and 55% of them live in third-tier cities and below. Subtract what users pay and the delivery fee from the hardware cost, and each scale is a net investment of roughly 40 yuan (approx. $5.60). I'll work through that 40 yuan, then ask whether the loop behind it connects. What 40 yuan buys today Acquiring users for an AI app is very likely the most expensive business on the internet right now. Ad prices have been pushed up by everyone at once, and the downloads they buy don't stay: users install, try, and uninstall. The cost of a user who settles into daily activity is long past two digits. Afu has swapped the ad budget for a physical object. Once the scale arrives at the door, the app is installed, and to see the data you have to open Afu. More important, the object stands where a bathroom scale belongs and reminds you every morning that it exists, which no online touchpoint can do. For 40 yuan Afu buys a daily active user with a physical reminder, and a one-off download is the smaller part of it. These users have one more property that is easy to miss: they chose to come. Someone willing to pay a 9.9 yuan delivery fee for a body-fat scale already has a weight-management need, which is far more targeted than the general traffic ads bring in. The daily actives bought for 40 yuan are the right people from the first day. Online data is being diluted