By turning emotional engagement into revenue, the CEO of Soul App, Zhang Lu, has managed to achieve what many in the social networking industry hope for. The company has impressive figures to show for all the effort that goes into serving the app’s primary audience exactly what they seek. Yet, it can be emphatically stated that commercializing emotional value is hardly a straightforward process.
This is one of the reasons why so many of Soul’s competitors have failed to achieve comparable results. Platforms often tend to doggedly pursue profits with measures that are all too obvious and an instant turn off for a generation that is seeking emotional validation. An example of this would be aggressive paywalls; these create transactional friction and, in the process, end up undermining trust in social environments.
Given Soul Zhang Lu’s acute understanding of Gen Z’s mindset, her platform never took this in-your-face approach. Instead, Soul shunned access restrictions in favor of optional enhancements. The idea was to allow users to purchase virtual goods, avatar customizations, and premium social features using the platform’s virtual currency, Soul Coins.
While these purchases do not function as utilities, they do double up as symbolic extensions of a user’s digital identity. This raises the question, but is anybody actually paying for something like this? Well, to answer that question, it is important to delve into the psyche of Zoomers who happen to be among Soul Zhang Lu’s most prolific user bases.
When serving millennials and Gen X, digital product design was guided by a relatively narrow set of priorities: speed, efficiency, retention, and growth. But Gen Z has flipped this roadmap on its head. Zoomers spend increasing portions of their lives inside digital environments.
Add to this the stressors that these youngsters have to face each day, and it’s easy to explain why emotional value has gained phenomenal importance. In fact, emotional experience is no longer at the periphery of product thinking. It now squarely sits at its center as products are no longer judged solely by what they allow users to do, but by how they make users feel while doing it and how long those feelings last.
Hence, instead of positioning the platform as another social network competing for visibility or influence, Soul Zhang Lu built it around emotional resonance as a core product principle, and this strategy is now yielding tangible financial results.
Per the company's filings for its Hong Kong IPO, AI-driven emotional value services, including virtual goods and memberships, accounted for more than 90 percent of Soul App’s revenue in the first eight months of 2025. Plus, average monthly revenue per paying user reached RMB 104.4, and this certainly isn’t a one-off occurrence. If anything, a recent study conducted by Soul Zhang Lu’s team and the Shanghai Youth Research Center proved that there is plenty more from where that comes. Of the platform’s young users who participated in this survey:
These figures seem all the more remarkable when viewed against the backdrop of the fact that for the post-00s generation (aged 21-25), digital consumption is the highest monthly spending category. In other words, Soul Zhang Lu has found both the consumer base and the service they crave.
And if that is not enough, the emotionally resonant platform design of Soul ensures consumer retention. This is evident in the fact that nearly 80% of the platform’s daily active users are zoomers. Another factor to consider is that as engagement increases, emotional data feeds back into the platform’s recommendation systems, refining its understanding of user preferences.
Simply put, the design of Soul Zhang Lu’s platform allows for the creation of feedback loops capable of cultural amplification. An example of this is the surge in discussion around Labubu collectibles on the platform. In the second quarter of 2025, such discussions increased by a massive 3,100 percent year over year, which is a clear indication of the fact that emotional consumption trends migrate rapidly into online spaces. This, too, keeps users glued to the ecosystem.
So, it comes as no surprise that Soul has been consistently profitable since 2023. In 2024, the company’s adjusted net profits were RMB 337 million, while in the first 8 months of 2025, the platform raked in RMB 286 million. In terms of annual revenues, the platform reported earnings of RMB 2.211 billion in 2024.
These figures suggest that when emotional value is treated as a core design metric, it can support both scale and sustainability. To cut a long story short, while commercializing emotional value may not be a simple task, Soul Zhang Lu has shown that it is possible to align product design, AI infrastructure, and monetization around emotional demand.
