Author｜Wu Sijin
Editor｜Wang Yutong
36氪 was informed that FORK AI, which is positioned on the MarTech track and focuses on providing intelligent customer acquisition services for cloud service providers, recently announced a Pre-A round of financing of tens of millions of RMB exclusively invested by Oasis Capital.
In the process of developing software, enterprise or individual developers, in addition to developing specific functions according to their own intentions, will directly use free open source SDKs for some general functions, or purchase related SDKs from cloud service providers.
The full name of SDK (Software Development Kit) is a software development kit, which is a collection of related documents, examples and tools developed by different types of cloud service providers for a certain type of software; enterprise or individual developers install third-party SDKs through APIs , to avoid repeated development of common functions and shorten the development cycle.
Take the following picture as an example. The Xiaohongshu application developed by enterprise developers uses 3 SDKs from cloud service provider Tencent. Among them, Tencent QQ SDK and Tencent WeChat SDK respectively implement the function of supporting the use of their account to log in to Xiaohongshu; Tencent Bugly SDK has the function of monitoring application bugs.
Source: Fork Stack Intelligent Customer Acquisition Engine Product Screenshot
FORK AI reported in this article has built a cloud-native general-purpose SaaS-Fork Stack intelligent customer acquisition engine, aiming to solve the problem of accurate customer acquisition for cloud service providers. The reason for choosing this track is related to the work experience of FORK AI founder He Lishi. He worked as a commercial product manager and customer success leader in Qiniu Cloud, a third-party independent cloud computing and data service, in the process of supporting the sales team. Among them, he found that the current mainstream sales funnel customer acquisition method and the technical gap between sales and customer technical leaders have become important factors restricting the efficiency of cloud service providers in customer acquisition.
The mainstream customer acquisition method is that cloud service providers mainly obtain sales leads by placing advertisements in SEM (search engine marketing) and DSP (demand-side platform), and salesmen claim customers from CRM and inquire about purchasing needs one by one; Accurate, leading to waste of human resources and low sales efficiency.
The technical gap is that due to the complexity of cloud service technology, it is often difficult for primary sales to accurately grasp the actual needs of enterprise developers, forming an embarrassing situation in which the technical person in charge is often difficult to choose when facing the service plan provided by the sales.
Based on the above pain points, the Fork Stack intelligent customer acquisition engine breaks the technical gap between cloud service providers and technical leaders of enterprise developers through data mining and reverse disassembly of the SDK distribution and API changes behind the application. Service providers can accurately locate the needs of developers, and combine industrial and commercial information to assist in judging sales opportunities to improve customer acquisition efficiency.
Specifically, the Fork Stack intelligent customer acquisition engine covers 5 major application stores. Through data mining and reverse application disassembly technology, it analyzes the SDK and API behind the application, and visually displays how many applications and distributions a company has developed. In which app stores, the SDK composition statistics of each app and which cloud service provider the SDK belongs to; and the SDK installation and uninstallation changes of the app are presented according to the time dimension, so as to monitor the application’s demand for cloud services.
Source: Fork Stack Intelligent Customer Acquisition Engine Product Screenshot
“The value of this model lies in helping cloud service providers focus their customer acquisition from massive clues to more than 8 million applications from 2.5 million developers in five major app stores through the logic of accurate customer acquisition.” He Lishi introduced .
For the marketing department, multi-dimensional data can be combined and filtered to conduct industry analysis and generate developer customer leads. Including accurate statistics on the market share of cloud service providers’ SDK products in the field and competitor customer profiles, market distribution analysis, and mining the next market growth point of enterprise products; at the same time, it supports the construction and export of target customer groups and competitor customers. List and performance analysis.
For the sales department, it can screen the distribution of applications owned by different developers and analyze the changes in the application rankings of target developers to estimate the changes in downloads; view the SDK composition and the analysis of existing SDK cloud service providers to infer changes in cloud service demand. And volume, customized sales strategy.
For the customer success department, it can understand the market performance and SDK dynamics of developer customers in real time, and formulate operational strategies such as renewal, repurchase, and recall.
Compared with the practice of existing professional research companies through research interviews and desktop research, the advantages of the Fork Stack intelligent engine are reflected in the comprehensiveness, objectivity and real-time nature of data display.
In addition, the developer details page can also help cloud service providers combine business and industrial information to assist in judging sales opportunities and improve sales efficiency.
According to He Lishi, “Different from the traditional sales funnel to acquire customers, FORK AI is currently the only company on the market that uses standardized products to improve customer acquisition efficiency for cloud service providers on a large scale.” This method is good, but from a different perspective It means that the market space is small and market education will be difficult. To this end, He Lishi expressed his views:
First of all, it is true that because the method is too new, it takes a lot of introduction to recommend products, but once cloud service providers understand the product logic, it is easy to accept.
Secondly, the FORK AI team has a deep understanding and insight into the needs of cloud service providers. At present, the product model has basically worked and passed the practical verification of several customers. It has accumulated experience in industry Know-How, technology and service experience. considerable experience.
Again, in the future, FORK AI will continue to increase the standardization of the cloud service supply chain, open up bilateral needs, provide developers with security analysis services for cloud service providers, and finally achieve a model similar to BOSS’s direct employment between supply and demand parties. Promote the sales conversion of cloud service providers.
At present, FORK AI uses SaaS subscription fees as its main source of income, including enterprise customization services and personal subscription services, and charges according to the amount of data for enterprise customization services. Last year, it has achieved revenue of nearly one million, and the unit price is about 300,000, and all of them have been renewed again.
On the team, there are less than 20 members of FORK AI, which is still in its initial stage, mainly from outstanding cloud computing companies at home and abroad, outstanding open source communities, network security experts, etc., with an average industry experience of more than 10 years.
According to reports, this round of funds is used to upgrade products and expand commercialization. In addition to its own sales channels, FORK AI will also use CRM manufacturers as channels to expand customers.
investors say
The person in charge of Oasis Capital Investment said: “Everyone is familiar with the use of data by consumer Internet companies to accurately acquire customers. Although enterprise services are flourishing, the actual customer acquisition of a large number of companies is still in the extensive stage. FORK AI has seized the opportunity to use data to improve insight into customer needs. The key. He Lishi was a member of the early stage entrepreneurial team of Qiniuyun. He has many years of experience in domestic enterprise service companies and insights into the development of global enterprise services. Oasis looks forward to growing and empowering the FORK AI team with a global vision. Corporate Services.”
Yang Yang, vice president of Xianfeng Evergreen, said: “In the long run, under the background of the rapid growth in the penetration rate of cloud services in China, the number of cloud infrastructure companies will continue to increase in the future. Great asymmetry. FORK AI’s original demand mining matching engine presents customers with complete cloud service supply chain information, helping enterprises to develop markets more efficiently and at low cost. As an early evangelist of Qiniu Cloud, Li Shi has witnessed the development of cloud services in China With its rise and an international perspective, we believe that FORK AI will soon become a standard growth tool in the global cloud service field.”
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