Text | Cheng Yicheng
Editor | Wang Yutong
36氪 was informed that the cooperative SaaS service provider “Xiankaidian” recently completed a Pre-A round of financing of tens of millions of yuan, led by SIG Haina Asia Venture Capital Fund, and the old shareholder Shunwei Capital joined the investment. Prior to this, Xiangkaidian received tens of millions of yuan in investment led by Shunwei Capital last year, Yingdong Capital and Challenger Ventures. This round of funds will be used for product iteration, service team building and new business development.
From 2008 to 2018, domestic chain brands represented by catering experienced a 10-year period of rapid growth. It is understood that the sales scale of the top 100 chain enterprises increased from 1.2 trillion yuan in 2008 to 2.4 trillion yuan in 2018. The extensive and rapid growth of offline chains has also brought about the rapid development of franchise chains. After 2019, the impact of the epidemic gradually made offline chain brands realize the importance of risk diversification. When epidemic prevention has become the norm of life, the form of franchising has also become the first choice for offline brands to achieve market expansion and diversify operating costs. In this context, franchise SaaS services with the goal of improving franchise management efficiency emerge as the times require, providing franchise brands with a one-stop shop for business scenarios such as store preparation, purchase ordering, operation supervision, marketing activities, learning and training, and customer service work orders. SaaS solution.
As a franchise collaboration SaaS service provider ( 36 krypton has previously reported ), its predecessor is an investment joining docking platform that provides a direct chat mode for brands and franchisees. In 2020, the SaaS product of Xiangkaidian was officially launched, and the information gap between the brand and the franchisee was eliminated through the products of 6 major modules, including new store establishment, purchase order, operation supervision, marketing activities, learning and training, and customer service work orders. It is understood that in 2021, the Xiangkaidian SaaS service will be officially commercialized. At present, Xiangkai Store has served more than 200 chain brands, and the number of online stores has exceeded 30,000. The main customer representatives are catering brands such as Hot Halo Shiguang, Zigulu Mixed Noodles, Shaye Light Food, and Cool Food Tower. In addition, the SaaS product also provides services for pan-franchised brands such as retail, life services, and leisure and entertainment.
Dai Zheming, founder of Xiangkaidian, said: In the entire franchise chain industry, communication, collaboration and management between brand headquarters and franchisees heavily rely on WeChat groups. The information is messy and unstructured, which is prone to wrangling and disputes. , the services they provide cannot be traced and quantified in the communication with franchisees, resulting in frequent rights protection and lawsuits; in addition, the ability of the brand headquarters focuses on investment promotion and core supply chain provision. The order optimization required in the actual operation of the store, operations, marketing, and training support are lacking in manpower or capacity.
Based on the above pain points in the industry, Dai Zheming’s team wrote the first line of code for the SaaS product of Xiangkaidian in 2020.
At present, the product form of Xiangkaidian is mainly divided into two parts: one is a franchise chain collaboration tool represented by SaaS, and the other is based on collaboration scenarios to connect services and supply chains for brands and franchisees. The former is based on the business middle platform, and realizes the standardized management of all links through functions such as preparation, operation, marketing, training, and work orders. The latter is to connect resources for brands and franchisees in terms of investment leads, store marketing, crowdsourcing store tours, equipment maintenance, non-core supply chains, etc., and reduce procurement costs through long-tail centralized procurement.
Different from the POS system products from the perspective of many stores in the market, Enjoy Open Store provides one-stop SaaS tool products from the “headquarters perspective” of franchise chains, “understands franchise business”, and connects the services required by brands and franchisees.
From the perspective of business model, Xiangkaidian mainly provides SaaS services to brands, and brands pay license fees according to the number of stores. As of October 2022, customers in the catering industry account for about 50%-60%, retail brands account for about 20%, life service brands (pets, dry cleaning, wedding photography, etc.) and leisure and entertainment brands (Internet cafes, script killing, etc.) etc.) each accounted for about 10%.
Talking about the impact of the epidemic on catering franchise chains in the past two years, Dai Zheming believes: “The act of opening a franchise has entrepreneurial risks, and closing a store is an unavoidable objective law; but from the perspective of a brand’s life cycle, closing a store At the same time, new stores will also be added; from the perspective of the brand management company behind it, even if the brand life cycle is approaching the end, the brand’s parent company will immediately create a new brand. Therefore, the actual use of SaaS will not decrease. , only with the growth of the market chain trend, the market will become larger. At the same time, Xiangkaidian has added investment CRM and customer extension modules on the tool side, precise positioning and one-click customer acquisition, helping brands to obtain more franchise income; On the service side, it has also improved the construction of the service ecosystem, reduced potential losses, strengthened competitiveness and brand stickiness, and resulted in a rapid increase in the proportion of service transaction revenue.”
In terms of team, the founder Dai Zheming has many years of work and entrepreneurial experience in the field of IT consulting and SaaS, and led the team to incubate a number of offline chain projects, with management experience in multiple categories and hundreds of stores. Co-founder and CTO Li Cheng used to be the product manager of Shanda Innovation Institute, and later founded Neitui.com to obtain investment from Innovation Workshop and Panwei Network; co-founder Wang Zebo used to be the operation director and product manager of Wangyu Internet Cafe, with thousands of stores operating and joining. Management experience; co-founder Li Ning was a senior consultant of Microsoft enterprise solutions, and later served as the head of the middle office of the channel fast construction business of the investment promotion service company.
Under the epidemic, offline chain enterprises are experiencing many challenges, whether they are direct sales or franchises. On the one hand, as the franchise collaboration SaaS service has become popular in the market, the management and control of the franchise chain industry has begun to be standardized, and the efficiency of franchise management has also been improved; on the other hand, the franchise collaboration SaaS is not suitable for complex supply chains, reputation and experience. It is impossible to replace the chain headquarters to complete the intensive management of directly-operated stores. In general, except for a very small number of large-scale and large-scale franchise brands like Zhou Hei Ya and Ruixing, most domestic franchise brands are still in a state of groping forward in the dark.
In the next few years, problems such as unreasonable fees charged by franchise brands, disputes between headquarters and franchisees, and the thunderbolt of celebrity endorsement franchise models will still exist objectively, which will also restrict the development of the franchise market. While calling for the introduction of stricter supervision measures for the franchise chain market, as part of the franchise business format, franchise collaboration SaaS service providers like Xiangkaidian also need to find a balance between regulating the market order and broadening the market boundaries.
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Related events
- “Xiankaidian” completed tens of millions of yuan in Pre-A round of financing, led by SIG Haina Asia Venture Capital Fund2022-10-17
- Join the collaboration SaaS tool “Xiankaidian” to complete a new round of financing of tens of millions of yuan2021-11-10
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