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Source: Node Finance (ID: Node Finance)
A few years ago before stepping down as CEO of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming spent most of his time on recruiting. It is said that he knows Baidu better than Robin Li. Every week he interviews a large number of engineers from Baidu, the relationship between Baidu team members, who He knew who he was having trouble with, and what kind of supervisor came recently.
The team is the core asset of enterprise operation that Zhang Yiming cares about very much. He once said: “A good CEO should also be a good HR”. This idea also runs through Feishu’s latest product positioning.
At the end of May, Feishu held the Spring Future Infinite Conference online and officially released the Feishu People series products. The biggest change is that Feishu People has opened up Feishu Personnel, Feishu Recruitment, Feishu Performance and Feishu OKRs. event management system.
Xie Xin, CEO of Feishu, said, “Feishu People has been built for many years, and it is a full-cycle solution around the ‘people’ in the organization. Through the application of Feishu People, we hope to enable managers to have a panoramic view of talent management and enable talents Maximize the value and minimize the difficulty of management.”
Behind the inclusion of human management in the scope is Feishu’s new thinking in the field of collaborative office: how to fly higher on this tens of billions track?
Free is obviously not the path Feishu chose. Although projects represented by Dingding quickly entered the market through a free model, Feishu is more inclined to acquire B-end customers. This means that Feishu’s top priority is not to do monthly work, but to do paid conversions.
Taking off in 2019, Feishu has debuted as a rising star. If you want to quickly share more market space, you still need to face three problems: traffic, products, and market competition. Only by figuring out the ideas of these three questions can Feishu fly a little higher.
/ 01 /
The question of traffic
How do rising stars acquire B-end customers and realize their profits?
From a team of 30 people who rented a residential house on Zhichun Road to a team of over 100,000 employees in AVIC Plaza on Zhichun Road, the growth of ByteDance is astonishing. In ten years, Zhang Yiming won a very efficient victory. .
With the huge enterprise team, in order to improve office efficiency, ByteDance has also used a variety of OA products successively. For example, in the earliest stage in 2012, ByteDance chose Skype, the pioneer of the video calling era.
Skype once swept the world and was a well-deserved star product. However, the biggest drawback of this product is that it is still technically unable to support mobile devices. The user experience is not good, so ByteDance employees will still choose WeChat to communicate with colleagues for a long time.
When an enterprise develops to a certain stage, internal information and data need to be kept confidential, and Byte also needs a more secure software product for internal coordination, communication and data retention. This time, ByteDance has purchased Salesforce. Salesforce is the founder of CRM software, and it has also opened up the cloud service track of SaaS/PaaS. teacher.
However, Salesforce, which does not understand Chinese business, has not developed well in the Chinese market. ByteDance has since changed its internal collaboration system to DingTalk. It was not until 2017 that ByteDance finally developed the predecessor of Feishu, LarK. Initially, this product was used by the internal efficiency engineering team, and then gradually expanded to the entire byte.
Until 2019, Feishu, which has been internally verified, began to open to the market. At that time, Dingding from Alibaba and microenterprises from Tencent had been running wild for several years, especially Dingding, which quickly conquered the market through marketing strategies such as free and C-end. The first question is how to attract users.
After Dingding entered the market, it attracted a large number of users through the free model. For a long time, the enterprise service track has placed great emphasis on payment, but Dingding is backed by Ali, and the emphasis is not only on monetization, but also on traffic. Through this unexpected free game, DingTalk has absorbed many small and medium-sized users beyond imagination, and it has also killed the Quartet on the C-end. During the epidemic in 2020, DingTalk punched in for primary and middle school students, and was given one star by students. DingTalk’s official website “begged for mercy”. Through this incident, DingTalk became famous and established a strong brand on both the C and B terminals.
In fact, the emergence of DingTalk has caused a lot of shock to the field of enterprise-level services. For a long time, payment and repurchase are the core indicators for considering enterprise service projects. However, the emergence of Dingding has affected many projects. At one time, many projects in the industry followed the free model of Dingding to carry out business, but soon, this road was proved to be unfeasible. Traditional enterprise service projects do not survive without fees.
Feishu, who is also endorsed by major Internet companies, thinks more clearly that since the launch, Byte’s positioning of Feishu is to take B-end users as the main customer group. And this also means that Feishu, which does not engage in traffic gameplay, needs to work hard on the conversion rate of commercialization and payment.
If you want to take this road, Feishu needs to persevere for a long time. Enterprise-level service is a value track recognized by investors, but it is also a long-term track. A relatively easy to understand point is that the larger the enterprise, the lower the frequency of replacement when choosing a certain enterprise service software or product. And they are more inclined to choose products that are on the top.
This also leads to the fact that enterprise service projects require long-term cultivation in order to reap the benefits.
Regarding the commercialization progress of Feishu, as early as 2020, Zhang Nan, president of Byte, revealed to the media that the to-B market in China is just emerging, and the commercialization prospect should be seen in five to ten years. “Is Feishu profitable at this stage? What we care about the most.”
Now, after three years of exploration, the commercialization of Feishu may already be in the pipeline. At the end of last year, it was reported later that ByteDance’s corporate collaborative office platform Lark (overseas version of Feishu) will accelerate the progress of overseas commercialization in 2022, and set a global revenue target of 6 billion within five years.
Improving efficiency is the primary reason for enterprises to use collaborative office software, and this demand has gradually evolved into efficiency + management over time. It can be said that the growth trajectory of Feishu in the past is in line with the trajectory of ByteDance’s internal pursuit of efficiency. Today, Feishu is efficiently promoting commercialization and continuously optimizing the product side.
/ 02 /
product question
Product homogeneity, how to differentiate positioning?
Efficiency, this is a high-frequency word that Byte emphasized after launching Feishu. However, taking a closer look at Feishu’s product understanding of efficiency has gone through 3 iterations. In these three iterations, each product form has been upgraded, which also corresponds to the Feishu team’s different understanding of the enterprise-level service market.
Feishu held a press conference after the first anniversary of its launch. At that time, Feishu was positioned as a new-generation enterprise collaboration platform, integrating functions such as instant communication, calendar, online documents, cloud disk, audio and video conferencing, and workbench. Covering enterprise high-frequency collaboration scenarios. At that time, Feishu proposed that enterprise members should be able to achieve efficient communication, smooth collaboration and agile management in one place, so as to improve enterprise efficiency in an all-round way.
Previously, Feishu was released with “囧Mom”, expounding Feishu’s pursuit of efficiency. It is reported that Feishu has become the key to improving communication efficiency behind ByteDance’s purchase of the exclusive broadcast rights of “囧 Mom” for 630 million yuan. From making a decision, contacting the owner of the film company, negotiating the price, signing the contract, developing the product page, watching the stress test online, and finally launching the movie, ByteDance employees only spent a total of 36 hours, while in previous movies In the distribution link, these work may take half a year or even a year.
The Feishu management team attaches great importance to communication efficiency, and a key reason is the epidemic in early 2020. The epidemic has changed the communication mode of enterprises, and online office and online meetings have become a mainstream at that time. For example, Zoom, which focuses on online meetings, has rapidly developed into a global unicorn this year.
Therefore, Feishu’s main energy at this stage is to make products around communication. But just from the product point of view, this version of Feishu is relatively rudimentary, and it is not much different from most products on the market.
In 2021, Feishu will hold a second press conference. This time, Feishu released version 4.0. The focus of the product has shifted to the three organizational elements of “people, goals, and information”, and launched a number of new products such as Feishu Knowledge Base, Feishu Performance, and Feishu Recruitment.
Compared with the last meeting, Feishu’s focus has been upgraded from efficiency improvement to organizational improvement.
Xie Xin said, “Feishu is not only a tool to improve efficiency, but also a tool to improve the organization. Enterprises who choose Feishu can deeply understand and learn from the management thinking and best practices of enterprises such as ByteDance, and will be advanced The organizational philosophy is for your own use.”
Compared with the last product conference, this time, Feishu added more management in addition to the communication function. For example, the recruitment business is online.
Zhang Nan revealed at the meeting that 90% of ByteDance’s interviews in 2020 will be completed by video, and Feishu Recruitment caters to this trend. In Feishu, you can initiate a video to complete the interview with one click. In addition, in order to help enterprises create a good performance evaluation system and effectively motivate talents, Feishu has simultaneously launched “Feishu Performance”.
That is to say, Feishu has changed from a people-oriented communication in the early days to a people-oriented organization and management. This is a big leap.
In May of this year, Feishu’s developer conference once again launched new products. This time, people are still the main focus, but the management cycle of the organization is lengthened. Fei People was launched, and Feishu explained that Fei People is a full-life cycle solution around organizational “people”.
On the one hand, Feishu Office emphasizes office collaboration, and on the other hand, Feishu People conducts organizational management. The positioning of Feishu has been upgraded from an enterprise collaboration platform to an enterprise collaboration and management platform.
This is also a move by Feishu to distance itself from similar products such as Dingding. If Feishu recruitment in 2021 is just a small business unit or product unit, then this time Feishu People is a talent management system that includes talent recruitment, data, management, and performance. This is of great value to Feishu – while expanding the boundaries and capacity of the business, it is more differentiated when benchmarking against similar products. The core is to improve efficiency in an all-round way through tools.
From the current point of view, Feishu is moving in the direction of “full life cycle solutions or tools”.
/ 03 /
battle for status
Enterprise service hot sea competition, how to break the collaborative office pattern?
Behind the three product iterations, Feishu wants to increase the scale of users through differentiated products. But if you want to cut the market, you have to run into the competition head-on.
According to data from iiMedia Research, the scale of China’s collaborative office market will reach 26.42 billion yuan in 2021. It is estimated that from 2021 to 2023, China’s collaborative office industry will maintain an annual growth rate of more than 10%, and the market size in 2023 will reach 33.01 billion yuan.
There are many players in the 30 billion market. As a rising star in the field of corporate collaborative office, although Feishu has the big backer of Byte, it is also fighting in the waters of the market, and there are many killer projects.
At present, the market is mainly divided into traditional and established software manufacturers represented by Fanwei, Zhiyuan, Lanling, etc. After several years of development, these enterprises have accumulated technical strength and customers. The other group is Internet companies, such as DingTalk, WeChat, 360 Zhiyu, etc. These companies are backed by giants and have unique advantages on the traffic side.
When it comes to competition, DingTalk has to be mentioned. When Feishu was officially opened to the market, Xie Xin once said: “Dingding and Enterprise WeChat have been used by all our company staff. We believe that in the era of knowledge economy, the above two products that we use heavily do not inspire us. He can only allow employees to complete those fixed functions, and the biggest difference between Feishu and them is that it can stimulate the wisdom of employees.”
Xie Xin bluntly said that Dingding and corporate WeChat entered the market earlier than Feishu, and the number of users was significantly larger than Feishu. “But from another point of view, the to B market is developing relatively slowly, and we should look at the long-term, not only the competition between products, but also the competition between customers of our products and customers of other products. From these two aspects In fact, we are more confident.”
In the Chinese enterprise service track, the competition between products and products is not about standardization, but personalized customized services.
Different from the overseas enterprise service track, most of which are standardized products, China’s enterprise service products have always been “dirty work”, which must be customized according to the enterprise and provide a full range of services. At present, Feishu’s idea is to create personalized services for KA through the PaaS platform and low-code development, and then accumulate the experience of serving KA customers to create standardized SaaS products and promote them to small, medium and micro enterprises.
It is understood that Feishu has built an exclusive enterprise performance consultant team to serve KA customers, and provide solutions to the pain points of KA users.
In a word, some investors say that the reason why enterprise service is difficult to do is mainly because of weak payment ability and short life cycle. Many enterprises have no professional service budget at all. In addition, due to the low unit price of small and medium-sized enterprises, under the traditional single-order sales model, the sales expenses will be very high, resulting in complete unprofitability. Feishu is in the enterprise service industry, and it also needs to go through layers of difficulties in the industry.
In this context, it is very important to capture large customers.
Feishu’s current customers see that there are Internet projects and manufacturers in traditional industries, and the diversification is progressing well. At present, a small number of representative benchmark customers have been captured, and the start from 0-1 has been completed, and the next step is to quickly replicate from 1-100.
The advantage of Feishu is that it is backed by bytes and has enough ammunition. Moreover, within Byte, the investment in Feishu is also at all costs. In November last year, Liang Rubo, who took over the positions of CEO and chairman of ByteDance, announced the organizational adjustment through all-staff emails and established six business sectors – Douyin, Vigorously Education, Flying Books, Volcano Engine, Morning and Sunset Lightyear and TikTok. Taking Feishu independently as a business sector is enough to see the importance ByteDance attaches to Feishu. According to a report from Science and Technology News, the current Feishu team has exceeded 7,000 people, while Dingding has about 1,000 people and enterprise WeChat has about 500 people.
In addition to heavy investment, whether Byte can adhere to “long-termism” is the determining factor for Feishu to gain a foothold in the market.
Enterprise services are different from the Internet. It is a long-term track, and it requires sufficient financial resources and basic skills to dig deep into it in order to be rewarded. Zhang Yiming has always emphasized efficiency. This time Feishu, how to improve efficiency will be another tough battle for ByteDance.
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