Author | Mr.K Editor | Emma
Source | Technical Leadership (ID: jishulingdaoli)
In the field of online office, DingTalk has almost completed the industry "pioneering" by itself, and has become the undisputed absolute king for a long time; Tencent Qiwei, with the blessing of a huge WeChat traffic pool, has also completed Staking on this track.
I thought that the AT and AT companies could divide the world in this field and dominate the world. Unexpectedly, the sudden three-year epidemic will force the office management of enterprises to go online. They speed up their small thoughts of entering the market and sharing the cake. Byte Feishu is a relatively successful up-and-comer, making a name for itself in the field of office apps and gaining a firm foothold. The online office field has changed from the original "Errenzhuan" to the current "Three Kingdoms". A pool of spring water has been stirred up. Is Houlang Feishu still okay now?
01
Feishu is in a bad situation
1. Feishu’s market share lags behind
According to data from the market research company QuestMobile, as of November 2022, the number of monthly active users of collaborative office apps has collectively reached a peak in the past two years. Among them, Dingding has 250 million monthly active users, Qiwei has 110 million, and Feishu has only 9.3 million. The gap is so big that it can be seen with the naked eye. To put it bluntly, Feishu's monthly activity scale is not as good as the two big brothers.
DingTalk, Qiwei and Feishu, among the three, from the perspective of user experience, DingTalk started the earliest, has a deep foundation of innovation, and has also cultivated user habits. It focuses more on top-down management, has formed a rich and complete hardware and application ecology, and has the unique skill of "cloud and nail integration". Its positioning is no longer just a simple online office collaboration system, but sublimated into an enterprise Digital entry.
Enterprise WeChat is superior in its simple and easy-to-use functions. In many aspects, it is almost the same as using WeChat. The operating cost is very low, and there is no need for deliberate adaptation or training. More importantly, it can also focus on a SCRM differentiation that is difficult for other companies to imitate. Through the powerful WeChat traffic, it can help with product marketing and precise customer operations. This kind of real "added value" is extremely useful for corporate users. The great attraction is also the most insurmountable moat for Qiwei.
The feature of Feishu is that it emphasizes "organizational collaboration", encourages openness and information flow, advocates equality and creation, helps internal efficient collaboration, and is especially friendly to companies that introduce OKR. But then again, OKR is more suitable for some exploratory businesses, not all industries. For the vast majority of jobs and companies that have a mature working model and only need to proceed step by step, this product feature of Feishu is easily overlooked.
According to their different characteristics, user portraits can be roughly determined: those who want to have a strong management style choose Dingding; those who focus on business growth choose Qiwei; those who advocate innovation and exploration use Feishu . Enterprises are very realistic, not all enterprises have an "always day one" corporate culture, especially at this stage, fancy ideas are not absolutely attractive to them, something that makes them feel and is beneficial to them , they will actively go to it. And these are basically doomed to the fate of Feishu's extremely low market share. It is not at the same level as the two big brothers. If Feishu cannot provide other more meaningful value-added points, it will be difficult to change the situation.
2. The revenue scale is at the bottom
Let's look at revenue again. The plate is there, and the cakes that can be cut will naturally only match it. Compared with the other two top players, it is not surprising that Feishu has the lowest revenue scale. According to data, Feishu’s revenue will exceed 1 billion in 2022, and DingTalk has achieved this revenue scale as early as 2 years ago. Of course, the size is different, and it is unfair to Feishu to simply compare revenue. But we can also refer to another data, team size.
According to statistics, the Feishu team now has more than 8,000 people (including middle office and outsourcing), and the number of production and research personnel is even more than that of Douyin. In contrast, DingTalk has about 1,500 people, and WeChat Enterprise has only a few hundred people. If we superimpose Feishu's team size, user size, and revenue size, it will be more intuitive and objective to see who is under more pressure than Dingding and Qiwei.
3. The latest time to enter
In 2015, DingTalk was the first to explore the collaborative office platform for domestic enterprises. In 2016, Tencent followed up and launched version 1.0 of Enterprise WeChat. In 2017, the Feishu project team was established, and later began to promote its use within Byte. It was not until 2019 that Byte decided to open Feishu to external customers, and implemented a charging strategy, focusing on the medium and large enterprise customer market.
The time gap is not the most important thing. What is more important is that Feishu missed the explosive growth of corporate remote office demand during the epidemic. During this period, Dingding seized the opportunity of "online education". Teachers and students used Dingding to take online classes, making "Dingding" one of the hottest high-frequency words. So much so that Dingding can continuously expand the capacity of more than 100,000 cloud servers on Alibaba Cloud to support a huge number of users. Whether it is for the B-end or the C-end, DingTalk has suddenly become a well-known tool and brand. Enterprise WeChat did not waste this explosive period. In just 9 months, the number of users increased from 60 million to 250 million, an increase of more than 4 times.
At that time, Feishu, which was still focusing on the payment market of large and medium-sized enterprises, almost perfectly missed this wave of growth. In an interview with the media at the end of 2020, Zhang Yiming also said that Feishu did not make better preparations and thus missed many small business markets. Later, despite strategic adjustments, a large number of small businesses have been taken over by Dingding and WeChat Work. More importantly, compared with C-end users, B-end users have higher loyalty, because replacing the system means a lot of business migration costs and learning costs, and they will not easily replace service providers.
4. Big customers can’t make money
Although Feishu entered the market later, it can be said that Feishu has racked its brains when it comes to winning big customers. The most famous case is that Byte mobilized a number of executives, frequently entered and exited the Xiaomi Science and Technology Park, and took turns to "woo" Lei Jun, Wang Chuan and more than a dozen key figures, and finally successfully won Xiaomi, a major customer.
In addition, Feishu did not hesitate to make various promises to poach the wall from Dingding and Qiwei, such as stealing Xiaopeng Motors from Dingding, and snatching Perfect Diary from Qiwei. One of the promises made by Feishu is that it can meet the customization needs of these users.
Anyone with a little experience knows how pitiful the so-called "customized business" is, with long cycle times, cumbersome communication, and difficult delivery. When several factors are superimposed, there will be a result that the business profit is extremely low, or even no money at all.
In addition, in order to stabilize these large customers and provide them with a more extreme user experience, Feishu often dispatches dozens or hundreds of implementation personnel (the Feishu team mentioned above is huge, and it seems to have an answer) to provide customers with Specially solve various problems encountered in the use process. For example, customers such as Xiaomi, China Resources, New Hope, Haier, and Huazhu are all enjoying this kind of "respected" treatment. With this style of play, the user experience must be improved. Lei Jun also specifically named Feishu on social software, but he lost his face after winning. There is no way to make money from these big customers immediately. value" to comfort myself.
02
The future of Feishu is full of bad luck
1. Internal pressure
In the adjustment of the organizational structure at the end of 2021, Feishu will rank among the six major business segments of Byte, standing shoulder to shoulder with popular fried chickens such as Douyin and TikTok. However, to this day, Feishu has still not been able to gain a firm foothold in its own track, which has put Feishu's business under tremendous pressure, and its internal status is also deteriorating.
This pressure mainly comes from high internal expectations and its own "unremarkable" performance. For Byte, after Toutiao and Douyin, it has not launched similar-scale explosive products in the domestic market. How long these two phenomenon-level products can maintain their leading advantages is also a concern for Byte. So Byte is desperate to launch a new heavyweight. Especially in the atmosphere where the market and bigwigs are shouting that "the second half of the Internet belongs to the industrial Internet and belongs to the 2B model", Feishu is definitely expected to be high.
Liang Rubo, chairman of Byte, once made it clear that the company’s R&D investment in Feishu is no less than Douyin and Tiktok. As mentioned above, the Feishu team is larger than the Douyin team, which also reflects this from the side. . However, judging from Feishu's market performance and data presentation, its ROI is far worse than Douyin and TikTok by more than a few streets. To give a simple example, in 2022, Feishu's ARR (annual recurring revenue) revenue will exceed 100 million US dollars, but the corresponding annual total cost of Feishu will be as high as 10 billion. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine what kind of pressure Feishu will bear within the company.
2. Go to sea and disperse forces
Facing the pressure of fierce market competition and the huge internal pressure of the company, Feishu thought of the strategy of going overseas, hoping to break through the situation. It is easy to understand that Feishu has this kind of thinking. First, it has the successful experience of Tiktok going overseas (the domestic Douyin had an absolute advantage in the market at that time); second, overseas users pay more attention to user experience than the domestic market. Feishu It seems that he is quite confident about this, thinking that he can fight.
But in fact, the competition in overseas markets is also huge. Competing products such as Microsoft teams, zoom, and slack have already captured most of the market share. In addition, don't forget that there are special "information security" issues in overseas markets, and everyone understands it, so there is no need to say more. Therefore, whether Feishu can replicate the glory of Tiktok going overseas is a big question mark.
On the contrary, due to domestic weakness, Feishu has entered the overseas market. Its overseas future is uncertain for the time being, but what is clear is that this will definitely cause the dispersal of existing resources and troops. There is a saying in "Outside History of the Palace of Qing Dynasty": "Preparing too many strengths, camping too loosely, responding poorly, and not fighting." It means that if there are too many places for defense, the forces will be dispersed, and if they cannot support each other, the combat effectiveness will deteriorate.
We will wait and see whether there will be a situation of "preparing more power points" when Feishu goes to sea.
3. Sacrificing profit for scale, how long can it last
In 2020, Feishu generously announced that it will be open to all enterprises and organizations across the country for free, regardless of size or duration of use. At that time, Feishu didn't consider making money, but paid more attention to the penetration rate in high-quality enterprises. But from time to time, Feishu’s free use has come to an end, and the degree of “penetration” seems to be left behind by the other two big brothers. Its strategy of sacrificing profits for scale, in the increasingly cruel reality, How long can it last?
If you can’t support it for free, then you will charge. This is inevitable, and the same is true for Dingding and Qiwei. However, Feishu will face two unique problems: first, Feishu has a small user base, and domestic B-end payment habits have not yet formed on a large scale. In September last year, Ye Jun, the president of DingTalk, said, "It is basically free for enterprises to use DingTalk now, and less than 1% of the real paid amount may be." The situation of Feishu should not be much better than that of Dingding. There are not many users in the first place, and if you filter out the vast majority of those who are unwilling to pay, is it lonely to charge? Second, from the point of view of overall functions, compared with DingTalk and Qiwei, Feishu has no absolute differentiation. On the contrary, many users say that there are "least ecological products" and "no price advantage". Slots. How to solve these problems will directly determine how Feishu will go in the future.
4. It is getting more and more difficult for competitors to attack
Brother K mentioned the advantages of Dingding and Qiwei, the two major competitors of Feishu, in the previous article. For example, Dingding's increasingly clear "cloud and nail integration strategy" allows users to "go to Dingding to go to the cloud", which not only reduces This has raised the threshold for using the cloud, and has also significantly increased the demand for the cloud and DingTalk from more and more companies, further locking in the user base. Enterprise WeChat, relying on WeChat’s 1.3 billion monthly active users, can not only help users do customer marketing and customer management, but also use Qiwei to do private domain traffic. Managed and controllable, you don't have to worry about being poached and taken away by those who leave. Faced with the constant pressure from formidable opponents with ultimate moves and moats, it is not easy for Feishu not only to try to seize the prey, but even to hold the basic game.
03
Feishu, why can't it "fly"?
Having said so much, why Feishu is so "weak" mainly has the following reasons:
1. No to B gene
Our Internet companies prefer to emphasize "genes". For example, people often say that Ali has no social genes, and Tencent lacks e-commerce genes. Compared with Ali and Tencent, Byte lacks the toB gene. Obviously, among the three, Ali’s to B gene is the strongest, after all, it started from B2B; while Tencent relied on cloud business, and later gained a place in the to B market; in comparison, Byte is not very to B Yes, although it is very eager to improve this situation, but the giant with a valuation of 220 billion US dollars (valuation in March 2023), its main revenue is still generated by the to C market. This congenital defect made Feishu’s business lose its grip and focus to some extent. In other words, Feishu lost at the starting line.
2. Lack of leading talents
We mentioned above that the Feishu team has as many as 8,000 people, but there seems to be a lack of leaders in this huge team. What is considered a leader? Let's put it this way, when it comes to WeChat, we think of Zhang Xiaolong; when it comes to Alibaba Cloud, we think of Wang Jian. There is no doubt that Zhang Xiaolong and Wang Jian are the leading figures. But when it comes to Feishu, who can you think of? Byte, which started as a to C business, once tried to use its "money ability" to find capable people to make up for the shortcomings of toB.
Since 2018, a number of big names with to B expertise have been recruited, including Cheng Hao, the founder of Zhaoxi Calendar, Chen Jinzhou, the founder of Heipayun, Shen Xueliang, the founder of ONES, Deng Yunze, the founder of Lanmao Weihui, etc. Let them be the heads of important business segments of Feishu. But unfortunately, these people not only failed to carry the banner of flying the book to B, but many of them left after a short time.
It has to be said that Feishu urgently needs an influential leader who can hold the scene no matter in terms of brand promotion or stabilizing people's hearts.
3. Lack of strategic determination
Generally speaking, the strategy of industry leaders is to develop upstream and downstream of the industry, find the second curve, and maintain high growth .
The strategy of the No. 2 in the industry is to attack the weaknesses in the advantages of the No. 1 . Taking the e-commerce industry as an example, JD.com, as the number two in the industry, builds warehouses and logistics, and logistics and warehousing are the weakest links of Taobao Tmall, the leader. JD. has chosen the right strategy, and it has been able to continue to grow and develop over the years.
The third strategy of the industry is to find a big market that the boss and the second have ignored or have not had time to enter, all in, and quickly establish their own relative advantages in this field . Just like Pinduoduo at the beginning, in the face of the seemingly unshakable Taobao and JD.com, instead of facing the hard steel, it cut in from the sinking market that Taobao and JD.com have not had time to deeply deploy, and cut in from the circle of friends, micro-business, and teamwork. , Slowly growing in the cynicism of others, constantly eroding the e-commerce market share, the scale quickly surpassed JD.com, and approached Taobao Tmall.
After talking about the strategy, let's take a look at Feishu. As the third oldest Feishu, its strategic positioning seems to be not so clear. In just about 3 years, it will build large enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises. Is it too erratic to go to sea to develop overseas enterprises in a while? Of course, we can understand it as continuous trial and error and continuous debugging, but it is still inevitable to leave people with the impression of lack of strategic determination. After all, the current byte is not the original byte. As an industry giant, as a large project and strategic product that has invested resources and has high expectations, it does not have a relatively stable strategic axis. Not so appropriate.
04
Dare to give suggestions to Feishu
The atmosphere has been heightened here, and Brother K took advantage of the situation to boldly give Feishu a few suggestions, which are purely personal opinions:
1. Deep cultivation of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises
Feishu needs to identify the "oldest third strategy" that suits its own development. For example, it is a good choice to continue to cultivate small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises. Because the manufacturing industry is the industry with the lowest degree of digitization among all industries, and there are a large number of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, there must be areas that DingTalk and Qiwei have never touched. You can grasp their characteristics of being price-sensitive and not willing to spend more money. Then set up a free plan for 3-5 years, and first narrow the gap with the two big brothers in the front in terms of the number of users, and at the same time widen the gap with the chasers behind.
2、all in AIGC
In mid-April, Feishu announced that it will launch the AI assistant "My AI", which provides a variety of functions in the form of dialogue, including optimizing and continuing to write text content, creating schedules, automatically summarizing meeting minutes, and searching the company's internal knowledge base. This shows that Feishu, which is under pressure in many places, felt the "life-saving straw" stretched out by the hand of the trend, and responded positively in a timely manner. Brother K thinks this is right, because there are rich and diverse AIGC scenarios hidden in the enterprise. If you discover them, sort out the pain points, and solve them, it is very likely to become a first-class rocket to occupy the market.
From the perspective of product form and function, My AI has many similarities with the applications of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen on DingTalk, and they are all developing towards the integration of office scenarios and generative AI.
3. Brand personification
A good product must have a soul, and the best carrier of the product soul is a representative leader, just like Jobs is to Apple, Musk is to Tesla. Many domestic super brands also follow this route, such as Lei Jun, Li Xiang, Yu Chengdong and so on.
In a word, if Feishu wants to further penetrate the hearts of the people and increase market memory points, it must take the route of brand personification. Once it succeeds, its brand amplification effect will be extremely huge. As for who Feishu can promote, the high-level executives of Byte can look through the roster and figure it out.
4. Ecological office platform
Collaborative office can never be the ultimate goal of the products of top manufacturers, and that would be too much to pursue. From SaaS to PaaS is the pattern they should have. In 2022, a survey by Productiv, an American research institution, found that American companies will purchase 40-60 SaaS software on average, and I believe domestic companies will not make much difference. To manage and integrate these software, the platform software is required to have the capabilities of collaborative office, software development, application integration, data analysis and so on. And this direction is definitely worth investing in Feishu. Especially after it has a large number of SME customers, it will vigorously develop an ecological platform so that ISVs can meet more personalized needs and have diversified tools to form a healthy industry ecology. , is the best ending worthy of Feishu.
5. Independently listed, capitalized operation
The competition among corporate giants has always been a long marathon, which requires both endurance and strength. This strength certainly includes capital strength, such as having money to support long-term strategies and free services. However, under the background and trend of accelerated commercialization of various projects under Byte, Feishu will always be under tremendous pressure and will not have long-term feasibility.
However, if Feishu can be listed independently and create its own blood, will it be able to better solve this problem? Is it feasible for Feishu to go public? Brother K thinks it is very possible. First of all, the "background background" is there, and as mentioned in the third strategy, the huge user base of small and medium-sized enterprises should be used a little bit. , Tell stories to capital, draw blueprints, how important is it? If you have money, you can make blood, and Feishu burns it for another 100 years, what is it?
Finally, I hope that Feishu will get better and better, and the Chinese toB software market will flourish.
Profile
Profile of the account owner: Mr.K , Huang Zhekeng, expert in digital transformation of enterprises, founder of "Duwu Hill", technology blogger, former technical executive of Haier, Zhongtong, and 1 Yaowang, author of "The Way of Technical Personnel Practice" The Summit of Technology Management. Focus on: technology trends, business, personal growth.
- END -
Using the Tesla Snake Charger: Never Bending, Picking Up...