Fish Companion 2021: Don't be a wind chaser, just be a passerby

Source: World Wide Web

The magical year of 2020 has passed, the online education industry is still sitting on the "strongest outlet", the last 8 days of the year to absorb 5.2 billion US dollars of hot money was sprinkled to the New Year's Eve party in the blink of an eye, each online education company in the user choice and product line of the grab, rose to the level of racing against the clock. Online education and money-burning wars, traffic wars, crazy gold sucking, blood transfusion and other words form a deep binding in the minds of users.

Those involved in the situation did not dare to relax for a moment. Capital stares at the head to grab shares, players from all walks of life rack their brains, fancy marketing emerges in an endless stream, whether it is online drama variety shows, or offline subway advertising, you can feel the rich "advertising style" of various online education brands. In this context, the companion fish that started with online children's English appears to be slightly "maverick", does not invite celebrity endorsements, does not do scale delivery, but low-key for two consecutive months to get top capital heavy bets, to achieve a doubling of the number of users and paying users, "do not do the wind chaser, only do the rusher" to make the companion fish leap into a trillion online education field of the new unicorn, what is the different business logic behind this?

Capture the double trenches to grab the scale

The afterglow of the autumn war has not subsided, the war has escalated again, there is no mutual testing, and the players who are accustomed to playing big money are facing the dilemma of peaking in single-subject delivery, and quickly and unanimously launch the new strategy of "double science joint report, increase the amount without increasing the price", and the winter vacation drainage war is about to start. Traffic competition is endless, scale competition bites growth, some players are impatient, and some players are more and more courageous.

After customer acquisition has become an important part of each family's seizure of Guanzhong, it is not too much to follow the trend and spend money but bury your head in polishing products, which lies in the different customer acquisition logic of the accompanying fish. Companion Fish in 2017 into the children's English track, its founder and CEO Huang He is most familiar with the identity is the founding partner of ByteDance products, looking at the single product model of the track at that time and the form of customer acquisition based on the delivery, he based on the ecological trend of the industry's future education, not limited to the structure of "children's English", along the discipline and age two dimensions of layout - horizontal discipline line with English to establish a complete product matrix (fish with picture book, fish with children's English, fish ai class), The longitudinal age line relies on the low entry of the companion fish picture book card slot to intercept the traffic flow to users of higher age groups in advance.

Three years of siege, accompanied by fish digging out the two trenches of children's English and enlightenment, the trend of thin hair has become. Among them, the children's English trenches use the matrix to solve the problem of high customer acquisition, the online children's English 0-14 years old products and services into the pocket, tear a corner in the big education arena and stand firm; the enlightenment trench traffic advantage is obvious, and the enlightenment entrance pried open with picture books has the potential to evolve from a single subject to a large platform that integrates English, language, and even quality disciplines, which is the key to the current enlightenment of many Internet giants. For the companion fish, the expansion of the high-frequency scene of the picture book from English to the language and other scenarios is also intended to dig deep into the value of the picture book user traffic pool. As Huang He said, "The extremely low customer acquisition ability of fish picture book products is undoubtedly the confidence that we are able to navigate the hinterland of online education." ”

At present, the industry's money burning war is not stopping, which is related to the approaching of the industry's large-scale match point, players have increased their customer acquisition budgets under the pressure of seizing market share, coupled with the integration of the delivery channels based on the bidding system, the traffic price has risen endlessly. In contrast, Zhai Lei, CMO of Companion Fish, recently revealed that the overall cost of customer acquisition of Companion Fish has been maintained at about 10 yuan. He explained that with the help of the accurate traffic precipitated to the picture book, the companion only promotes users with more demand, and will not blindly follow the market bidding to raise and low-key prices, at the same time, thanks to the overall brand and dissemination of the accompanying fish, the growth of the natural flow of the accompanying fish picture book can offset the growth of the external traffic price. In the current environment, looking at these two kinds of customer acquisition logic, the former cost growth has almost no boundary, the latter cost can be controlled stably, for a long time, between a high and a low, the higher the cost of external traffic, the greater the relative advantage of the low cost of accompanying fish.

At present, growth has become a big proposition for all online education players, and there are basically two situations for companies that stay at the table. Either the financial strength is strong enough to cover high delivery costs, or there is a low-cost customer acquisition ability to achieve large-scale growth while maintaining health. Under the blessing of the double trench, the business model of the companion fish health itself has also become a hematopoietic ability, coupled with the two rounds of blood transfusion of the top capital, its ammunition reserves are very sufficient, through hematopoiesis and blood transfusion, the accompanying fish are fully capable of fighting a protracted war, and even the longer the fight, the longer the battle line, the more prominent the combat effectiveness of the accompanying fish.

"Whoever gets the user wins the world"

Every industry on the cusp will attract a large number of influx, but when players attack the city with crazy subsidies and low-cost strategies like flying sand, it is easy to ignore the quality of education and the essence of service. This has led to intensified competition in the industry, while product homogenization is also becoming more and more serious. "The key to homogenization is whether education products follow the market or follow users." Yellow River analysis, the former is chasing the wind, valuing the user's traffic value, what to do in the market, but this kind of follow-up is easy to lead to action deformation, the lack of any link in the education product will affect the user experience, the latter is driven by user demand, the product in the latest demand continuous iterative breakthrough and innovation, repeated polishing and verification, always in the process of evolution, become a "living" product with vitality.

Not only is it a product iteration at the micro level, but also following the user is also the basis of the company's "live" strategy. The educational needs and acceptance methods of users that have grown up with the Internet are changing dramatically, and the changing needs mean that no corporate strategy can be done once and for all, so the closer to the user, the higher the sensitivity to the user's needs, so as to make adjustments before the market. In this positive cycle, the more traffic is accumulated, the more data, the more accurate the strategic positioning of the enterprise, and then the two factors of time and user volume are superimposed, under the snowball effect, the companion fish can maintain a great strategic lead.

During the epidemic, almost all educational institutions are busy undertaking traffic, and the companion fish who deeply understands the user experience is one of the few companies that continue to upgrade their products during this period. "The Companion Fish Picture Book and the Companion Fish Children's English have been upgraded three times, in fact, which needs to be optimized are not out of thin air, these are the results of the team's continuous analysis of data in different sections and continuous communication with users." Yellow River supplement. According to public data, as of October last year, the number of companion fish users reached more than 40 million, and the number of paid users exceeded 2 million, compared with 20 million and 500,000 before the epidemic, with a significant increase and a prominent word-of-mouth effect.

"It is easy to fight the country and defend the country", to some extent, it can be camped under the eyes of a number of strong enterprises in the children's English track at that time, and the secret of accompanying fish is "the user wins the world". Everyone likes to chase the wind in the online education industry, but few people think about whether following the market is a typhoon or a spring breeze for themselves, and what can be left for the business after the wind blows. Based on this, it is not difficult for us to understand what kind of product realm Huang He calls "Internet education companies with fans", after all, whoever catches the user has the future.

Technological "nuclear weapons" bring super human efficiency

At this stage, under the theme of competition to burn money and obtain customers, more and more enterprises are beginning to realize that blindly burning money can only ensure that enterprises do not fall behind, if there is no efficiency blessing brought by the "nuclear weapons" of technology, excessive burning money to seize the market may be burdened by scale. For example, the stability of the curriculum has risen from 90% to 99.99%, and if there is no technical help, this problem falls on sales and service, that is, the number of complaints among 100,000 students will be reduced from 1,000 to 10, which needs to be solved continuously.

However, in the battle of technology, the enterprises that preemptively laid out the layout have the first hand. In the second half of 2020, with the high growth of business development, the high human efficiency of accompanying fish is also well-known. According to the relevant person in charge of the companion fish, this is related to the SYSTEM capabilities of the accompanying fish team such as AI voice scoring, AI interview, AI training, AI lesson preparation system, and AI analysis decision-making.

For example, in terms of teacher training, Companion Fish has developed an AI lesson preparation system, which reduces the original tens of thousands of training personnel needed for the training of tens of thousands of foreign teachers to dozens of people, improving the quality of teaching while improving the efficiency of teacher training; in terms of service, through fixed foreign teachers and other forms, optimize the content of helping children to make lessons that are not highly related to the learning effect, so that the energy of the class teacher is really spent on communicating with parents and answering questions for children. "I'd rather let the machine do it for a minute than have someone spend an extra second." This is the core competency that we attach great importance to building, empowering through systems, optimizing efficiency through systems, and even solving some things or services that cannot be done with human beings. He concluded.

It is worth mentioning that two months ago, The Companion Fish also disclosed its organizational culture for the first time at the media meeting, a total of three layers and six points, the bottom consensus is absolute honesty and business priority; the middle level approach is data-driven and extreme innovation; and the top level vision is continuous evolution and the pursuit of excellence. In the perspective of the Yellow River, the companion fish is not a team that believes in gene theory, he believes that the team has very good evolutionary ability, and through the culture of gathering similar talents, it can grow genes that are not available.

The people who chase the wind are tired of running, and the people who are ready wait for the wind to rise. This year's online education jianghu is still a sword and sword shadow, even more fierce, the players understand that this battle is the comprehensive strength of product capabilities, system capabilities and team capabilities, they have to cross not only the basic threshold of product capabilities, system capabilities and team capabilities These two boundaries will also determine the follow-up tension of development. As for the outcome, I believe that time is the fairest judge, it will make the glow glow, let the dim eventually return to dust.