(Wen Jonas)
This may seem like a set of slightly old stories: entrepreneurs get investment, companies step on the wind, and an industry track stands out from the perspective of investors, bringing opportunities, blue oceans and predictions of success. But this is actually a very new set of stories: behind the favor and chase of SaaS companies by capital, it is the Internet platform and single-handed entrepreneurs who play and coexist here, putting aside the idea of a decisive victory or defeat, complementing each other and expanding the territory.
Where is the Wind in the ToB Industry? These stories may serve as a bellwether.
Since the second half of 2020, the SaaS corporate financing stories on the DingTalk platform have emerged in an endless stream: after-sales customer service system after-sales treasure completed 20 million rounds of A financing, low-code platform Tritium Cloud (Aozhe) won 200 million yuan of B+ round financing; in July 2021, Pinbang helped CRM get 50 million B rounds of financing, personnel SaaS salaries won the C+ round, with a valuation of more than 10 digits; No. 1 direct employment just won the A round in August, and will soon enter the rhythm of the next round...
Coincidentally, just this morning, Yi Xieyun also announced the completion of a new round of financing. The company's SaaS product "Ant Division of Labor" is only three years old, and it is already the top 1 in the collaborative industry on the DingTalk platform.
01. What changed an investor's decision-making curve
In the view of Ye Guantai, a partner at Qiming Venture Capital who focuses on enterprise services and investment in the semiconductor field, before 2020, if he sees a "SaaS company that grew up from the platform", he will most likely not shoot.
What is a "SaaS Company That Grew Up on a Platform"? The corporate training manufacturer "Cool Academy" that he has just chased is the representative.
In 2017, Hua Junwu, the founder of Cool Academy, resigned from HP and began to start a business in the field of corporate training and talent development, Hua Junwu is very clear that if he does not rely on a large platform, he will have to do a set of "big and complete" things, and then one by one to die customers, customized products. Therefore, Hua Junwu chose to cooperate with DingTalk when starting a business: "AII in DingTalk".
Settled in DingTalk, become an ISV (Independent Software Developer), short-term customer acquisition is not to worry, but from the perspective of investors, Ye Guantai has his concerns.
"My idea at the time was that the platform has some constraints on the development of ISVs, and I would worry that these SaaS companies may not be big enough, and I hope they have room to grow independently." Ye Guantai said to 36 Krypton.
But in 2020, Ye Guantai's thinking changed.
The most sudden and far-reaching change in the past year was the COVID-19 pandemic. People are forced to stay at home and can only connect with others and the world through network cables. The whole industry has set off a digital revolution triggered by "online office", and large and medium-sized enterprises have carried out self-examination of the internal digitalization process, which has also accelerated the progress of market education in the field of enterprise services. Under this wave, the mobile office platform represented by DingTalk has a traffic blowout, and in May 2020, DingTalk announced that the number of users exceeded 300 million - from 200 million to 300 million, dingTalk only took 9 months.
The giants' continued bets on cloud computing business are also attracting the attention of investment institutions. In April 2020, Alibaba Cloud announced that it will invest another 200 billion yuan in the next three years for the research and development of major core technologies such as cloud operating systems, servers, chips, and networks; at the end of September, Alibaba announced the "cloud nail integration" strategy and integrated all the resources of the group to ensure the implementation of the strategy.
Moreover, in the context of industry anti-monopoly, "openness" has increasingly become a consensus. In October this year, In a public speech, Ye Jun, president of DingTalk, mentioned the open strategy of DingTalk ecology. "We believe that dingtalk's true openness is to be with partners and serve customers well together, and we must be customer-centric together, not platform-centric." The success of partners is the success of DingTalk. Ye Jun said at the time.
Traffic represents business opportunities, giant support represents phased dividends, and open ecology means a healthier business environment - these triple benefits make Ye Guantai re-examine his investment ideas, he began to lead the team to seriously find high-quality SaaS service providers on the platform, in October 2020, Qiming Venture Capital led the "Cool Academy" A+ round with a level of 100 million yuan. In November 2021, Qiming Venture Capital once again appeared in the list of investment institutions in the B round of "Cool Academy", and the total amount of this round has reached "hundreds of millions of yuan".
02. How did companies that "grew up from the platform" grow up?
SaaS companies like "Cool Academy" are not unique, and the reason why they have won the favor of capital is not simply because they have been lucky to step on the rhythm in the general trend of the times.
Coincidentally, another "lucky" ISV, Ao zhe (the parent company of the low-code platform "Tritium Cloud"), raised a 200 million yuan B+ round of financing at the end of 2020. Its development history is also a typical microcosm of "SaaS companies that grew up from the platform".
It is undeniable that DingTalk's traffic to these enterprises received early customer assistance
Lots of power. To this day, many SaaS companies are still looking for traffic and customer acquisition. Because for most SaaS startups, starting from small and medium-sized enterprises is a more secure choice. However, the risk is that small and medium-sized enterprises have limited ability to pay, and SaaS vendors can only make a profit on a large scale, which requires high customer acquisition costs in the early stage.
"If you don't have a batch low-cost customer acquisition channel, serving small customers is not established." Hua Junwu said.
After becoming the ISV in the DingTalk ecosystem in 2018, Cool Academy can get 50 experience displays in the dingtalk app store every day, which is equivalent to 50 corporate customers every day who can try the products of the cool academy, in the words of Hua Junwu: "It is equivalent to waiting for users to use it after doing a good job, which is a very happy thing for the enterprise." ”
Even today, DingTalk is still an important customer acquisition channel for Cool Academy, and Hua Junwu has calculated that the cost of obtaining customers from DingTalk channels is half the cost of customer acquisition in the industry.
But SaaS companies get more than just traffic by leaning back on the platform.
Xu Pingjun, the founder of Aozhe, still remembers that in 2017, tritium cloud's important breakthrough in the manufacturing industry came from Xiqiang Dairy, a leading enterprise in Anhui Province. It is through the cooperation process with DingTalk that this company has met Tritium Cloud, and in the past 4 years of cooperation with Tritium Cloud, Xiqiang's turnover has doubled and become a benchmark for enterprise digitalization. In 2018, Cui Yongzhi, general manager of Yunnan Jiantou's second division, tried to build his own process of printing, dining and using cars on DingTalk, and found that DingTalk's native process engine function was difficult to meet the demand. So DingTalk and Tritium cloud visited customers together, deeply analyzed the requirements, and found that tritium cloud's low-code platform can perfectly match the needs of rapid development of business processes. Taking this as an opportunity, Yunnan Jiantou Security Second Division officially opened the road to digitalization.
In 2019, Cool Academy ushered in an important big customer - Belle, a shoe and apparel retailer with 20,000 stores and 40,000 shopping guides, and being able to hold hands with Belle is not unrelated to DingTalk. "DingTalk was serving Belle at the time, and when they learned that Belle had training needs, they recommended us." Hua Junwu recalled. In the end, Belle and Ku Academy established the "Baizhi Academy" digital enterprise university, which greatly improved the training effect within the group.
Whether it is the new industry expansion experienced by Tritium Cloud or the large customer resources of Cool Academy, it is a crucial turning point for SaaS enterprises, and it is also a key boost that DingTalk brings to ISV manufacturers in the ecosystem.
"DingTalk ecology has many enterprises that are very successful in commercialization, this path is very important, DingTalk has this experience and knowhow." Xu Pingjun said. On DingTalk, the paid conversion rate of Tritium cloud products has increased by 4 times in one year.
After the closed loop from market education to commercialization is opened, a healthy SaaS prototype has been completed, and capitalization has become natural.
Hua Junwu has an intuitive feeling for the aura given by the blessing of the platform. "Cool Academy" from the angel round of financing, by investors as a representative company of "DingTalk ecology", this label of the degree of attraction to capital is more obvious in the A+ round, with the rise of DingTalk in 2020, the entire industry investment will focus on the DingTalk ecology.
"The entire investment circle has a strong interest in isVs in the DingTalk ecosystem, and we are a very well developed enterprise in the ecosystem, and this collaborative story has a lot of imagination." Hua Junwu spoke to 36 Krypton.
03. The future of SaaS is in the ecology, and the future of the ecology is in the open
"Since the beginning of this year, our cooperation with DingTalk has gradually entered a better situation." Working with DingTalk is about to begin its sixth year, Xu Pingjun lamented about 36Kr.
The variable is that in September 2020, Ye Jun took over DingTalk, and after he took office, he launched a series of drastic reforms, the most effective of which was the open ecology around ISVs.
For example, in the past, IFVs wanted to settle in DingTalk, requiring enterprises to register for more than two years, and the "DingTalk score" (indicating the activity of the enterprise in DingTalk) reached 900 points, Ye Jun removed all these thresholds, and the number of ISVs in the ecology doubled in half a year.
There are also more practical ecological dividends. IsVCs interviewed by 36Kr all said that DingTalk's commission quota has also been reduced, as low as an average of less than 15%; DingTalk currently has more than 2,000 API interfaces open, more than the past combined. In the low-code field alone, more than 600 templates have been launched, covering major industries such as manufacturing, retail, Internet, catering, government, and education.
However, compared with the stage dividend, ISVs and investment circles are more concerned about the standard problem of DingTalk ecology - whether an ecology is open enough directly determines the development scale of ecological enterprises.
What criteria should a good ecology meet? The answer is actually about to come out. "The first is openness, which is more important than anything else, and the second is transparency of the rules." Jiang Haotian, founding partner of Zhilin Capital, told 36Kr, "To tell the truth, the game between the platform and the ISV is because the rules are not clear, the ISV is worried, if these are transparent, everyone can dispel a lot of concerns." ”
Talking about the changes in ecology, Hua Junwu, who cooperated with DingTalk in 2017, has a lot of say, he can clearly feel the difference brought about by DingTalk after the complete opening, a particularly important signal is that DingTalk has transformed from independently providing HR products to providing "in and out" and other base capabilities, as for the upper level of salary, training and other applications, all handed over to SaaS vendors such as Cool Academy.
This move gives SaaS business founders like Hua Junwu more security, and he no longer has to worry about "what if his product is made by the platform one day?" " question.
"DingTalk's current strategic logic is very clear, it is very clear about what it wants to do and what it should give to its ecological partners." Hua Junwu summed up on 36 Krypton.
Today, the number of DingTalk users has exceeded 500 million, the number of organizations has exceeded 19 million, and it has reached a crossroads from scale expansion to value deepening. In October 2021, DingTalk President Ye Jun proposed the "two digitization" strategy, focusing on the digitalization of the organization and business, to be precise, DingTalk's current strategic goal is to change from the original single scale indicator to the value indicator.
Transmitted to the specific work of the ISV, Xu Pingjun found that in the daily docking with DingTalk, the other party also gradually shifted from the past appeal to enterprise traffic to how to better serve customers step by step.
"In the past, many of the goals of attracting customers were short-term, thinking about how to use templates to drain traffic every day; now we and DingTalk are thinking about what customers need, how to operate, how to improve satisfaction after payment, and so on from the perspective of how to better realize the digitalization of users' business." Xu Pingjun said.
04. In the Nth "SaaS Year", where does the wind come from?
As the "Cool Academy" and "Tritium Cloud" are pushed to the spotlight by the news of continuous financing, the voice of "SaaS has come back to the world". In fact, from 2015 to the present, the "SaaS meta-year theory" has reappeared every once in a while.
"I don't really care about the 'first year', I only care about the turning point when the industry began to accelerate." Jiang Haotian said to 36Kr. In Ye Guantai's view, this turning point has come: "The entire SaaS ecology will usher in a fundamental acceleration." ”
As they say, the SaaS industry has been the target of capital for the past two years. According to 36Kr combined with public data statistics, in 2020, a total of 134 investment and financing events occurred in the domestic SaaS field, with a total financing amount of more than 15.745 billion yuan; in 2021, there were 111 investment and financing events in the SaaS track in the first half of the year alone, with a total financing amount of more than 19 billion yuan.
But in the midst of the hustle and bustle, leaving aside the virtual fire of the industry, clear-eyed people have seen that the direction of the tide is changing. An extremely significant phenomenon is that in the eyes of investors, the opportunity for "general-purpose" SaaS has passed, which is like no one in the To C field will recreate a "WeChat", to B's mobile office entrance has formed an inherent pattern represented by DingTalk and enterprise WeChat, which carries most of the traffic on the Chinese enterprise side.
"If your customers are on these platforms, it's not worth saying, you're definitely going to be on (platforms)." When it comes to the relationship between SaaS companies and platforms, Jiang Haotian answered categorically. Ye Guantai coincided with him: "We now look at SaaS projects, in addition to the ability standards of independent software companies, we will also pay great attention to whether these companies have accelerated opportunities to cooperate with giants." ”
However, compared with short-term customer acquisition, Jiang Haotian pays more attention to the platform through rapid iteration to drive SaaS vendors in the ecosystem to improve product capabilities. When starting the industry as a whole, you have to prove that you have enough acceleration to run faster. One of the most important sources of motivation for this acceleration is the platform.
Take Jiang Haotian's investment in 2020 enterprise digital service provider "Xinfengwei", when it was established in 2018, "Xinfengwei" was only a service provider that helped DingTalk solve some of the customer's offline implementation and software delivery work, and with the continuous co-creation with DingTalk, now "Xinfengwei" has become a "one-stop enterprise management solution provider", and the business includes consulting systems, program systems, implementation delivery systems, continuous service systems and other complete systems.
"If you have strong product capabilities, cooperation with the platform is like a tiger." Jiang Haotian summed up 36Kr, "The combination of the early platform and the ISV is very important, but in the long run, the development of the ISV still depends on the product and the customer. ”
Ye Guantai also holds a similar view: "SaaS companies want to expand their scale, it needs to have multi-platform customer acquisition capabilities, as well as their own direct sales team, the strength of other channel providers, only the rapid growth of cross-platform, in order to further gain the recognition of the capital market." ”
For ISVs on the DingTalk platform, early customer acquisition through the platform is only a phased action, how to cultivate their own sales team and polish commercialization capabilities is equally important. In other words, the platform needs to be open enough to ISVs, but ISVs shouldn't rely too much on the platform either.
From early attachment to self-growth, Cool Academy has experienced a cycle of enterprise iteration. After serving large customers in 2019, Cool Academy has gradually built a marketing service team of nearly 200 people, which has served more than 80,000 enterprises and more than 20 million users; more importantly, Cool Academy is also in the process of contacting major customers, feeding back the newly acquired customer resources to the DingTalk team, prompting more medium and large enterprises to migrate to DingTalk, which has realized a virtuous circle in which the platform and DingTalk complement each other and are mutually beneficial and win-win.
"On the platform, it is also possible to grow giants and listed companies." Hua Junwu was full of confidence.