Who can catch it? How long does it take?
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Author | Xu Xiaofei
Edit | Zhou Lei
"Domestic imitators will consider some of the influencing factors that policies and regulations may bring, such as assuming that figma cannot be used in China one day, which will free up a big opportunity." Not long ago, Dabin, an executive of the design line of a domestic cloud manufacturer, said this to Leifeng.
What people did not expect was that this day came so quickly.
On March 12, it was reported that Figma, an Online Design Software Company, banned the accounts of companies sanctioned by the United States, such as DJI. LeiFeng Network asked DJI about this matter, and the other party said that there was no response for the time being. However, according to China Securities News and other media, the ban has been confirmed from DJI employees.
However, for the impact of this matter, Zhang Liang, the head of the design line of a domestic head Internet company, told Leifeng Network: "In a short period of time, it will have little impact on DJI. Because Figma is more inclined to UI design tools, and DJI's versions involving UI and web pages are more mature, and the replacement cost of UI tools is not high. However, if industrial design-related 3D software is sanctioned, it may have a greater impact. ”
But it is worth noting that Figma's ban may be just the beginning. According to Weibo user "Dragon Claw Locust Watchman", the US sanctions list contains prohibitions on providing software services to the other party, and Figma decided to comply with the sanctions list and will suspend all corporate accounts (personal accounts) that have been sanctioned by the US sanctions list.
Image source: Weibo
According to relevant statistics, the current US sanctions list includes 611 Chinese companies, such as Huawei, 360, Hikvision, DJI and many high-tech aerospace-related enterprises, DJI is the first Chinese company to be banned by Figma.
If the reasons highlighted in Figma's press release to DJI are the same, the ban may continue to spread to other companies on the list. At that time, it will have a great impact on the domestic design industry and enterprises.
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Passive acceleration, "new, old, big"
Three categories of players compete
It has to be said that the domestic substitution of online design and SaaS has slammed the acceleration throttle under a sudden dynamic.
"For related domestic software, it is a good time for a wave of development." The situation creates heroes, and the ban on foreign software will 'force' domestic companies to make more safe and prudent choices and measures, which will be painful in the short term, but it may not be a good thing in the long run. Zhang Liang said.
"Fortunately, the replacement cost of this UI-like tool is not high. Moreover, the domestic software companies have also reacted quickly, and many countermeasures have been launched. ”
It is understood that after the ban, instant design, Blue Lake's MasterGo, Tencent's self-developed design collaboration platform CoDesign, Wondershare Technology incubation Pixso and other platforms responded quickly, and have now launched the Figma file import function, as well as the imported editing function, actively responding to the impact of the industry.
In fact, with the rapid rise of Figma in the past two years and the promotion of tens of billions of dollars of unicorns, a wave of imitation has also been formed in China, and the online design collaborative track has become a fire, attracting vertical startups such as Blue Lake, Instant Design, Gke, etc., established listed companies such as Wondershare Technology, and a number of "new, old, and big" players such as Tencent Cloud, HUAWEI CLOUD, and ByteDance, all of which want to rush out of a Chinese version of Figma.
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In the face of market blanks, domestic design
Can SaaS be picked up?
However, in the face of the market gap that may soon appear, can domestic design SaaS be able to catch it?
Zhang Liang admitted to Leifeng Network that "in view of the current large domestic market volume in this field, it takes time to digest, and it may not be able to catch it at once." And more importantly, "the maturity and performance of domestic tools at present need time to improve, especially in terms of server size and stability, version update speed, and the matching degree of new features and past tools." ”
In addition, in the previous Leifeng Network's "100 billion "design collaboration" SaaS track, when will it rush out of a Chinese version of Figma? In the interview, a cloud manufacturer design line executive told Leifeng network that because Figma has done a lot of technology research and development and accumulation in performance precipitation such as web page canvas support and online collaborative response, product polishing has also taken a lot of time and has formed a high barrier. "For latecomers, it is not to invest in people and money, it takes a year or two to do a good job, it takes at least 3 to 5 years."
In particular, design tools are heavy productivity tools, can not do half a point fake, good to use, designers know in minutes after getting started, the product power of the tool itself is crucial.
Zhang Jie, an entrepreneur with more than ten years of SaaS background in China and the United States, once told Leifeng in a PPG topic exchange that after more than 20 years of accumulation in the SaaS industry in the United States, most of the products on the market are more than 90 points, while the current domestic SaaS product strength is only about 60 points, the gap is large.
You know, most of the domestic design collaboration SaaS tools have really begun to exert their strength after 2018, and there is still a long way to go.
However, Dabin believes that as long as the users of similar domestic products have accumulated to a certain scale, the products have been polished enough, and they understand China's scene and design ecology, there may be a domestic tool that can compete with Figma.
In his view, it is only a matter of time before the country rushes out of its own Figma, and there are only two types of potential players, one is the vertical company that solves the technical barriers, and the other is the Internet factory and the internal cloud department that are technologically leading and have deep accumulation in design.
Specifically, the former has a very deep understanding of users and scenarios in the subdivision field, and in terms of concentration and industry depth, it has the advantages that are difficult for Internet manufacturers and cloud departments to surpass for a time; but the latter's scale capabilities, ecological advantages, cross-field linkage advantages, underlying technology, and user accumulation and brand reputation accumulation are usually difficult for vertical manufacturers to match for a while.
However, a large variable is that the latter has already launched an offensive against the former, and it is difficult to predict who will win in the end.
Some Internet manufacturers, holding high the ecological brand, in the process of cooperation and docking with SaaS manufacturers, binding ecological partners, brand shading, looking for opportunities to acquire or incubate their own projects are more common operations.
"Due to the small population in Europe and the United States, the number of users of a single software or tool will not be too much, and each enterprise can only cooperate with each other to conspire with the ecology to have greater room for development; but the domestic is different, due to the large population base, a single APP with a huge number of users does not have to open the ecology to live very moist, large companies will choose to do everything themselves out of inertia, preferring internal horse racing rather than giving it to external companies, at this time the big fish eating small fish will become a high probability result." A cross-border marketing SaaS practitioner told Leifeng.
At the request of the interviewees, all names are pseudonyms.
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