The founder of the course sent a letter saying that the debt is 1 billion, and there is no "big story" in online education.

Today, I saw 2 news in a row.

First, the founder's open letter was recently issued by the founder of the school bar, which was recently in the heat of the water, openly explaining the recent hustle and bustle of wage arrears, social security arrears and other issues, and bluntly said that "the CEO has now 1 billion in debt" and "needs to further reduce the team to less than 1,000 people".

Second, tencent's new round of layoffs has been rumored online, and Tencent's classroom, which has not been profitable for a long time, has also become a hard-hit area, and it is said that the layoff rate is as high as 50%.

Or quite emotional, after the start of the class, Tencent classroom, basically means that in the field of domestic online education, all the players who have been committed to making a "comprehensive platform" in the 2C direction have handed over their answer sheets in stages, and the result is: all fell.

Regarding "platforms", there is no new story in online education.

I remember that during my first venture in 2013, I wrote an article with the title of "Several Big Pits in Online Education Platforms", and later I also communicated with many well-known entrepreneurs and investors in the education industry on similar issues.

Now 10 years later, it seems that there are some more in-depth thinking about the "platform" and "whether the education and training industry can be a platform in the end", which can be partially shared as follows.

First, whether the education and training industry can be made into a "platform"

The essence of the platform is to have both large traffic and to be able to continuously match multiple parties to form transactions, and to be able to have stickiness to all parties on the platform.

Therefore, the platform has three major elements: traffic, supply chain integration capabilities and "transaction infrastructure".

The flow is best understood, and the remaining two are slightly explained.

Traffic is the demand side, but to achieve large-scale transaction matching, you also need to have large-scale supply capacity, and supply chain integration, that is, to organize the massive supply side in an orderly manner, classify and manage them, in order to match the purchase demand of a large number of traffic ends.

Only if the traffic can be scaled + the large-scale organization of the supply chain is well integrated enough, there is a foundation for the "platform" business to be born.

Finally, the so-called "transaction infrastructure" actually refers to all the basic capabilities of all platforms that can reduce the transaction resistance of all parties on the platform and significantly improve the efficiency of multi-party transactions, including but not limited to transaction protection capabilities, quality control capabilities, product evaluation standards, and even circulation and distribution capabilities.

For example, the early Alipay, Taobao and Dianping store/commodity evaluation systems, and the delivery capabilities of JD.com and Meituan are actually important "transaction infrastructure" for large platforms.

Only when the three major elements can be possessed at the same time and can form a positive closed loop between each other can the "platform" business be established.

For example, users go shopping on Tmall, because Tmall's business management is done well, which are genuine high-quality sources, and then the transaction protection capabilities (such as returns and exchanges, delayed delivery compensation, etc.) are also guaranteed, which makes the user experience very good after completing a transaction, so the next time if there is a shopping demand, I will also choose to carry out on Tmall, so the cultivation of user shopping habits will bring about a decline in the cost of platform traffic acquisition.

This is a typical "positive closed loop".

Looking back at the past 20 years of the Internet, at least on the C-side, the success of the "platform" seems to have only two development paths -

Or first through other more high-frequency 2C user needs (typical such as content, social, tools, etc.) to obtain large-scale users, have traffic capabilities and then start platformization, and gradually establish transaction matching capabilities (typical such as Douyin, WeChat, Dianping);

Or in the particularly early stage of a market, adopt the capital-driven + bilateral subsidy method, and continue to obtain merchants, supply chains, traffic and other capabilities until they obtain scale effects + network effects (typical such as Didi, Taobao).

In fact, the route taken by the previous NetEase Youdao and NetEase Open Classes is more partial to the previous one. The route taken by the opening class is more of the latter.

Unfortunately, after a period of time, these two routes have not been able to go through in the industry of education and training.

The core reason for the failure is that the supply chain organization costs and transaction infrastructure difficulties in the education and training industry are too high. As a result, "in the education and training category, it is necessary to continuously match multi-party transactions on a large scale, which is extremely costly and unsustainable." This is likely to be a problem of the category and the business itself, rather than a problem of technical play.

Down, I further summarized the 4 core underlying reasons why the education and training category is difficult to run through the "comprehensive platform" model, and we will say one by one in the future.

Second, the education and training industry is difficult to make a "platform" of the 4 core underlying reasons

The first core reason is that the supply chain organization is difficult.

The consumer goods industry, supply chain organizations, in fact, are mainly in charge of "goods". Tube inventory, tube warehousing, tube distribution, tube order matching.

However, the education and training industry itself is a "service industry" logic, the teacher is the service provider, and the user pays to buy the teacher's service time. Therefore, the supply chain organization in the education and training industry needs to manage thousands of teachers well so that they can serve everyone in an orderly manner.

But there are two core issues here —

1) In the education and training industry, especially in some cutting-edge new occupations and new skill fields, the service supply is often very scarce. In the case of an industry such as the "Internet", more than ten years have passed, in fact, there are still very few "teachers" in the entire industry who can open classes and do a good job in standardized teaching.

2) "Teachers" are not quite the same as low-end service providers such as cleaning aunts and blue-collar workers. Teachers' cognitive level and knowledge reserves are often relatively high, so they are often more thoughtful. This has led to many companies and platforms that are prone to challenges such as "kidnapping of famous teachers" and "teachers running away", which is also a common challenge that all industries based on "people" must face.

Therefore, the supply chain organization of the education and training industry is naturally more difficult, and the complexity is usually increased geometrically with the increase in scale - you serve 50 users a month, and you are often very happy about nothing. But serving 5,000 users a month, you will find that from front-end enrollment, scheduling, teaching assistant management, user teaching follow-up, online Q&A... And so on, almost every link is a variable and a problem.

The second core reason: the difficulty of trading infrastructure.

In fact, the essence of this matter is one - most education and training products are naturally non-standard.

For example, if you buy an iPhone13 on Taobao, there are two stores with similar ratings A and B, both of which are standard, A store sells 5000, B store sells 4000, you will easily make a judgment: buy B store.

But if you are ready to learn time management or operation, there are also two lecturers with similar evaluations, Teacher A and Teacher B, the class needs 3000 yuan, and the class of Teacher B needs 2000 yuan, can you judge based on this that you should choose Teacher B's class?

The answer is no.

The reason is simple, "iphone" is a standard, and "time management" is not, two different stores sell iPhones must be the same, in addition to the price, you only need to compare services at most. The "time management" that two different teachers talk about is likely to be fundamentally two very different things.

Similarly, the "Lenovo Ideapad E430" is a standardized product, while the "Communication Course" is not; "Wang Lao Ji Herbal Tea" is a standardized product, while the "Career Planning" course is not.

The biggest difference between course products and other physical commodity products is that they are "not standard".

A platform that sells standardized goods can be, but selling non-standardized courses and "services" will be problematic. Non-standardization means that user choice costs are high, that user needs cannot be met in batches, and that it is likely that what exactly is "good" and suitable for my product is likely to be undefined.

The difficulty of building transaction infrastructure for non-standard products can also be imagined, and once the "transaction identification standard" provided by the transaction infrastructure is not enough, it means that the transaction cost of matching will increase significantly.

The third core reason: the cost of matching transactions at the technical level is also significantly high.

A course with teaching services, the unit price is often more than 1,000 yuan, and the decision-making cost of users at this price is generally higher, at least at the level of the public, it is not possible to form impulsive purchases.

Therefore, even if you have traffic, there is supply, and the degree of product standardization is OK, but if you want to match the two sides to complete the transaction, you may still have to rely on "manpower", that is, a large number of human flesh sales.

But if this is the case, then the platform business is too hard to do.

The fourth core reason: under the education and training category, it is difficult to quickly establish a "positive closed loop" between traffic, supply chain, and transaction infrastructure.

Because, the user behavior of the education and training category is typically low frequency + no repeated consumption.

For example, if you buy a mobile phone recharge card or a pack of snacks on Taobao, when your mobile phone bill runs out or you finish snacking, you will definitely have the need to buy again, and if the place you last bought made you have a good enough experience, it will most likely become your first choice.

But if you finished a lesson in time management or new media operation on a learning platform and got good learning experience and results, would you do it again?

FMCG and many other goods can be repeatedly consumed many times, even if it is difficult to be repeated consumption of goods such as printers, it will also provide consumables that you can consume repeatedly, but "courses" can not, courses and learning, often can only be disposable consumer products.

This means that for many education and training companies, assuming that you can't give users a strong reason, even if your product is good and the service is excellent, the user is likely to have only one consumption opportunity in you, especially for some skills such as such categories, each skill is relatively independent, learning is learning, and the use process after real learning will often only become more and more skilled and handy, and you may not even have a follow-up service follow-up opportunity.

Therefore, education and learning can easily become such a special product: learning will not, the user will leave in the scolding of the street, learned, the user gives you a piece of praise, but he will still leave.

But the point is that if it is both low-frequency and cannot see the possibility of repeated consumption under a single commodity, it means that for the platform side, there is almost no possibility of relying on some commodities and the "transaction" itself to do the platform traffic, but often can only become the logic of external procurement traffic and internal marketing conversion to see ROI.

Under this logic, in fact, a so-called "education and training platform" is more likely to eventually become a part-time job for various larger traffic platforms such as Douyin and Baidu.

3. Summary

In summary, make a summary of several aspects -

First, for the "platform", in fact, the relatively easy to make "platform" is the "traffic platform", and the more difficult platform is the "industrial trading platform".

For example, the most basic attributes of WeChat, Douyin, and Baidu are all "traffic platforms", all of which benefit from selling "traffic" as a transaction unit to advertisers and merchants.

However, similar to Taobao and Meituan, it is already an "industrial trading platform", that is, displaying and matching specific categories of goods.

Traffic is the simplest "trading unit", but where the industrial trading platform, it needs to involve a series of problems such as commodity management, inventory management, quality control monitoring, etc. If the relevant capabilities are not perfect, there will be frequent problems in the transaction process, and finally the platform side will be exhausted.

In China, most of the successful "industrial trading platforms" are based on consumer goods with very clear product standards, such as books, clothing, 3C products, etc., and there are also vertical industry B2B trading platforms such as "finding steel meshes" in the 2B industry field.

However, industries such as education and training, medical care, although there are countless people working hard, have not yet had a successful precedent, in essence, this kind of industry is more inclined to the service industry, it is too difficult to establish "industry-level" transaction matching capabilities.

Second, to do the education and training of this industry, may still have to see it to a certain extent as a "high-end service industry business", for this kind of business, in fact, if you can lock in some high-net-worth people, in fact, the "small and beautiful" idea will be more appropriate, do not make it bigger, but pay attention to profits.

Especially in the current era environment, in fact, with the help of content, short videos, live broadcasts, private domains, communities and other capabilities, there will be more opportunities and spaces for you to do small and beautiful business.

Third, for adult vocational education, after running for such a decade, in the end, it may still be those who are deeply rooted in the industry, have campuses offline, and directly do the combination of skilled talent transportation + some academic qualifications, which looks like a traditional business model, but it is the most worthy of long-term dependence.

For example, New Oriental Cooking, Tagou Martial Arts School, Lanxiang Technical School... Wait a minute.

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