Today, among ByteDance's six major business segments, ToB's Feishu and Volcano Engine account for one-third. "Advanced team, use Feishu first." This slogan is often seen at airports in major cities, which is a vivid portrayal.
This is not difficult to understand. As the "third pole" of China's Internet world, it is an inevitable result that ByteDance's ability to overflow ToC to ToB. According to iResearch's forecast, the scale of China's collaborative office market where Feishu is located will exceed the 70 billion mark in 2023 and maintain growth at a rate of 16.5%.
Behind it is undoubtedly a huge and booming market. However, along the Feishu slogan, it is not difficult to think of a question: why don't everyone use Feishu first? Is it because everyone is not an advanced team? Apparently not. China's enterprise service market is still facing many difficulties.
The Chinese enterprise service track is in a state of confusion
As you can see, tens of billions of dollars of investment and thousands of people create the reputation of Feishu among users.
Feishu not only incorporated the OKR evaluation system representing byte culture for the first time, developed applications such as "multi-dimensional tables", "Feishu application engine" and "Feishu integration platform" that truly solve business needs, but also referred to the excellent functions of many foreign products and supported the input of TeX formulas.
But in terms of performance, Feishu's ARR in 2022 will just exceed $100 million, and the MAU will only be 9.3 million. In the same period, DingTalk reached 253 million, and WeChat reached 110 million. In contrast, Feishu's user numbers are an order of magnitude worse than the other two competitors, and the users are mainly emerging Internet companies.
Looking into the reasons, this may be a common pain point faced by many enterprise service companies. Unlike C-end users, B-end users are difficult to cultivate and educate. Sometimes, consumers and buyers may not be the same batch. For buyers, if it is not just needed, even if the product is good enough, they need to consider whether it is necessary to change the existing processes and mechanisms, whether the value of the purchase is large enough, etc.
Obviously, the moat established by DingTalk and WeChat in this track has a certain depth. DingTalk entered the game earlier than Feishu, accumulating a large number of resources and experience of small and medium-sized customers, and the earlier App ecology is also the threshold for latecomers; The integration of Cloud Pinning avoids internal friction and supports many highly customized projects of enterprises. Enterprise WeChat is the traffic advantage of WeChat, which is the core competitiveness that ToC companies are difficult to refuse, and there is a super assistant hidden behind it: Tencent Meeting.
The overall change in the corporate service track this year is to look at "money". From DingTalk, WeChat, Feishu to Tencent Meeting and Tencent Docs, they have all changed from pursuing MAU to paying attention to ARR. This reflects an inertia thinking of Internet people doing enterprise services: first pursue traffic and solve problems through the number of users.
This road itself is also reasonable, after all, the traffic offensive has helped Internet companies attack the city on the C-end and won many victories. The core reason for ARR difficulty is that the product differentiation is not enough, most entrepreneurs in the enterprise service track do not have in-depth user experience and rapid demand-oriented product iteration capabilities, and it is common to find nails with a hammer. In the U.S., many successful SaaS founders spend a lot of time and energy becoming customers and learning from them, but unfortunately in China, the process of "becoming a user" is a luxury.
Looking back, ByteDance cannot be ignored for enterprise services. Since 2014, Byte's investment entity, Beijing Quantum Leap Technology Co., Ltd., has successively invested in more than 200 enterprises, of which enterprise services account for nearly 20%, and the determination is obvious.
In 2018, Byte acquired the outline note-taking software curtain, when Feishu was still Byte's internal office tool Lark. However, with the successive launch of functions such as outline notes and mind maps in Feishu documents, the update speed of the curtain has gradually slowed down. Later, it was reported that the curtain would change hands again, and the acquirer was Floro Ink Notes. At the end of 2021, "fattening and thinning" was written into the OKR of Byte executives, and in addition to the curtain, offline real estate, IP content and other businesses were also reduced by Byte, and the financial investment sector was completely dissolved.
It can be seen that Byte's exploration of enterprise service investment layout has not stopped. After the general function of outline notes was easily replaced due to the relatively low design threshold, the small expansion of the large cleanup at the same time shows that the investment layout of bytes is becoming clearer.
The road to breakthrough of Byte Enterprise Service
What is the new idea of bytes?
As mentioned above, many SaaS products served by enterprises do not have enough user genes and ToB experience, so they can only do relatively large and comprehensive things, learn users while developing products, and build a moat by user volume in the early stage. Therefore, an obvious change is to let people with user experience in niche fields and product people with ToB experience lead product development.
In the recent investment layout, you can smell the hint of a change in byte's thinking. According to public information, Byte's last investment in the enterprise services track was in November 2022. At that time, Byte invested in a company called Zhengyan Software, and participated in the seed round.
Who is Zhengyan? This is a general engineering research efficiency platform company with artificial intelligence attributes, which is committed to using data as a starting point to improve the efficiency and collaboration of engineering research for the global engineering research community. As the founder of Zhengyan Software, Li Yanfeng has a bright resume, graduated from Tsinghua Department and famous American universities, and served as the chairman of the Beijing Branch of Tsinghua Entrepreneurs Association (TEEC).
At the same time, Li Yanfeng is also a serial successful entrepreneur in the EDA field, and has founded and exited two EDA companies and one EDA listed company. In terms of technical capabilities, Li Yanfeng has led the development of a number of world-leading EDA tools and semiconductor test instruments, serving more than 100 semiconductor customers around the world, with heavyweight papers and patents, including the best papers of DATE2018 (one of the top EDA conferences).
To sum up, Li Yanfeng is first-class in entrepreneurial experience, technical ability, ToB experience and social resources. It is not difficult to see Byte's new investment idea in the enterprise service track: choose a track with a threshold, and let serial successful entrepreneurs with superuser capabilities, industrial resources and ToB software experience lead the development of new enterprise service products.
It must be known that engineering research is a large and sunny field. There are hundreds of millions of engineering researchers in the world, and their labor costs are still increasing year by year, and the average salary of employees of China's semiconductor listed companies has reached nearly 400,000 yuan. Therefore, if the efficiency can be improved by 1%, it is equivalent to saving 4,000 yuan/person/year of labor costs.
A sunrise track with a threshold, a large enough volume, and a strong enough willingness for users to pay; The core team and upstream and downstream have super user quality; With many years of experience in ToB software development, it can solve the difficulties of ordinary SaaS practitioners in early ToB product iteration and sales transformation; A team of consecutive successful startups with enough patience and ambition. These qualities meet the requirements of solving the current confusion in the enterprise service track.
From the public domain information, it can be seen that the seed round of investment of Zhengyan Software was completed in November last year, and the shareholders include active investment institutions in the hard technology track such as Source Code Capital, GSR Venture Capital, Tsinghua Fund, etc., as well as Qinghui Yide, which is actually controlled by Zhu Yiming, chairman of GigaDevice Innovation. It can be seen that the new characteristics and new ideas of enterprise services represented by Zhengyan seem to have become a new consensus among investors in the industry.
At present, Zhengyan Software is still in the early stage, there is little information in the public domain, and the information presented on the company's official website mainly serves the purpose of recruitment. Half of the positions are related to semiconductor, materials, hardware and other industry applications, which also proves that Zhengyan allows more experienced super users to design product development ideas from the user's point of view.
From the keywords of providing more advanced and unified productivity in data presentation, management, acquisition and mining, and solving the efficiency and collaboration problems of engineering scientific research, it can be boldly imagined that Zhengyan may start from data, take efficiency as the core, and coordinate scientific research and engineering R&D to become the exclusive Feishu or Figma in the field of engineering scientific research. Different from the application of AGI in language and code, there are few high-quality engineering research data in the open field, and mastering the data entry is the key to truly allowing AI to enter the application of engineering scientific research.
In 2023, adjustment and shuffling are the main theme of the enterprise service track. Who can break new ground in enterprise services? Can Byte achieve new breakthroughs under the new ideas of enterprise service layout? We'll see.