This article is from WeChat official account:Pinwan (ID: pinwancool)< span class = "text-remarks">, of: Li Hezai head from FIG: visual China
Bytedance is described as an “App factory” by the outside world. In fact, one of its direct competitors, Kuaishou, has been trying to build itself into an “App factory”.
Kaishou recently launched a music karaoke app called “Huisen” on most Android app stores. According to the official introduction, Huisen was developed by Beijing Chenzhong Technology Co., Ltd. The suspected actual controller of the company is Su Hua, CEO of Kuaishou. According to experience, Huisen App is not much different from other K-song apps in terms of gameplay. The overall look is more like a K-song app “Whale” launched by Alibaba before, in the form of K-song + music video, and Users can also publish their work to show others.
People familiar with Kuaishou know that Kuaishou wants to make new products in a day or two. The last time it was mentioned by the media was in 2019. In 2018, the number of apps incubated by Kuaishou was as high as a dozen. This is also considered to be the result of the accelerated commercialization of Kuaishou due to the superimposed influence of various factors such as financing progress, competition speed, and capital pressure under the capital winter environment in 2018. Kuaishou hopes that it can bet on a certain App and run a new growth point.
More than two years have passed, Kuaishou has not stopped developing new products. According to rough statistics from public reports, no fewer than seven new products have been launched since 2020, and the types include social tools, B-side advertiser services, news, Chinese video, podcasts, and K song communities, etc.-running In the process of listing, from the perspective of the number of new apps, Kuaishou looks like an “App Factory”.
Why should you continue to develop new apps?
The first answer given by Kuaishou may and absolutelyMost Internet giants are the same: because they face the crisis of peaking traffic growth. And the first financial report since Kuaishou’s listing on March 23 showed that in 2020, Kuaishou’s adjusted net loss reached 7.949 billion yuan. Although its losses are narrowing, Kuaishou has not yet achieved profitability. At the same time, Kuaishou’s revenue growth is also slowing down.
Under the dual influence of peaking traffic growth and not yet profitable, Kuaishou must find a way out. Finding ways to increase advertising and e-commerce revenue is a way out. This allows Kuaishou’s income structure to no longer rely heavily on live broadcast income, which mainly sells virtual gifts and rewards anchors. Layout overseas is a way out, taking advantage of the dividends in the overseas market. No disappearance can occupy the share; and the development of a new App is obviously another way out that Kuaishou identified.
It’s just that compared to the more practical goal of “finding new growth points” two or three years ago, this way out has added more meaning with the listing of Kuaishou.
On the surface, Kuaishou wants to use it as a product matrix, so that you can not only match the Tik Tok, but the entire byte beating. But as the first party to go public, Kuaishou now has something more important than Douyin-to provide investors with more room for imagination. The current situation of Kuaishou is that, on the one hand, since its listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on February 5 this year, the transaction price has always remained high, creating a market value of trillions of Hong Kong dollars; on the other hand, Kuaishou’s market position is still ranked No. Second, many data lag behind Douyin.
“People usually require (ok) profit for the first place (Performance), the second place depends on your scale and story. If your story doesn’t make sense, how can you sustain such a high valuation?” Media author Judge Xiang Pinwan analyzes.
In order to sprint to the market, Kuaishou has not done less “storytelling” in the past two years. For example, in terms of advertising and marketing, the Kuaishou marketing platform has been fully upgraded to a “magnetic engine”, saying that it will fully open up public and private domain traffic and create a “second growth engine”. Not long ago, the magnetic engine also announced a high-profile strategic cooperation with Vantage; On the business side, in the past year, there have been frequent actions on the live broadcast of goods, and many celebrities have been invited to join; on the live broadcast business itself, during the Spring Festival this year, a “Super Broadcast” live broadcast event was planned to bring beautiful data to Kuaishou, which was broadcast continuously for 26 days, covering I want to “explore more imagination of live broadcast” in the form of goods, variety shows, speeches and interviews.
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One thing that all the above actions have in common is that they are all carried out around the Kuaishou main App. As one of the many stories told by Kuaishou, the deeper purpose of developing a new app is to prove that its team has the ability to replicate success, thereby enhancing the confidence of the outside world.
“The current scale of Kuaishou is good, but don’t forget that its main-end business (short video) was too competitive before In a fierce track, in this case, it may need to make new products to prove that, “We did it not because of good luck, but because we did it because we saw it, not because we saw it again.”” The judge said .
There are plenty of reasons for Kuaishou to become an “App Factory”. However, the real meaning of “App Factory” is not that there are more products, but that it can have the next phenomenon-level product. However, so far, the newly developed Kuaishou App has not yet been able to run the next fast hand.
In addition to external factors-the general environment where new apps are generally not easy to do, this result also exposes to a certain extent Kuaishou’s shortcomings in organization and management. In other words, it seems that Kuaishou’s success does not have a methodology that can be replicated. Kuaishou App is a product of a specific historical period and has captured the sinking market window, but now this window no longer exists, and Kuaishou wants It is difficult to recreate a “quick hand”.
One of the difficulties is team building. According to Pinwan’s understanding, the Kuaishou team has always been working on the main app, and the development of each new app is almost completed by an independent team. There is a lack of connectivity between each other, and each team is also very unstable. Many people have changed. This leads to unclear overall thinking, even like playing a lottery ticket.
Some people in the industry believe that the product logic of Bytedance is in sharp contrast with Kuaishou. ByteDance has accumulated rich experience in front-end and back-end technology, growth, recommendation algorithms, multimedia, operations, commercialization, and marketing through operating connotation Duanzi, Toutiao, Volcano and other products in the early days, and has formed stable growth. Technology and other middle stations, these become the base of its app factory, which can be quickly reused by different teams.
DifficultiesThe second lies in the absorption of talents-this does not mean that Kuaishou cannot attract talents, but whether talents can really play a role after entering Kuaishou. According to Pinwan’s understanding, the dilemma that almost all talents who enter Kuaishou to develop new products will face is that the company’s support has been unclear, and the main product’s traffic, technical support, and corporate capital investment are basically not available. .
People familiar with the matter said that Kuaishou executives believed that they all started from scratch, so now they should start from scratch to prove themselves when making new products, and then find the company for support. At the same time, although some teams have made products with good data and commercialization prospects, the management will feel that hundreds of thousands of DAUs are not sexy enough and still cannot get more support. And this forms a paradox. It also bound the team to a certain extent.
The problem that most rapidly developing Internet companies will encounter is that their organization and management cannot keep up with their increasingly bullish valuations. Just like the contradiction of Kuaishou, while looking forward to creating another “Kaishou” to prove himself, it is also affected by the inertia of organization and management.
Of course, for Kuaishou, the ability to run a new app is the icing on the cake. The failure to run it does not affect investor confidence too much, but it needs to make more performance in other areas to digest the current high Valuation. However, Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao once wrote in an open letter, “Kai Shou is going to transform from a great product to a great company.” Nowadays, great Internet companies rarely rely on only one product, which also indicates that Kuaishou. Still obsessed with developing the “next fast hand”.
This article is from WeChat official account:Pinwan (ID: pinwancool)< span class = "text-remarks">, of: Li Hezai