Why has the computer changed the medical and social aspects so much that it can hardly touch the education?
“It is no longer possible to distinguish educational institutions from online institutions and traditional institutions. Online education has changed from a business model to a teaching model.” Song Junbo said in a speech at the Yigu New Education Forum in August this year. Here.
Song Junbo is the founder of Yigu Education. Yigu is a company established in September 2014. In the second year after the company was founded, Yigu launched an online classroom technology solution called ClassIn. Right now, the company’s cooperation targets include important players in almost all educational tracks from New Oriental, Good Future to EF and so on.
Through ClassIn, an online education system, teachers can conveniently organize various online classes to teach, and can cover most of the actions that offline classes can complete, such as preparing lessons, dialogues, group discussions, and automated roll-calls. Although it is not specifically responsible for the “selling lessons” that seem to have greater business potential, Yigu still gains the favor of many enterprise-level users by providing comprehensive basic technology solutions, and it has already become important in the domestic online education industry. 觑 Influence.
In the traditional perspective, the education industry is generally considered to have a high moat when faced with the invasion of technological waves. “Why the computer has greatly changed the medical and social aspects, but it can hardly touch education?” As a leader who has made Apple’s rapid rise in the wave of new technologies, Jobs, who is also passionate about education, once made such a sigh.
But Song Junbo can obviously be classified as a camp of entrepreneurs who are fully confident in the involvement of technology in the education industry. In fact, his company has indeed promoted the education industry to a certain extent in the new technology era. Right now, after solidifying the advantages of the traditional market, Yigu has begun to set its sights on a new field of scenes-online video conferencing. After a long period of accumulation, its new technical team has developed a new video conferencing product-Kuaihuiyi.com.
As an innovative attempt when exploring how education and technology can be fully integrated, although it seems to span a new and challenging field; in Song Junbo’s view, the business logic behind the online video conference No different from the online education market that you are good at right now.
The big market behind small meeting rooms
In April of this year, the NASDAQ ushered in a big black horse. A company called Zoom is officially launchedCity, after the first day of trading opened a 65-dollar transaction price, compared to the issue price of 36 dollars at the IPO, a single-day increase of nearly 80%. The stock price even reached a high of $ 107.34 in the following months, which meant that the valuation reached about $ 30 billion.
Zoom’s offer in the capital market makes people feel “unexpected.” After all, compared to ToC companies that often tell beautiful stories, ToB companies that do video conferencing services are more or less “indifferent” and not easily accessible. On the capital side, stories are often closely related to company valuations, which makes it difficult for corporate service tracks to gain favor.
But the situation seems to be slowly turning around with the support of performance. For Wall Street investors, for example, the attraction of Zoom is its rapid growth. The company ’s revenue has directly increased from $ 60.8 million in 2016 to $ 331 million in 2018, a five-fold increase in three years. It’s rare in startups; besides, this is also accompanied by a positive net interest rate of 2%, and stable returns allow investors to see a clear prospect.
When the outside world analyzes the reasons for Zoom ’s current success, there are various sayings. For example, the founder’s Chinese background allows him to quickly find a lower-cost team of programmers. But if you look at it from a more fundamental level, you will easily find that the support behind it is a huge market potential.
“The premise of predicting the size of the market is to define this market. How to define online video conferencing? We need to use online video conferencing for internal communication, and cross-organizational communication is also required. This must be a large scale.” Song Junbo told me so.
In fact, the mode of communication represented by conferences is very important for maintaining the normal operation of an organization. Achieving consensus from uploading and uploading requires various conferences to complete efficiently. In the traditional organizational system represented by the bureaucracy, it is standard practice to convene members to complete reporting, discussion, and decision-making processes in the physical space of the conference room; however, in the new technology, organizational form, and labor-management environment In addition, the internal building model of the organization is also facing innovation. All these have brought huge space for the development of the “quick meeting”.
On the one hand, the advent of the era of globalization has made it difficult for relatively large-scale business operators to complete the task of bringing together all personnel in the same office; on the other hand, the “company-employer” model is being partly being “community-collaborator” “, Replaced by a more flexible and flat organizational form.Paths make the organization of meetings more flexible and agile in order to adapt to increasingly fierce business challenges.
The changes within the organization have increased the market space for online video conference services. This collaboration model that can efficiently organize internal communication at any time and place has become a “rigorous need” for normal business operations, just as air and water are to humans; Communication within and outside the organization has also become important and high-frequency. This situation has also forced companies to find stable and reliable video conference service providers as soon as possible.
Although different third-party organizations have given answers ranging from 100 billion to 1 trillion in the size of the online video conference market, the consensus among them is that this market has considerable growth potential in the future. The self-consistency in business logic brought by the market size has also become one of the motivations for Yiou to enter the online video conference market through a product called “Quick Meeting”.
From education to online meetings, it’s a natural success
Although there is a vast market space for online conferences, Song Junbo mentioned that Yigu’s expansion into this new scene stems from its own needs.
With the healthy development of the business, Yigu began to set up its own offices throughout the country, and has its own office team in major markets such as Shanghai, Henan and Hubei. In particular, the two main teams in Beijing and Shanghai need close communication in daily business development. At this time, they need to obtain stable online video conference support. After a period of time, Song Junbo gradually discovered that the team members started the meeting on ClassIn “as a matter of course”.
“The traditional collaboration model has two problems: First, the conference room to the conference room is backward. Now everyone is holding a computer and a mobile phone for a meeting. Collaboration through a physical blackboard is impossible. The evolution from conference room to conference room is ‘end-to-end’. Secondly, traditional instant messaging software cannot cover online conference scenarios. It is not clear if there are more people, and there is no way to quickly complete other functions such as document sharing. “Song Junbo came to this conclusion after observing the changes within the team.
Most of the time, people’s behavior choices seem to be accidental, but the converged trend has inherent logic support. Just as Yigu’s team started to use ClassIn for internal communication, the reason behind this choice is that this solution can naturally be extended to the scene of online video conferencing, even though ClassIn was originally aimed at the online education scene.
For Song Junbo, education andThe line video conference scene is actually a two-sided one similar to a coin. “In fact, we can understand it this way. Corporate internal training is one of the important forms of online conferences, but it is also part of adult education in online education. Therefore, education and online video conferences are very similar in many underlying logics. He mentioned.
If you look closely at these two scenes, you can find a lot of coincidences. For example, the successful completion of these two scenes requires the participation of a large number of subjects. In both groups, there are roles to master different speaking rights. Encouraging creativity under the premise of a sense of order is also their common point. These potential intersections make Song Junbo’s judgment more valid.
In fact, Song Yibo and his team made the final decision in two scenarios, education and online video conferencing, when the initial team of Yiou was preparing to start a business. The reason for choosing education was that the value of this scenario was higher and the commercialization prospect was clearer; but the team had realized at the time that the communication frequency in the conference scenario was greater, which also meant greater growth potential. After it was determined that this was a scalable potential market, and external demand forced to provide a solution, Yiou immediately acted. The company has set up a technical team of about ten people to specifically develop solutions for online video conferencing scenarios based on ClassIn. This brand-new product called “Quick Meeting” was also officially released recently, marking the wingspan layout The beginning of a new market.
The nature of competition in the fierce battlefield
Although it faces a market with huge potential, and also has mature and transferable experience accumulated in the previous online education market, Yigu ’s new layout also faces the external challenges of fierce competition.
On the one hand, there are competitors like Zoom. In fact, the users of the “Quick Meeting” in the early stage of development also mainly come from the education industry, and in its current description of the product business also covers the educational scene; on the other hand, there are Internet giants such as Tencent and Alibaba. The intensity of the recent focus on enterprise user business makes it difficult to assert that they will not enter this new market. However, when asked about these explicit or implicit risks, Song Junbo maintained a consistent exposition: “Don’t think about what your competitors are doing, but pay attention to what you see ahead and make things ahead of yourself faster. Just do it well, all we have to do is to understand the competitive market value more thoroughly. “
For the traditional enterprise service market, Song Junbo used the “Relationship Motivation and Distribution Model” to describe the industry where “Quick Meetings” are located;In his view, in the past competition around the enterprise service market, the strength of the sales team directly determined the development level of the enterprise. However, with the rapid development of technology, this situation is being reversed, and more and more buyers are beginning to really pay attention to the strength of the technology itself, which has laid the foundation for those companies that are devoted to research and develop technology.
According to Song Junbo’s introduction, although a large number of solutions are gathered in these markets regardless of online education or online video conference systems, the stability brought by technical strength is the most important factor for partners. In his opinion, the characteristics of enterprise users are that they are not so sensitive to prices. They can accept higher quality and stable services at a higher price. The advantages of technology and services are exactly where the “fast meeting” is. .
Taking the online education market as an example, Song Junbo mentioned that Yigu did not adopt the free model of its main competitors, but instead ensured to provide partners with stable security solutions while charging fees. “If there is a stable product, the capacity of students in each class can be increased, and this increase does not affect the unit price, which means higher profits,” he mentioned.
In the education market in China, ClassIn has firmly grasped its advantages with its own technology reserves. At the same time, more and more overseas education companies have come to seek cooperation. At present, Yigu’s business has covered a total of 26 countries on all continents, and in many countries, it has established a solid cooperative relationship with the leading educational institutions. , Set a benchmark for users. According to Song Junbo, the advantages established by Yigu in the online education industry can also be naturally transferred to the scene of video conferencing: “Excellent products are because they can bring higher value to customers. Business people are not price-sensitive. What they care about is actually whether it can bring a better experience, make it easier for the team to reach consensus, and more easily form excellent results. “” Leading the value of intergenerational products is the key to motivating the sales mechanism beyond relationships. ” / p>
Instead of targeting competitors on the track, Yigu seems to want to use Microsoft’s development history to inspire itself. In the early stages of Microsoft’s development, it did not focus on rapid return realization, but increased market share and ultimately ensured long-term benefits through various means; in the end, the benefits brought by the windows system and office software provided companies with long-term considerable benefits Cash flow.
To some extent, Wing Gull is doing similar things. It does not focus on recovering costs through selling lessons, but rather continues to develop and provide services to all partners based on the underlying technology. The advantage of this development model is stability, which is also in line with Song Junbo’s education industry’s “stability” Features.
He admits that whether the expansion of the team size, the expansion of international customers, or the extension of the scene to the online video conferencing system are due to the external forces. “But when the track is spread far enough, it is good to do it decisively,” he said.