Su Jianxun
According to 36Kr HoldingsIt is understood that Feishu established a new strategic plan in June: focusing on the development of large enterprises in customer types, while focusing on the three major industries of the Internet, science and technology, and media.
36Kr Holdings learned exclusively that Xu Zhe, the product director of Feishu, an online office product owned by byte jump, left office at the end of February this year. Xu Zhe now plans to start a business in the field of e-commerce SaaS tools. "I have been in contact with many investors and finally got real money." An investment institution person said to 36Kr Holdings.
Xu Zhe was previously responsible for Flying Book's IM (instant messaging), calendar, open platform, enterprise management back-end and other product modules, which is now taken over by Zhang Nan, the newly appointed head of Flying Book. In March this year, byte beat announced the appointment of a new executive, and Zhang Nan, former president of watermelon video, served as the head of Fei Shu, reporting to Xie Xin, vice president of byte beat.
An employee of Flying Book said to 36Kr HoldingsXu Zhe's departure has little impact on Flying Book, because Flying Book products adopt modular management.Xu Zhe only cares about IM, other things such as Flying Book documents, human resources application People, audio and video, mailbox, there are special responsible persons to report to the senior management.
36Kr Holdings turned to byte beat for a response to the news, and byte beat officials said they would not comment.
Xu Zhe joined the byte beat in January 2018, which is a critical period for the preparation of flying books. Before 2018, Flying Book (then called Lark) was only a collaborative tool used within bytes; in 2018, Lark began inviting external partners to try it out; in April 2019, Lark was officially launched and named "Flying Book" in China.
Before joining Flying Book, Xu Zhe was a continuous entrepreneur. His well-known start-up projects are Doit.com, a time task management software launched in 2009, and Rush, a mail collaboration tool established in 2015, while the concepts of minimalist process, multi-task collaboration and cross-platform synchronization that he advocated during his startup period are somewhat reflected in Flying Book's products.
Xu Zhe played a key role in the early development of Lark (Flying Book). Foreign media Information has exposed the organization chart of byte jump. In the early report line of Lark, Xu Zhe was the person in charge of Lark products, together with Liang Rubo, technical director of byte jump, and Wu Weijie, head of commercial cash flow (monetization), to report to Xie Xin, vice president of byte jump.
When going out to sea, there is no final conclusion that bytes are "clouds".
Under the leadership of Xu Zhe and Xie Xin, Lark mainly promoted overseas markets in the early stage, targeting Alphabet Inc-CL CIts Gsuite suite has formed a set of Office365-style "family bucket" software solution. Among them, the product strategies of going out to sea, payment and package are all formulated by Xu Zhe. (for the early development of Lark, please refer to 36Kr Holdings's previous report: "Byte ToB: Fei Shu leaps in and dodges nails.")
"Xu Zhe has great hopes for going out to sea, especially in the North American market," said an employee who is familiar with Xu Zhe. "he is very familiar with American enterprise service companies and can count any new ToB model." Lark plans to launch corporate office suites for the United States and other overseas markets, according to its website, which launched a Lark subsidiary in Singapore in March 2019.
But the policy challenges encountered by byte jump in the US have hindered Xu Zhe's originally planned road to Lark to go to sea.
Since October 2019, Douyin's overseas version of Tiktok has received a number of lawsuits in the United States, involving excessive data collection, privacy / copyright infringement, and other acts, which directly affected the promotion of Lark, which is also a byte-beat unit in North America.
"originally, Lark planned a lot of business actions in North America, but after tiktok was sued, many business development had to stand still."A Fei Shu insider said to 36Kr Holdings.
When overseas was blocked, Lark began to fight at home in the name of "Fei Shu" in the second half of 2019, and faced BABA directly.Nailing, TencentWeCom and other giant players, Xu Zhe's way of thinking at this time, and byte high-level there is a certain difference.
"Xu Zhe believes that bytes can not only do IM (instant messaging), this is too uncompetitive, we must do 'cloud', and then cooperate in the game planning."The above-mentioned person said to 36Kr Holdings. Previously, Byte Jump had been rumored to enter the public cloud, but was later denied by officials.
As far as 36Kr Holdings knows, Byte Jump does have teams and plans to enter cloud computing, but the internal priority of the business is not high, and there is no clear internal conclusion on what model to do "cloud".
At present, Xu Zhe's obsession with "cloud + IM" is already the realistic way of playing BABA and Tencent in the field of ToB.
In June 2019, Ali Nail, once an independent business department, was announced to be merged into BABA Intelligent Cloud; in June this year, Zhang Jianfeng, president of BABA Smart Cloud, said that nails will be deeply integrated with Ali Cloud to achieve "cloud nail integration". To put it bluntly, it is to have more users to hit customers in the vanguard, and Aliyun provides more in-depth commercial products and services at the back end.
Tencent's action is similar. Although the CSIG (Cloud and Intelligent Industry Group) to which WeCom and Tencent Cloud belong are not yet part of the same department, when Tencent CSIG President Tang Daosheng accepted an exclusive interview with 36Kr Holdings, he said many times that the synergy between cloud and WeCom had significantly improved in recent years. "the cooperation model between cloud and Wechat has become popular." Tang Daosheng once said.
Insiders with multiple byte beats told 36Kr Holdings that bytes accumulated too little in ToB, and senior executives sometimes could not judge what to do or not to do. "Xie Xin also mentioned in internal sharing that bytes have not done ToB, and experience is not enough." In addition, Xu Zhe joined the byte late.Therefore, no matter from the aspects of high-level support and cross-departmental resource coordination, many of Xu Zhe's ideas and actions are not supported enough.
An internal employee of Flying Book told 36 Krypton that the demand for online office had soared during the epidemic this year, and it was thought that bytes would be used to support Flying Book with C-end traffic, but there was no related action in the end. After the beginning of the epidemic, Tencent joined the Tencent conference entrance at the bottom of the Wechat group chat-voice call, and diverted the stream through Wechat, making Tencent Conference, a product that has only been online for five months, rapidly reaching 10 million daily active users.
A number of Flying Book insiders and industry insiders told 36Kr Holdings that since the beginning of the epidemic, the number of user registrations and activity of Flying Book users have been "relatively average." by contrast, "nails have hit very hard."
The next step of Flying Book: be a big customer and focus on the three major industries
In the field of enterprise service, whether to be free, whether to be a big customer, and which industries to focus on are the paths that each ToB enterprise needs to choose, which will affect the company's product strategy, sales style and team composition.
Similarly, these are the three propositions that need to be solved urgently after Flying Book has shifted its focus back to China in 2019.
The first question has already been answered-Feishu was declared free during the epidemic, and the latter two questions gradually became answered after the new head of Feishu, Zhang Nan, took office in March this year.
According to 36Kr Holdings's understanding, Feishu established a new strategic plan in June: first, in terms of customer types, focus on the development of key customers, which will be carried out by Wu Weijie, the head of commercialization; secondly, in key industries, Feishu will focus on the Internet, science and technology, and media.
In the view of the Flying Book team, in addition to getting revenue from the secondary development of products, being a big customer is more conducive to the rapid accumulation of the number of users. In February this year, Fei Shu signed China Resources Group, which increased the registration of 400000 employees in a short period of time.
Previously, Feishu did not focus on the industry type-the early Feishu website case, with customers ranging from Source Capital, Beijing normal University and same-sex social platform Lancheng Brothers. In the future, Feishu will focus more on the industry and customer types. A flying book employee said to 36Kr Holdings: "originally there are some big and comprehensive flying books, want to serve all kinds of customers well, now I want to focus on the Internet."
milletIt is the latest benchmarking customer signed by Feishu in May this year. Previously, XIAOMI used Wechat and Mi Xiao for internal communication. According to the internal staff of Feishu, he was able to pry 20, 000 employees of XIAOMI to use Fei Shu. It is because "Lei Jun is very satisfied with Fei Shu and thinks the experience is good."
However, for this way of dividing the industry, some Flying Book employees are puzzled: "what is the difference between the Internet and the technology industry?" Feishu is already late for admission, is it too late for Internet customers? "
For Flying Books, there are still many issues that need to be reconsidered.
The change from paid software to free means that Flying Books have to find their own strategic position in the group, like nails and WeCom. In BABA, nail can work with Aliyun to hit customers; Yu Tencent and WeCom are the backgrounds for private domain traffic in Wechat system, but for Feishu, how to link up with the main business blocks such as byte-beating short / long videos, there is still no specific direction.
The industry still has expectations for the style of Flying Book. today, when nails and WeCom shout private traffic, hitting B-end customers with the advantage of C-end is the most popular method in the field of enterprise service this year. Byte jumping sits on the successful precedent of headlines, Douyin and watermelons. How to copy this part of user growth experience into Flying Books is also the current goal of Zhang Nan, former president of watermelon video and now head of Flying Books.