Shulou(Shulou.com)12/24 Report--

Editor's note: look at the market in the early stage, the benefit in the middle stage, and the idea in the later stage. This is my biggest feeling after an interview with the Flying Book team. this sentence applies not only to SaaS companies, but also to all entrepreneurs in an era when demographic dividends are at their peak.

Where is the next spring of SaaS industry? Practitioners who move forward in shouting and hesitation suddenly find that more and more head SaaS enterprises are beginning to move closer to Flying Books, and the purpose is very simple: to find new growth in business, and to reduce costs and increase efficiency with Flying Books.

Spring and winter is not as good as tomorrow

From winter to spring and to winter again, with the level of ebb and flow, China's SaaS industry has gone through a magnificent decade. Return to value, return to products, return to service is the true portrayal of the current SaaS industry, players are waiting for the arrival of spring. But when will "spring" come? That is a question!

In fact, driven by the digital wave in recent years, China's SaaS industry has indeed ushered in a new round of opportunities, but also intensified the product competition of the subdivision track. How to get more enterprise users and how to move from extensive growth to lean management has become a common challenge for SaaS enterprises.

"now that the demographic dividend has entered a bottleneck period, the next step of growth comes from two sources: one is to wait for the scientific and technological revolution, and the other is to benefit inward, that is, the so-called cost reduction and efficiency. Although AI shows signs, it is still a long way from the real industrial revolution." Cheng Hao, director of solutions for the Feishu enterprise service industry, said.

Fly up the book and find the increment

Fei Shu was first known as "synergy".

"in fact, at the beginning, byte didn't think about making its own tools. at that time, we used almost all the collaborative tools in the world and got through all the API we could get through, but we found that we still couldn't meet the demand." Cheng Hao said.

In the first half of this year, it was found that Flying Book had upgraded its product positioning from a collaborative office tool to a business management tool. They released a three-piece set of business-- multidimensional tables, application engines, and integration platforms.

Feishu multi-dimensional table is a form-type database built without code to better connect with office scenes; Feishu application engine is designed for 20% of customers' core business. provides developers with a wide range of general-purpose modules and visual editing modules to help develop and improve efficiency Feishu integration platform is an integration tool mainly for enterprises to solve the internal "data isolated island" problem. There are more than 100 system connectors at present.

With the release of this set of ToB combination punches, Feishu has found a new way: Feishu began to embrace the ToB market, from the ultimate user experience to the road of experience + business integration.

In recent years, more and more enterprises have begun to embrace Feishu, especially in the SaaS track, many segments of the field have almost achieved a "home run". For example, the fee control track: Huianlian Yi, Fenberton and Hesi are all using Flying Books.

Why do SaaS companies embrace Flying Books? Cheng Hao repeatedly mentioned a word-"there is a future". "I think the flying book is like a rocket ready to go. It's about to be launched. Do you want to jump on it?"

He said that on the one hand, as the products of Flying Books become more and more mature, it will attract more and more enterprise users to use Flying Books, and the word-of-mouth effect of Flying Books in the target users will be "realized". Compared with other competitors, Flying Book is a more growth potential and tempting platform for SaaS enterprises.

Under the influence of the two factors of "incremental + commercial closed loop", a large number of SaaS enterprises actively embrace Feishu and integrate products and services into Flying Book ecology, which seems to be a popular choice.

In fact, for the domestic SaaS industry, large factories build ecology, while small factories cultivate it meticulously. "Building ecology requires a lot of manpower and material resources. In fact, it is very difficult for a start-up company to do this, but after a large platform is built, we can come in and build together, give full play to their own strengths, and provide better services for users." Cheng Hao said.

In addition, for user-side enterprises, with the deepening of the digitization process, it will inevitably lead to more and more SaaS products access to business, different systems, different accounts, how to manage, how to pull it will be a big challenge. Under this background, the combination mode of "collaborative office integration platform" + "tripartite SaaS" such as Feishu seems to be the optimal solution to help enterprises to break through the internal data chain with the lowest threshold and the fastest speed, and release the value of data.

Of course, "being integrated" will also have hidden worries, that is, the product boundary problem of the integration side. The story of big fish eating small fish in the Internet industry is staged every day, how to rest assured to join the ecology is also the concern of every SaaS enterprise.

"first, for large companies, to make a good product, we must first see if it has this gene; second, it is how determined it is, because for large companies, this project may only be a leaf in the midst of flourishing leaves, but for small factories, it is a matter of life and death, so in terms of combat effectiveness and product effectiveness, it is not necessarily which is strong or which is weak." Cheng Hao said.

"in addition, now that the Internet has passed the stage of rapid development and winner-take-all, socialized division of labor is an inevitable trend. And for big companies, whether to do it or not is, in the final analysis, a ROI question: first, if you do something harmful to your partners, all your previous ecological structures will collapse instantly, making it almost impossible to expand ecology again; second, from a revenue point of view, if you enlarge the ecology, every 1% growth in the market may be much larger than 100% in the vertical track. " Cheng Hao added.

In fact, the ecological openness of Feishu is beyond everyone's imagination. "We do not mean to make a mountain in ecology, and the good products of many competitive enterprises are also in our ecology." Cheng Hao said. It is reported that the current Feishu open platform has been connected to 1000 + API. Feishu hopes to help enterprise systems integrate deeply with Feishu through rich and flexible open capabilities and smooth and convenient development experience.

Use flying books to find benefits

"Advanced team, use Flying Book first" is not just a slogan.

During the interview, the biggest cognitive reconstruction given to InfoQ is that "advanced" is not a golden adjective, but a business philosophy, a state of collective trend, and Flying Book is more like the explicit byte culture, efficiency, coordination, data, rationality. To name but a few, these characteristics are actually scarce and need to be made up for in the whole business society. And this feeling needs to start from the collaborative ability of Flying Books.

Cheng Hao said: "in fact, the collaborative ability of the whole flying book should be divided into three stages. Stage 1.0 is the most well-known flying book, including the precipitation of all kinds of knowledge, the examination and approval of business flow, some robot reminders, and so on." Phase 2.0 begins to help more enterprises connect their business to Flying Book, such as sales process management, product research and development management, etc. Flying Book can directly help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency; 3.0 is the AI co-creation stage. For example, this year we launched the out-of-the-box feature of Flying Book Intelligent partner, which integrates the capabilities of large models.

If the collaborative ability of Flying Book 1.0 is compared to point collaboration, then 2.0 is more like a line and network that can achieve cross-organizational, cross-departmental, and cross-business collaboration.

Take Hesi as an example, before using Flying Book, Hesi uses a third-party CRM system and project management system to solve external work order scenarios. The use process is as follows: the customer success team receives the bill of lading from the → triage desk in the CRM system and analyzes the work order, confirming that the work order of bug will be manually forwarded to the R & D personnel → R & D personnel in the project management system, confirming and repairing the contents of the work order or giving a solution. → triage desk manual operation in the CRM system and comments.

After using Flying Book, Hesi has realized the automation of external work order scene SOP, relying on the collaborative ability of Feishu to get through the system data, from finding data to finding people, which greatly improves the efficiency of work order implementation. When an external work order is entered, the flying book will be automatically classified and forwarded to the corresponding role. The work order confirmed as bug will be sent to the designated R & D personnel through IM for confirmation, and the development task can be automatically generated. The task status will be automatically transferred to the work order system and the work order status will be completed.

Project management is also one of the high demand scenarios within the enterprise. With the introduction of Flying Book, the efficiency of project management has been significantly improved. In the past, project leaders and node leaders needed to communicate frequently to synchronize project information. Now, with the multi-dimensional table function of Flying Book, no matter it is R & D or delivery, all projects can be managed in a unified interface, greatly enhancing the efficiency of collaboration. For example, in the R & D project, different teams are responsible for different modules. Through the visual report of Feishu, each project member can clearly grasp the progress and status of the whole project. This not only helps to plan the time reasonably and ensure the completion on schedule, but also ensures the smooth coordination of inter-departmental work. Once the task is completed, the person responsible for the next link will also be automatically reminded to ensure the efficient promotion of the process and the effective improvement of human efficiency.

For multidimensional tables, Cheng Hao added that one of the great values of multidimensional tables is to help enterprises do data integration and analysis. Take cost accounting as an example. In the past, we all had different service providers and different expense lists. Finally, when summed up, the decision maker could only see a fruitful number and could not dig deeper. In other words, it takes a lot of time to "get to the bottom". With multidimensional tables, we can "pour in" all kinds of data forms, and then use multidimensional tables to do data perspective, visual analysis, and so on. The input-output of all expenses is clearer at a glance.

In addition, in the sales management scenario that enterprises pay most attention to, Flying Book has also explored a lot of best practices with partners. Take Feibeitong as an example, through the use of Flying Books, the mechanisms of one customer, one group, one customer and one file are established, and all customer data and communication analysis processes are automatically synchronized and collected into customer files, which greatly avoids all kinds of non-standard and untimely problems of manual record collection. At the same time, decibeitong uses the Flying Book project function to develop a standard form for filling in the customer's whole life cycle data, and strictly combines the customer's journey to manage the data in accordance with the "project" management mode. At the same time, synchronize the customer base in real time after filling in the data, and inform the group members to review in time.

According to the introduction, after using Feishu, the development workload of decibeitong has been reduced by 60%, the efficiency of customer management has been doubled, and the customer conversion cycle has been increased by 40%.

In fact, from 1.0 to 2.0, Flying Book has evolved from collaborative office tools to business management tools. Stage 3.0 is more about digging into customer scenarios, abstracting more best practices, and introducing AI capabilities to empower. " In fact, Flying Book has not been selling a product or a tool, but industry best practices. Some of the enterprises we have worked with and co-founded also hope that their best practices can be spread and seen by more people, because this is also a manifestation of strength. " Cheng Hao added.

As for the latest development of the 3.0 phase, Cheng Hao said: "at present, we have provided a lot of plug and play scenarios, you can go to the official website to see, other scenes that are closely integrated with the customer industry and business are also in the process of continuous co-creation with customers."

Become an "advanced enterprise"

In fact, in the process of co-creation with customers, something "touched the soul" happened.

"there are a lot of customers in the process of co-creation with us, after using some of the functions and services of Flying Book, they begin to think about whether their previous workflow is reasonable and efficient, and then begin to optimize actively." Cheng Hao said.

And this is more interesting. In fact, compared with the long-term consulting mode chosen by foreign enterprises, Chinese enterprises are more inclined to see the method of recruitment and disassembly when there are problems, and the advantage is that the short-term cost is lower, but in the long run, it is easy to bring a large number of historical omissions. This is the root reason why medium and large enterprises need to spend a lot of time and money to hire consultants and experts to do strategic carding and business carding.

However, if enterprises start with tools such as Flying Books to manage business, data, manpower, etc., will there still be a ticking time bomb in the middle and later stages of enterprise development? If some traditional enterprises use flying books and use the power of tools to force and optimize organizational processes, can they avoid future troubles to the greatest extent? More importantly, it can start from the scenario of high-frequency pain points, and the impact on the operation of existing business will be minimized.

Look at the market in the early stage, the benefit in the middle stage, and the idea in the later stage. This sentence at the beginning of the article, on the one hand, refers to the flying book for SaaS enterprises, first of all, from how much market value the flying book can bring to it, and then what help the flying book can bring to the organization's cost reduction and efficiency, and finally through the flying book, what kind of changes can be brought to the concept and cognition of the organizational operation of the enterprise, that is, the use of advanced tools to become an advanced enterprise. The first two can help enterprises enhance their combat effectiveness in the early and middle stages, while the last layer is related to the everlasting future of the enterprise. Just like when people are young, the metropolis will sacrifice a certain degree of health in order to fight for their career, but when they can have both fish and bear paw, I believe no one will refuse.

On the other hand, this sentence also applies to how we understand Fei Shu. Enterprises compete, ideas win, and more advanced ideas may blossom and bear fruit later, but they have a better chance of winning the future.

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