Panoramic interpretation of the domestic To B market

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Text | Old Lining

When the expansion of one ecology reaches its limit, another ecology begins.

This is especially true for the Internet. To C’s traffic business has reached its limit. The uncles and aunts in the towns outside the 5th Ring Road have popularized various “speed editions” and learned how to use Pinduoduo for shopping and Douyin and Kuaishou. Brushing short videos, where else can the Internet expand?

The fundamental reason for the expansion of traffic is the transfer of user scenarios. The product scenarios of the Internet have become so homogeneous that it is difficult to attract most users to move to the same position. After comparing multiple similar products, more users can stay in mobile apps for a long time. There are still a few.

Most new products are trapped in the involution of the traffic limit. The refinement of scenarios within the same ecosystem is no longer the criterion for attracting users. The degree of homogeneity is so serious that it cannot guarantee the long-term retention of users. Therefore, most products have become extremely small and Survive in the cracks of beautiful traffic.

In the past two years, the external environment has deteriorated rapidly, and the financial assets of medium and large Internet companies have continued to depreciate. Therefore, the disorderly expansion of capital has been cut off. Even companies like Apple, which have changed the world, have suffered for many years. Domestic Internet The big factories are even more afraid to act indiscriminately. From queuing up to get a "graduation certificate" to "optimizing" Ri Gongyi's death, everyone has adopted a layoff strategy of saving food and clothing.

I originally expected Metaverse and Web 3 to be the antidote to traffic. As a result, the development and change of these new ecosystems is still a distant dream. Meta VR has put a lot of effort into it. The monthly active data of the social product Horizon has so far not exceeded 200,000. Despite this , the popularity of these new ecosystems is still unabated, and the layout of major manufacturers is also continuing, but I don’t know when they can really take the stage.

In addition, the rest are To B or To B, especially in the domestic To B. Because the domestic Internet To B scene is far from popular, and the scene refinement is far from reaching the limit, the To B model still has a lot of room in China, and it is still a piece of cake that can be made bigger, and the To B model is closer to cash flow , which is also crucial in the current winter.

02

There are different reasons for the domestic To B ecology not developing. In the final analysis, it is very simple, it is the development cycle. Although the domestic To B market has experienced several rounds of bombardment, in fact, it is still in the early stage of development so far.

This is because from the web side to the mobile side, although we have basically kept up with the global development in terms of To C applications, in the web period, we basically focused on benchmarking, and the former BAT as a representative can find foreign benchmarking products, mobile After the start of the terminal, we followed at the same time, and there were some innovations.

After the advent of the mass Internet, Microsoft and Apple operating systems were born in the Web era, and Apple and Android operating systems were born in the mobile era. In fact, none of them came from China.

This is the fundamental reason why there is a big gap between domestic To B and foreign To B ecology, especially in the period of PC computer development, the United States started from military industry to civilian popularization. In this process, we fell behind for many years. At that time, the United States was the earliest The military took the lead, led major laboratories and large enterprises, and formed the earliest prototype of Silicon Valley.

It was not until the birth of Apple and Microsoft systems on the Web side, which brought the mass Internet boom, that we gradually participated. In this process, the commercial To B led by the United States has already formed customer habits, and we have only started from scratch.

Although the early creation of Ali was the To B gene, what really made Ali a giant was the birth of Taobao. Usually, after the increase in the To C application, we began to really pay attention to To B, because the cultivation of customer habits takes a long period of time. , most people will automatically ignore To B as long as they can tell fast-growing stories.

Due to the above factors, domestic To B is still mainly based on large customers with stronger cognitive ability and financial strength, but the needs of large customers are usually more personalized, and more only accept customized privatized Internet deployment services. Accept overseas popular SaaS standard products and services.

In the early days, small and medium-sized enterprises generally adopted the principle of saving where they can save. In the past two years, with the increase of technology startups and the trend of younger entrepreneurs, the customer habits of using SaaS products have improved, but small and medium-sized enterprises still They tend to use free products and services, and their willingness to pay is not high. In addition, the business changes of small and medium-sized enterprises are relatively frequent, and it is difficult to retain long-term maintenance fees for a certain SaaS scenario.

In addition, many low-level commercial To B systems are still the mainstream of international competitors, such as database management systems, which are basically used by large enterprise groups such as financial banks, telecommunications, and governments. These enterprises have higher performance requirements for commercial systems, and most government enterprises tend to Procurement technology has accumulated many years of foreign commercial management systems, such as database management systems owned by companies such as Qracle, IBM, and Microsoft. This situation has further compressed domestic To B enthusiasm.

After the mobile Internet, we finally caught up with foreign development in the core technology field. From around 2010 to the present, there are finally more domestic manufacturers in emerging technology fields such as cloud computing, big data, and AI. Alibaba Cloud, Nail The To B model headed by Ding has begun to rise, and a number of high-quality entrepreneurs have also appeared in big data analysis, middle and Taiwan, etc.

After the mobile Internet, the technical strength of both start-up companies and large factories is not only not lagging behind, but also can beat overseas counterparts in many aspects. For example, in terms of distributed databases, due to the huge base of Internet population in China, it is easier to explode massive data, such as Alibaba Double Eleven concurrent data and Alipay payment data. Therefore, several database management systems similar to the Alibaba system have been born, which can go overseas and cooperate with international counterparts. Wrist wrestling.

The next industrial stage is recognized as intelligent production. We are not behind in the technical layout of this aspect, and there may be opportunities in many aspects. For example, a company such as Baidu, which has been deeply involved in AI To B, has a lot of advantages in autonomous driving and intelligent hardware systems. There are already many advantages.

No matter how far the next technological revolution is from us, at least for now, we will not be absent. The commercial application of emerging technologies basically starts from the B side. This process of cultivating customer habits from scratch will definitely bring the whole Changes in the domestic B-end market, so there are huge opportunities for To B in China.

03

Many scenarios in the To B market are different from To C, for example, you don’t need to worry about who your opponent is.

Of course, the giants are laying out different To B scenarios, and some tracks will spare no effort to invest capital to clear their opponents, because compared with C-end consumption, the LTV (customer lifetime value) of B-end customers is higher. The cost of switching is also high, and the reason for churn is usually that the customer has closed down, or the related product line has been closed.

Under this logic, large customers that are not easy to go bankrupt will naturally become the KA (key customers) targeted by all To B companies; industries that are not easy to shrink, or industries that are growing, naturally become the beacon of demand for all To B companies .

If a To B enterprise wants to make a SaaS product, it needs to have a complete solution in at least one scenario, and the logic of the To B scenario is very complex. In a scenario, different business processes with multiple user roles are usually distinguished, and the functional rights of different user roles are also It is completely different, so a SaaS product that looks very simple on the outside has actually developed a lot of very complex functional logic behind it.

Because of this, it is difficult for SaaS to iterate quickly through the MVP model (minimum viable product) like To C products, because the important premise of the MVP model is that the C-side user roles are unified, and each additional user identity means that the cost of function development has doubled. More than doubling, thus losing the biggest advantage of the MVP model.

User roles are different, business processes are different, and product logic is different. Therefore, the workload of SaaS products will increase by more than 5-10 times compared to To C products. Therefore, the iteration cycle of SaaS products is usually very slow, usually in units of years. It is difficult to iterate every week or every two weeks like To C products. At present, there are a large proportion of SaaS semi-finished products with "weekly iteration thinking" on the market. Obviously, the demand is turned upside down.

Slow iteration of SaaS does not necessarily mean lag. SaaS also has its own flexibility, because the needs of enterprise customers are deterministic, and SaaS does not need to be like To C products. Testing, SaaS can easily find PMF (product fit market), but the PMF process of To C products is extremely difficult. PMF determines the life and death of products. From this point of view, To B products are more likely to survive.

Feishu, DingTalk, Tencent Conference and other SaaS products with a large number of users can see that the giants are competing around common scenarios. In fact, it is more to maximize the value of their own traffic, which itself is vertical to the choice of most entrepreneurs. There is a big difference in the field of SaaS, and the traffic structure of the core products of the big manufacturers also limits the direction of their products. If they target the vertical field, it will bring obstacles to the diversion. Therefore, most To B startups in the vertical field do not need to worry about it. Who is the opponent.

The underlying technology solutions such as database, operating system, and middleware have become popular in the past two years under the background of domestic Xinchuang. However, in addition to testing technical strength, these core technology areas also test system performance. If there is no support behind It is difficult to achieve the expansion and compatibility of the underlying capabilities for the iterative performance of high-traffic products. Therefore, in these core technology fields, large manufacturers with high-traffic products also have inherent advantages.

The other aspects of the layout of the big manufacturers are value-added services, creating added value around the paying customers of their own traffic products. These products are subsidiary products of traffic products. SaaS products create competition.

For example, Tencent’s corporate WeChat ecosystem for WeChat, ByteDance’s MCN and advertiser ecosystem for Douyin, Meituan’s cash register ecosystem for takeaway merchants, and Ali’s Alimama and Cainiao ecosystem for retail customers.

04

The domestic To B market situation can be summed up as half products and half services.

It does not mean that half of the companies in the market are making products, but that even companies that make SaaS products, customized services for major KA customers will account for at least half of the weight. For most entrepreneurial To B companies, most of them only do Part of the product structure is 100% focused on serving customized customers.

This is the biggest difference between domestic and foreign To B markets. Due to the development cycle, domestic To B is in the early stage of the market. Enterprise customers on the demand side have many process habits that have not been standardized in the early stage. When choosing an external supply side Party B, the service weight It will definitely be greater than the product weight.

Compared with large KA enterprises, the demand scenarios of a large number of SMB small and medium-sized enterprises are relatively simple. Therefore, many SaaS products are mainly aimed at small and medium-sized SMB customers, and more of them are small and medium-sized customers in technology-related fields. The author wrote an article in 2020. This situation has been analyzed in "To B Ecological Panorama Interpretation", so I won't repeat it here.

SaaS products for SMB small and medium-sized enterprises generally focus on "people" in the enterprise department to obtain demand, such as project management, collaboration, CRM, etc. Since these products mainly focus on people, they can obtain network effects and can quickly Accumulating a large amount of customer resources and data, the disadvantage is that customers are not willing to pay, and it is difficult for the company to make profits.

Due to the long profit cycle of SaaS, these products are prone to survival difficulties. SaaS products with good customer resource data conform to the user structure of large-scale traffic products, so most of these SaaS products will be acquired by big companies, such as Teambition, Curtain , Youmeng, etc. Of course, the big manufacturers themselves are also building different SaaS products around their traffic products, such as Feishu, DingTalk, and Tencent Conference.

Those To B products that can survive and do not need to be acquired in the short term usually focus not on people in the corporate sector, but on a certain transactional workflow of the customer, and after years of scene polishing in the vertical field, they are also mainly serving large customers. , and at the same time obtained a large proportion of small and medium customer resource data, such as Kingdee, UFIDA, etc. in financial aspects.

In addition, the To B team after the mobile Internet usually chooses not to release SaaS products, or release products as the main profit model. These teams are usually experts in a certain technical field, and they have developed a set of semi-product technical architecture or The management system can provide privatized customized services for different large customers.

The two models of PLG product-driven and SLG sales-driven have been repeatedly discussed and dialectical in the To B ecosystem. The foreign PLG model is very successful, and the domestic SLG model is still the main model. Perhaps with the continuous iteration of emerging technologies, domestic customer habits have been cultivated. This The situation may improve the most in the future.

05

By bridging the gap in technical core capabilities, To B companies have no restrictions on localization or globalization.

In the early stage, we are far away from overseas companies in terms of core technical capabilities and maturity. However, with the development of the mobile Internet and today's AI big data production, the domestic team is not weaker than overseas counterparts in many core technical capabilities, and many may also have more advantages.

In addition, many To B technology companies in China have adopted a global team structure. They have a large number of domestic employees in China, and they have also established branches or studios around the world to introduce global employees, and choose different strategies according to different market ecology. , and recruit different talent teams.

Under this premise, To B is actually easier to globalize than To C, because the habits of users in overseas markets are more mature, To C competition will be blocked by overseas giants, To B vertical competition also does not need to pay attention to who the opponent is, and overseas The PLG model can also be used to expand the market.

From a macro perspective, digital transformation is in full swing both domestically and globally. Whether industrial manufacturing, government bidding, consumer retail, power and energy, etc., are researching digital transformation paths, and the core of digital transformation is the data processing that To B companies are best at.

In the Web era, data processing was mostly just transactional process processing. After the mobile Internet, it began to move towards the path of data analysis. Today, data processing has moved towards the path of production. For example, the popular "AI painting" a while ago was completely drawn by AI. The Space Opera effect hit everyone hard.

Data production has begun to replace some functions that we once thought could not be replaced. This process is faster than we imagined. Data production also brings To B opportunities. At present, everyone has the same starting point, and the digital transformation needs of all enterprise customers are also It is clear that the digital transformation cycle is likely to be the growth and popularization cycle of the domestic To B market.

Even in the current winter when traffic is extremely involution, facing the influx of emerging technologies, To B is still one of the few options that can grow for all Internet companies.

For example, in the Metaverse, although no product on the C-side can reach 200,000 monthly active users, there are already many delivery scenarios for digital twins and remote interaction on the B-side, such as virtual exhibition halls for cultural tourism, 3D prototypes for construction and manufacturing, medical care Sensing interaction with the car, etc.

From 3D modeling to positioning algorithms, the application of Metaverse To C has not been successful, mainly because the interfaces and open source markets of these To B underlying technologies are not yet mature, and there is no unified standard in these areas in the world. Compared with the world, the domestic advantage is obviously greater, so there is a great possibility that the setter of the metaverse standard will come from China.

Web 3 abroad basically stays in the stage of issuing coins and speculating on concept coins. Domestically, the ternary paradox of blockchain currency speculation was recognized earlier. After the legislation prohibits currency speculation, it has fundamentally improved the blockchain technology. With more thinking and application, many explorations of B-side commercial scenarios have also been born.

In the next iteration of the technology industry, although To C applications seem to be far away, To B commercial delivery is already close at hand. When emerging industries are iterating on old industries, all needs will not distinguish the size and background of the company, as long as With a real solution, there is an equal opportunity to obtain all KA major customers and government bidding.

Based on the above, the domestic To B market can be entered now, and the future can be expected.