New Journey of Entrepreneurship Veteran Li Jun｜ONES Technician

Li Jun is the founder of Weizhi Notes. WeizhiNotes is a powerful collaborative document and knowledge management software. Weizhi Notes will be merged into ONES, and together they will contribute to improving enterprise productivity and knowledge management.

The following is Li Jun's review of the entrepreneurial process and his outlook for the future.

The Internet Changes Payment Consciousness

My partner Wei Shijun and I both came from Jinshan WPS. In the genes of Jinshan people, they all wanted to make independent general-purpose products.

Coming out of Jinshan, if I still do traditional software company business, I always feel that something is wrong, so I still want to do some Internet innovation work.

We had done shareware before, and around 2009, it felt like a good opportunity. One is that the previously made software can be formed into service-oriented products, and the other is that the mobile Internet is just in the ascendant.

So started the so-called business, the first business. We have never started a company before, and we didn’t expect that making productivity tools is completely different from entertainment consumer tools.

Entertainment consumption will take the initiative to play, by nature, there will be many people who play. But for productivity products like Weizhi Notes, most people just use it as a tool for work or study, which is fundamentally different from entertainment consumer tools.

Doing productivity-related tool products is a very hard business. There is now a buzzword called PLG (Product-Led Growth) – a business that is product-driven growth.

The hardest part is constantly exploring and finding a suitable business model. At that time, domestic C-end users were not very willing to pay for note-taking tools, and the free value-added model adopted at the beginning had not been able to generate income. For a long time, our note-taking products were free for users to use.

Because our judgment at the time was: in the short term, it is difficult to charge fees in the domestic general coordination field.

Around 2013, we began to try the ToB business, providing SaaS services to small companies.

However, the business income of our ToB is not enough to support the expenditure of the whole company, and the ToC is basically free.

Around the end of 2016, the company’s financing was almost exhausted, and wages could not be paid out. Since then, it has experienced layoffs. Although I have been carrying it hard, I am very anxious. So I tried the ToC fee.

So, how much do you charge? Our team debated for a long time. The consensus was to charge reasonably.

The annual VIP fee is 60 yuan. When the charges were announced, we were nervous because we didn't know what was going to happen. But users are supportive, and they are really willing to pay for the product. All of a sudden, the revenue increased by several million yuan, and the company came to life again.

Wow, at this time we found out that users are not unwilling to pay, but because we have always been free of basic functions, users have no reason to pay.

This subverts our previous thinking. It can be said that we have come from the era when piracy was rampant, and we are rarely willing to pay for software. But now the new generation of payment habits have changed, mainly because the mobile Internet has changed people's awareness of payment, and payment channels are also more convenient.

However, our strategic direction at that time has been adjusted to ToB. So the money charged by ToC has always been a guarantee for our company. On this basis, we have enough manpower to do business exploration on ToB.

In other words, it is equivalent to individual users paying us the bottom line, so that we have the opportunity to do some innovative things.

Weizhi Notes is a product of the new era

In 2021, with the support of several major companies such as Huawei and Baidu, all new products and new system architectures in the ToB direction will be released. As the underlying technology, product user experience has kept up with a new wave of trends.

Our new products are better than the competition in terms of applicability and flexibility. The new product uses one of our core component capabilities, which involve multi-person collaboration, block editing, and two-way linking.

It can be said that this product reflects the finer granularity of information. It used to be an association of articles, but now it becomes an association of pieces of information. All I can say is that things that can be calculated from links in the future will be much better than before.

With this real-time block structure experience, it's time to draw a line from traditional Office documents. It was always said in the past that since there is Office, why do you need to engage in such online documents?

Being able to collaborate quickly in the process, and being able to quickly edit and modify by multiple people, these are cloud-based and new front-end technologies based on fast real-time collaboration experiences - it can be called a product of the new era.

In large companies, those who prefer scientific research or knowledge workers with high-tech Internet must have a lot of communication in the daily work process. But because no one writes Email anymore, the ability to write long texts may be lost, and everyone is more accustomed to writing short words on IM chat tools.

As a result, large companies need long-term tracking or a place where everyone can reach a consensus. This kind of document that can be opened at any time on the mobile terminal or PC terminal, and can be recorded, commented and discussed, is currently the most scarce in major companies.

That is to say, the ToB businesses of Weizhinote can complement the existing R&D management tool business of ONES.

Since our focus has shifted to ToB and the lack of manpower, the user experience of the C-side is not good enough, which has attracted a lot of scolding on the Internet.

In fact, in the face of user criticism, we feel very uncomfortable. Because we have always wanted to do a good job in the C-side user experience.

However, from the perspective of company operations, we must have some phased goals and controls, and we must go to commercialization.

So, most of our strength is on support services for large companies, and then prioritized to improve according to their needs. However, these B-side needs cannot be felt by individual users. For individuals, most of them are the basic needs of ensuring the reliability of users' data and the high availability of services.

Speaking of which, I am still very emotional. Most of the users who use note-taking products are more rational. They think that it is not easy for the company to provide this product, and they are more supportive. We are very grateful to these users, and they are also the driving force for supporting us to make C-end products well.

Notes present tacit knowledge

Technically, it is worth mentioning that Weizhinote can be stable, reliable, and concurrent for such a long time; we provide users with a seamless upgrade experience for long-term use.

Among them, the new products upgraded this year can be updated and upgraded seamlessly and automatically. In terms of multi-person document collaboration, when multiple people are editing collaboratively, conflict handling is perfectly resolved.

That is to say, when we change a place at the same time, how can we ensure that the modified things will not be overwritten by each other - there is our core technology behind this.

Also, let's say that when we write a document, there will always be someone with a bad cell phone network, such as in an elevator or a plane. So, how to ensure that the content that users can modify offline on their mobile phones can be synchronized and merged again when the network is unblocked without conflicting with others? This "offline mode" is also worth mentioning.

A block of information in a live document can be embedded in anything. What used to be a piece of text is now a block of information. In addition to some of our built-in flow charts, audio and video and other main information block types, any company or developer can use a few lines of code to implement a new "block" embedded in the document, that is to say, the document can be embedded in the document. Embed everything - the carrying capacity of this document becomes very flexible.

Personally, what I value more is the knowledge graph. In fact, whether it is a note or an online document, the recording function carried by it is already excessive, that is to say, this value has been recognized by everyone, and it is very mature.

However, there is another value that everyone can see, that is, the relationship between documents and documents, or the relationship between "this piece of information" and "that piece of information", these relationships may be more valuable than the document itself.

Since 2019, the use of graphs to show the relationship between documents, including the connection between people and documents, and the connection between documents and documents - through the calculation of these relationships by algorithms, you can calculate some things you don't know. thing. What we have collectively written and discussed can also be calculated and come up with some unexpected but reasonable things that may be the most valuable at the company level, or should be most invested in research.

For individual users, traditional note-taking tools will only help you record, not help you recall or tell you what to do. But now our new type of note-taking tool pays more attention to association. It can immediately show you what you have written and thought about in the fastest way, and it is presented in the form of a picture.

That way, what you've written in the past has added value. Its value comes not only from the information, but also from a bunch of relationships — it’s called “insights,” and it’s presented to you in a visual way. When you see it, you are actually having a conversation with your own past. Then, when you are making decisions, you are confident because you know where your inspiration, your intuition, comes from.

You can follow this insight and pull out all the previous stuff. For a team, this insight may be the presentation of the team's collective brain. Therefore, the value of mining these link relationships is very large.

To put it professionally, this is equivalent to having a new way to present people's tacit knowledge. It used to be said that explicit knowledge is those structured documents we write. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge and experience that has settled in our minds, and we may not be able to express it clearly - but now tools can help you to say it, the only thing you need to do is to write something that you think is important every day. .

This actually became a motivation for taking notes. The daily record itself is not purposeful, it may just be to solve the process of wanting to strengthen the learning at that time. However, if you can take notes, these things can be of great value in the future.

On the whole, this is a good product trend, and all companies will go in the direction of improving the productivity of knowledge workers, and it is about to explode. Since there is such a good opportunity, Weizhi Notes and ONES can quickly catch up with the market demand and seize the opportunity of this round of ToB business development.