Hua Shao, founder of Kechuang, Kuxuan Technology: Make products with win-win thinking, connect the ecology, and achieve large-scale development

Hua Junwu (Hua Shao), founder and chairman of Kuxuan Technology, has more than 10 years of experience in consulting services and solutions for multinational enterprises. He has served well-known IT companies at home and abroad such as Kingdee and Hewlett-Packard, and is well versed in the pain points and innovations of corporate training. Law, with unique insights into the digital transformation of corporate training. The established Kuxuan Technology has served more than 200,000 enterprises and tens of millions of users at home and abroad, and is also a strategic partner of Dingding, Qiwei and Feishu.

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The biggest gain in working life is learning to break boundaries

Because of his love for the enterprise management software industry", Hua Shao chose Kingdee for his first job. His peers were still comparing salary and enjoyment after get off work, but Hua Shao ignited a burst of professionalism early on. When obstacles are encountered and get off work is over, I will make up lessons and break the topic. I will continue to think about and organize the details of regret during work discussion, and communicate with the team the next day...
This dazzling self-driving force was caught by the executives of Kingdee Headquarters at a glance. "In addition, I am more honest and honest, and I always rush to check out when I eat." olive branch.
"The family has always been in business, and I have been very interested in business management since I was a child. Starting a business is a dream in my heart."
In Hangzhou, Hua Shao, as a founding member, has experienced all the pains and joys of achievements, and has also accumulated valuable entrepreneurial experience. Although the scale of the enterprise is small, it is a real famous enterprise and an elite team. There are many well-known domestic and foreign enterprises such as Hewlett-Packard, Midea, Hangzhou North Software Park, and Wu Xiaobo's Blue Lion. However, the manpower-heavy consulting model is destined to be slow in the development of the enterprise, limited in the service radius, and Hua Shao, who has completely opened his horizons, took advantage of the opportunity of enterprise adjustment and joined the technical consulting department of the HP Enterprise Business Group at the invitation of the partner HP team. .
Years later, Hua Shao summed up his work experience before starting a business, "The service awareness and communication skills cultivated at Kingdee have learned the process of creating a company from 0 to 1 when starting a business. The biggest gain is that at HP, I really learned to break the boundaries Thinking and decision-making... More coincidentally, these three jobs with seemingly different business directions are all related to the depth of training."
In 2017, HP decided to cooperate with Tsinghua Unigroup and borrowed the H3C brand to continue its business in China. The Chinese team paid more attention to HP's core businesses such as servers, switches, and storage networks, while other business departments were facing adjustments - including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Technology Consulting Department, where Hua Junwu is located.
Hua Junwu was not reconciled, "Such a good team has a tacit understanding, and it's a pity to break up like this." He proposed to form a group to start a business, and Paoze responded in succession.

Choose training and take root in DingTalk Eco-tech creators: Why did you choose training as the direction of entrepreneurship in 2017?

Hua Shao: The first is value judgment. In the work experience of Kingdee, Entrepreneurship and Hewlett-Packard, I have felt the great value of corporate training. Compared with talent training, the more important purpose of corporate training is: an important means of large-scale expansion and replication of corporate business. For enterprises entering the growth stage, this is a rigid need, and the mainstream training mode in those days was very heavy, mainly serving the head customers, and the market potential of customers below the waist was huge.
The second is observational variables. Around 2017, we observed several variables within and outside the training industry that are likely to cause dramatic changes. First, the employment model based on the Internet platform has become popular, but it is impossible for field sales, shopping guides, waiters, and delivery guys to sit in front of the computer and use the online learning platform for training. Therefore, the mobile terminal is a potential scenario for training; second, in 2017 It is the first year of knowledge payment, and paying for learning on mobile phones has become an obvious trend. Compared with personal paid learning, more corporate employees can conduct convenient learning anytime, anywhere through online platforms. This learning mode The formation is more attractive to us. Therefore, we judge that there is a great opportunity for standardized SaaS products for corporate training based on mobile Internet that serve waist customers.
Therefore, targeting demand, grasping trends, and enjoying dividends are the foundations of early entrepreneurship.

Kechuang people: Your knowledge and experience of training scenarios come from serving the top customers, but you decided to serve the waist customers. What is the thinking behind this decision?

Hua Shao: Big customers are service-driven, and customers have many personalized needs. Sales, pre-sales, products, technology, delivery, operation and maintenance, project managers... A systematic team needs strong people in every link, which is destined to be It is a low-margin, short-radius business, and it cannot be scaled, so it cannot rely on the power of capital. This is an important reason why we did not become big customers at the beginning of our business. On the road of standardization and scale, if there is no DingTalk, I may not have the courage to do it, because the promotion of standardized and large-scale products requires extensive customer resources or traffic pools.

Kechuang people: In your previous interviews, you mostly talked about why you chose Dingding. Can you review the thinking of the year in detail? It is not so natural to choose an entrepreneurial model based entirely on the DingTalk ecosystem in 2017.

Hua Shao: First of all, I have a principle for whether to choose ecology for SaaS products: high-frequency products are suitable for independence, and medium and low-frequency products must embrace ecology. The training is obviously not as high frequency as Dingding.
Second, we found a common pain point when serving large customers. The employees of large enterprises have more than 5 APP applications. In order to improve efficiency, it is generally necessary to spend tens of millions to build a unified entry-level portal system, which is more firm We are determined not to do independent APP.
Third, Dingding had 2 million corporate customers at that time, which itself was a huge traffic pool. The success of Weimeng and Youzan in the WeChat ecosystem has given us enough confidence that the To B service is based on the To B ecological platform with the largest traffic, and it should also be able to grow a company of sufficient scale.
An editor-in-chief of 36Kr once asked me a question. He said that there are some common characteristics of people and companies that can do things well in DingTalk ecology? I think the most important thing is the pattern and mentality of win-win thinking. You need to embrace the rules of the platform, embrace constraints, give up some ego, get used to trade-offs, and find common values for both parties. Back then, we put a lot of energy into thinking and judging this decision, and formed an understanding of the value concept, which proved to be a good choice.

The biggest worry: do products or do content?
Kechuang people: What is the real value of the training industry? Is it the content of training, or is it a convenient, fast and easy-to-use tool?

Hua Shao: This question is a very big challenge we encountered in the early days. Do you want to do software or courses?
We finally decided on the mode of software self-development and content cooperation:
First of all, the corporate training business we do is based on internal training, so more than 70% of the content is generated internally, such as business processes, corporate culture, product knowledge, and service standards. We used to serve customers such as BOE, CCB, and Samsung when we were at HP. For HP courses, they mainly checked and filled vacancies in the curriculum system, and the training courses were mainly their own.
Second, as mentioned above, the essence of corporate training is to help companies expand and replicate their business on a large scale. As long as standardization and scale expansion are involved, training is a very important starting point. How to do training at low cost and high efficiency? , is its pain point.
This determines that, for course content, the life cycle is short and the reusability is low. You have to match various industries, different business models, and different product forms. Just the sales link will be overwhelmed by the huge amount of information.
As for software, continuous accumulation and reusability are strong. Although Cool Academy has now been defined by customers as a platform-level product for enterprise training operation management, which can help solve the integration needs of enterprise training, the early product functions are also very simple. Just three things: first, send a study task; second, exam; third, homework. The content is provided by the enterprise, and we help the enterprise to control the training process and quality with low cost and high efficiency. It turns out that a large number of businesses need such a product.

Kechuang people: There is a lot of room for imagination: Can we cooperate with leading companies in the industry, Kuxuan Technology provides promotion and landing services, and the other party provides high-quality training content to achieve high-quality training content output, such a business model?

Hua Shao: This is an action we are already doing. It is called "Integration of Industry and Training" internally. It has already been implemented in the property and chain industries. In the future, we will continue to try to enter other new industries.
This is thanks to our partners who are willing to share their cutting-edge thinking and in-depth insights, such as Country Garden Knowledge Product Team, Belle's CTO, and Shanghai Auntie's boss. They often share their thinking about training and business with me, and I will Quickly form data, go to the market to find resonance and feedback, and make timely efforts if the opportunity is determined to exist.
What kind of business system is training? In fact, it is to help enterprises achieve business standardization and talent standardization. At present, our ability to do talent standardization is stronger, but in some specific scenarios, talent standardization itself is the implementation of business standardization, such as chain store scenarios, what to do every time , How to do everything... This brings new value to customers. We are no longer a training system, but a complete closed loop to help enterprises achieve business standardization.

Three major difficulties in starting a business: priority of needs, where are customers, and where are talents

Hua Shao: The first challenge that comes after starting a business is, what kind of product should we make to serve customers? The needs of major customers are clear and detailed, and the customers we want to serve are scattered, vague and huge. How to balance the needs of customers and control our own production resources is the biggest challenge for a new company. We spent a long time and found a lot of professional people to sort it out. In the end, if we want to solve it completely, we still need to study customers and gain deep insight into customer needs: we have built a complete business architecture diagram for the entire business scenario of corporate training. Corresponding product architecture diagrams are also generated to plan our resource allocation based on importance and application frequency, as well as medium and long-term strategic value.
The second challenge, where are the customers? How big is the market? How high is the ceiling? Can this business become a listed company? Some of the issues here are really critical, such as waist customers, how to define them? How to find them? This must be considered.
The third challenge is talent. In the beginning, we were a business team. We knew the product but not the technology. How to choose the CTO talent was a thorny problem in front of us. Together, we formed a consensus and understanding of the value of this person, and clarified the talent profile. This also constitutes our standard process for talent selection in the past five years: first, we must clarify the portrait, and as long as the portrait is clear, we will definitely be able to find a matching person.
Market size is limited, corporate resources are limited, and talents cannot be matched... In fact, there are some problems here. The essence is that start-ups must focus on core values due to the weakness of the company in the early stage. As long as the core values can stand, they will enter a spiral of rising After reaching a certain level, there will be a strategic upgrade, and then more resources and more outstanding talents can be matched.

Kechuang people: When it comes to talents, many companies are troubled by the loss of excellent core talents. Kuxuan Technology has grown from 4 people to more than 500 people. How to ensure a low turnover rate of outstanding talents?

Hua Shao: The first is the reasonable distribution of interests, and the second is the cultural atmosphere of excellent talent selection and unquestionable employment. Kuxuan Technology advocates that everyone can speak, and issues are transparent. Employees are very encouraged to give their opinions to the company. The experience of growing together.

Three important stages of product and platform integration: Tech creators have been rooted in the DingTalk ecosystem for 5 years, and the Cool Academy has won numerous awards, including winning the first place in all categories. As a successful practitioner of the ecological model, can you share your judgment on the three ecosystems of Dingding, Feishu and WeChat?

Hua Shao: Pay attention to the stereotypes that the market has formed on the three platforms. Enterprises must consider the mind of users when choosing an ecological platform. At present, customers have a stereotyped impression of the three platforms: they are all platforms for enterprise collaborative office, but each has its own characteristics. For example, some people will say that enterprise WeChat is SCRM, Dingding is OA, and Feishu is HR tool.
Their respective advantages are also relatively clear. For example, the bottom layer of enterprise WeChat is a social ecosystem; and in terms of ecology, DingTalk started earlier. At present, the scene of product support for corporate collaborative office is relatively more complete, and DingTalk also takes ecology as the core. strategy. Feishu has already started to lay out its ecology, and the relevant teams and operation systems are in the process of improvement. At this stage, the cooperation with ISVs is more like leveraging each other to expand the user base.

Kechuang people: Are there clear stages and steps for cooperation with the platform ecosystem? How far are many people's ideas of "continuously reducing innovation costs and increasing innovation scale through API interfaces based on platform ecology"?

Hua Shao: I think there is still a certain distance. There are at least three stages to be completed before reaching that stage.
In the first stage, the cooperation between the enterprise and the platform at the market level is similar to that of the APP Store, listing-selling-sharing, to achieve customer acquisition and closed-loop sales.
The second stage is product integration. For example, we are integrating with Dingding and Feishu. Cool Academy and Dingding have 15 capabilities. For example, Dingding has a group live broadcast function, which we have integrated with it. You can also initiate a DingTalk live broadcast, and the content is stored in the Ku Academy system. The live broadcast initiated from DingTalk can also be stored in the Ku Academy with one click, which greatly improves the user experience; combined with Feishu documents, in the field of Feishu The training and learning components of Cool Academy are embedded in it, allowing people to realize a series of links such as training process management and training assessment in the process of browsing documents and learning and disseminating. Integration with ecological products can greatly improve the usability of products.
In the third stage, in coordination with the ecological marketing service system, they go deep into the process of serving customers and serve customers together, which takes the advantage of competition.
Only when enough companies have completed these three stages can the subsequent ecological horizontal links be truly prosperous and form a truly complete and sustainable ecosystem.