Jiang Xiaopeng, a paranoid man from northeast China, entered the SaaS industry in 2006 and has never left. He has been doing it for 14 years. From Wolf smoke to Ten thousand net to Ali, closely follow SaaS business. In 2013, due to the strategic adjustment of Ali, Jiang Xiaopeng left with the halo of Ali, but returned to a small SaaS project, which surprised countless peers.
Not 40, Jiang Xiaopeng’s life and work in addition to SaaS is SaaS. He is typical of the post-80s generation. But knowing full well that SaaS was hopeless in China, they stuck with it. We talked to him about 14 years of SaaS.
01. Six years of wind and rain, paper clips for villas
Since when did SaaS exist in China? In 2004, a pivotal year for the industry, Salesforce made headlines when its shares rose more than 55% on the first day of its successful ipo on the New York Stock Exchange.
It was also the year that the first batch of SaaS companies were born in China, imitating Salesforce’s model. But most are a flash in the pan.
And in this wave survived the Wolf smoke, this is a paper clip for villa story, but also jiang Xiaopeng accidentally into the beginning of SaaS. Wolfsmoke was founded in 2005, the early stage of SaaS industry, they aimed at one thing, to build a website.
Jiang Xiaopeng remembers the hard time after entering Langyan in 2006, a company that started as a SaaS website. Within two years, Jiang reached the top of this business and the market reached the ceiling. “You have to show customers one by one to prove that this thing is very easy to use. Only with the technical strength of the founders lu Zhong (former vice president of Microsoft) and Wang Zhigang (co-founder of Sina) can you win the trust of customers.”
However, this kind of sales can not bring more growth to Wolf tobacco. In 2008, the founder chose to merge with Wanwang in exchange for shares to continue this business. At the same time, Luzhong also introduced cooperation with Ali, focusing on the sale of IaaS (basic hardware such as servers). In the end, the small SaaS company was acquired by Alibaba, completing the feat of swapping paper clips for villas.
Mergers are bound to be painful. When Lupus was swallowed up, he was labeled a “loser” as a business manager. Then came the salary cut, 10,000 yuan directly cut to 2160 yuan. Twelve years later, he still remembers the insulting number vividly. Selling in the industry was just cheap labor, there was no concept of business. In less than a month’s time, all the business managers of the original Lvyan team left, only Jiang Xiaopeng still stayed in wanwang.
In the face of such a fierce environment, jiang Xiaopeng, 25, has nothing to refute except grievance. He was all too aware of the bottlenecks of SaaS products, but still didn’t believe they could only go so far. After the merger of the fierce collision, the more jiang Xiaopeng is unconvinced, the more he wants to make achievements in this business.
In the later years of wanwang, the situation of being discriminated against and suppressed increased rather than weakened. He would sometimes hide in the office alone and cry, a feeling he still vividly remembers. One thing he knew after the dark moment was that it had to be done well, done well.
It is jiang Xiaopeng’s nature to be better than others, and this nature comes from the natural weakness of a northeast boy of 165 height. The natural weakness at the beginning of his consciousness and the inexplicable discrimination after he entered the society made him deeply realize that if he did not do well, the world would leave him no respect.
He led 20 people with his own strength, set a higher performance than ten thousand net branch. Subsequently, the strength of the Wolf smoke team has also been proved, in the year ali acquired Wanwang, listed on the public prospectuse book written lu zhong is the founder of Wanwang, wanwang’s original team has also been under the banner of Jiang Xiaopeng.
But it is a pity that after entering Ali, the SaaS website business of Yuanlang tobacco only occupies a very small proportion, and this business shrinks to 8%. After joining Alibaba, Jiang’s weekly work consisted of flying to Hangzhou on Friday, holding various meetings at Alibaba headquarters on Monday, and flying back to Beijing on Saturday, which was also a little boring.
02. The big factory left and did a small project: SaaS entrepreneurship
What Jiang xiaopeng encountered again after the merger was the disrespect from the top management directly under him — they cut down the SaaS website business without telling him. At that time, Alibaba’s strategy was: “A company of Alibaba’s magnitude only needs to do well in IaaS and PaaS, the underlying logic is important.” Jiang Xiaopeng in the face of adjustment, resolutely handed over the resignation application.
Jiang Xiaopeng felt: “Their children, no longer important to grow up with it.”
In this way, he came out to do cloud dream network this company, all advocate SaaS. In a blink of an eye, it is 2020. Fourteen years have passed. Jiang Xiaopeng, who never gives up SaaS as a young boy even at the age of 40, has really seen the market clearly.
Even though there are already listed SaaS companies – praised, Jiang xiaopeng is not optimistic about the status of SaaS in China. Youzan faces the same problem, its customers can only stay at: junior e-commerce. After all, big platforms like Taobao, JD.com and Pinduoduo already account for more than 90% of the e-commerce market.
Chinese people rely on platforms far more than they realize. We can’t make Salesforce. The ceiling is too obvious, unless it has a new stove. Chinese people’s excessive trust in platforms has led to business bottlenecks for companies like Youzan. The American habit of focusing on brands rather than platforms has helped Salesforce grow.
During the pandemic, however, many SaaS tools became popular, including a batch of enterprise service software for online office represented by Dingding and graphite documents. But the dilemma is also well known in the industry: not making money. This makes the situation of SaaS tools represented by nail and graphite very awkward.
Take Dingding as an example, it is still in a loss state, once paying means a large number of customers will lose. Not to mention SaaS tools like graphite documents and ink knives that are small and don’t have a big employer to support them. According to qimai data, the weekly downloads of graphite and ink knife in IOS system are not even more than 10,000, which is far from the level of dingding, so there is no need to make a profit.
In addition to such online office SaaS tools, there are SaaS systems that provide services to enterprises, such as financial management system and website building system. Such as the site-building SaaS system he provided to Aliyun, has seen its performance soar during the pandemic. However, it is still a popular saying in the industry that “no money with SaaS, money with customization.” The essence behind this is not whether the company is rich or not, but the trust of society.
For startups, saving money is a necessity and SaaS is often chosen without hesitation. Once they grow up, they don’t want to use these SaaS services, and customizing services is the way to be trusted. In China, top companies either develop their own software or go to giants such as Sinosoft, Neusoft and Pactera to make custom software services. This is the way it is in China, and big companies are happy to pay for it even if it is not marginal cost effective.
Jiang Xiaopeng in SaaS these 14 years, to see all these very clearly. When his friends asked him about the business of SaaS, he would simply say that he could not do it. “For SaaS companies, small and medium-sized enterprises either grow big without SaaS, or die and lose customers, every day in the recruitment of new survival.” After Smoke, wan Net, ali, he firmly this business, “small and medium-sized enterprises are only users, not customers.”
Mr Jiang’s resume has given him the luck of having customers at AliCloud, which disdained SaaS development, and later At China Unicom. “Find the right customer, there is below.”
Today, with the stock market in flux, the media is used to mixing Chinese and western ideas about the future of SaaS to prove that the future of SaaS is bright and promising. Ignoring the waves of the sea.
Jiang Xiaopeng has been facing life and death for several times, from Langyan to Wanwang to Ali to Yunmeng. If it were not for changing the single profit model focusing on small and medium-sized enterprises, I am afraid that yunmeng today has long been dead.
See through all this he is still willing to deep cultivation in this line, “SaaS technology is good, SaaS is a historical trend, but SaaS business is too difficult.”
03. Only by surviving can we strive for change
In The eyes of Jiang Xiaopeng, there are many ways to play SaaS. As he said, trust in products other than mechanics is even more deadly. He said frankly, the current company in the use of sales help management system, some insufficient. “Develop one if you have time later.”
Jiang feels that most SaaS products are not good enough, even in his own case, he is not satisfied. More recently, he has been eager to combine AI intelligence with site-building systems.
Looking back on his 14 years of SaaS, he thinks he was wrong from the start. Now, he finally understand one thing, technology to solve the problem of repetition, “SaaS this website building system, or to reduce people’s hands, then the mouse drag and drop website has been outdated.” Technology update should not serve selling points, technology should really serve efficiency.
At the same time, he is redesigning the company’s offerings to “do SaaS well and go back to full customization.” As far as possible to meet the needs of ordinary and personalized needs, this has become the key to break the game. SaaS+PaaS, in the jargon, preserves SaaS while catering to the PaaS needs of the market.
Jiang Xiaopeng has never been a person with a mind to change the world. “You say how much you love the SaaS field, no.” When I stumbled into it, I didn’t want to change. For him, it’s not about the industry, it’s about making things the best and becoming the industry standard.
At that time, this SaaS sales specifications and e-commerce of unsatisfactory full refund are from his initiative. When the entire business was acquired by Alibaba, he achieved half of that goal. When he talks about 14 years ago, he says: “Even QQ’s online pages were copied from us.” The pride of being an industry leader, he wanted to keep it going. The remaining half is now fully intelligent AI.
According to Jiang xiaopeng, his team pioneered the product presentation method of visual operation and the website construction system of SaaS, and the successors only started to enter the industry five years later. Now, in his opinion, as long as the product to do the best, will naturally wait for SaaS hope, success or industry strong, everything will come naturally.
At the moment, SaaS products like graphite documents are not going anywhere. It’s not about SaaS, it’s more about products. Before WPS, after Microsoft. The only highlight of collaborative work is also quickly learned by competing products. The upper limit of the documentation product is already visible.
If you want to leverage the market with SaaS, remember that the fulcrum is products and services. Huawei can keep pace with the world by insisting on communication technology. Its lever is communication technology, and its fulcrum is service. In the case of SaaS, it takes a kind of crazy persistence, coupled with the powerful leverage of SaaS, extreme products and services as fulcrum, to pry up the Chinese market.
04 do not know how to give up, there is no wisdom
Recently, people often ask, SaaS industry is really so strong? Jiang Xiaopeng, the leader of the SaaS website project, said in a private chat with friends, “SaaS is hopeless in China.”
In recent years, lu Zhong, who knew him well, also looked for him several times and let him give up SaaS. From payment programs to the later Internet of Things, even letting him bring his own company to do things for him. He did, but Lu Zhong wished he could follow him. After all, the future was not in a small SaaS, but in the Internet of Things.
Today, Lu zhong has stepped down as vice president of Alibaba Group to become a founding partner of Zhonghai Investment. He once took the investor of 10 billion assets, persuade Jiang Xiaopeng again and again, but were rejected by Jiang Xiaopeng. Looking back over the past 14 years, this is a career that has been stuck in the SaaS field and is perfectly wrong with the billions of dollars.
At a team building event in 2007, he led his team to a second-place finish, but when faced with a chance to try again after a draw, he gave up. Lu Zhong pointed out that “the mentality of seeking stability”, and later his refusal also made Lu Zhong think that the young man did not know when to give up, no wisdom.
After all, both Lu Zhong, the original pioneer, and Wang Zhigang, the tech genius, are now out because they know too well that SaaS is too hard. But Jiang xiaopeng still firmly believe that “their children to take to the end, now has not done it.”
Back to the day when we talked in Shanghai, it was raining cats and dogs at 10 o ‘clock in the evening, so the partner decided to take a taxi back to the hotel. Jiang xiaopeng looked at the number of steps on his watch. Before he reached 10,000 steps, he borrowed an umbrella and walked in the heavy rain to complete the remaining 7,000 steps.
At that moment, he seemed to see that the boy who was seeking stability disappeared. The boy who thought that it was enough to be a bank president at the age of 40 was now walking on the road of life at the age of 39, thinking that SaaS was a lever that could overturn Chinese society. Do the best, survive the tough times, and you can stand out again.
Unless you’re the chosen one. Jiang Xiaopeng is obsessed with SaaS. Is it right or wrong? Don’t know how to give up, there is no wisdom.
But Zhang Dai also pointed out clearly in the Four Books, do not know not to do, fool also; Knowing that it can not be done and not to do, sage also; Knowing what not to do is a saint.
In China, those who move forward against the trend of technology are sages. And it is these people who are changing the tide of The Times.
Partial picture comes from network, tort deletes