First, an open letter from the founder was sent to the class that was in dire straits in public opinion recently, which publicly explained the recent problems of wage arrears and social security arrears, and bluntly stated that "the CEO is now in debt of 654.38 billion" and "the team needs to be further streamlined to within 654.38 million".

Second, Tencent's new round of layoffs. The long-term unprofitable Tencent classroom has also become the hardest hit. It is said that the layoff rate is as high as 50%.

Still very emotional. After the beginning of the class and Tencent class, it basically means that all the players who have been committed to building a "comprehensive platform" in the field of online education in China have handed in their answers in stages, and the result is: all of them have fallen.

The story about "platform" in online education is not new.

I still remember that when I first started my business on 20 13, I wrote an article with the general title "Several Big Pits in Online Education Platform", and later I talked with many well-known entrepreneurs and investors in the education industry about similar issues.

10 years later, looking back, I have some deeper thoughts on "platform" and "whether the teaching and training industry can finally be a platform", which can be partially shared as follows.

First, can the teaching and training industry become a "platform"

The essence of the platform is not only to have a lot of traffic, but also to be able to continuously match multiple parties to form transactions, which is sticky to all parties on the platform.

Therefore, the platform has three elements: traffic, supply chain integration ability and "transaction infrastructure".

The flow rate is best understood, and the remaining two are explained a little.

Traffic is the demand side, but to achieve large-scale transaction matching, you also need to have large-scale supply capacity, and supply chain integration is to organize a large number of suppliers in an orderly manner, classify management, and match the purchase needs of a large number of traffic terminals.

Only when the flow can be scaled up and the large-scale organization and integration of the supply chain is good enough can the "platform" business be born.

Finally, the so-called "transaction infrastructure" actually refers to all platform basic capabilities that can reduce the transaction resistance of all parties on the platform and significantly improve the efficiency of multi-party transactions, including but not limited to transaction support capabilities, quality control capabilities, product evaluation standards, and even circulation and distribution capabilities. Wait, these all count.

For example, the early store/product evaluation systems of Alipay, Taobao and Dianping, as well as the distribution capabilities of JD.COM and Meituan, are all important "transaction infrastructures" of the platform.

Only when the three elements are available at the same time and form a positive closed loop with each other can the "platform" business be established.

For example, users go to Tmall for shopping, because Tmall's business management is well done, and it is full of genuine and high-quality goods, and then the transaction guarantee ability (such as returning goods and compensation for delayed delivery). ) is also guaranteed, which makes users have a very good experience after completing a transaction, so if there is a shopping demand next time, I will choose to do it in Tmall, so that the development of users' shopping habits will bring down the cost of platform traffic acquisition.

This is a typical "positive closed loop".

Looking back at the Internet in the past 20 years, at least at the C end, it seems that there are only two development paths for the success of the "platform"-

Or get large-scale users through other higher frequency 2C user needs (such as content, social networking, tools, etc.). ), and then start platformization after having traffic capacity, and gradually establish transaction matching capabilities (such as Tik Tok, WeChat, and public comment);

Or in the very early stage of a certain market, we will continue to acquire the capabilities of merchants, supply chains and traffic. Through capital-driven and bilateral subsidies, until the scale effect and network effect (such as Didi and Taobao) are obtained.

In fact, before Netease had a way, the route taken by Netease's open class was more biased towards the former. And the route of the course is relatively late.

Unfortunately, after a period of time, these two routes failed to work in the teaching and training industry.

The core reason why it is not feasible is that the supply chain organization cost and transaction infrastructure of teaching and training industry are too high. As a result, "it is extremely expensive and unsustainable to continue to match multi-party transactions on a large scale under the scope of teaching and training." This is probably a matter of category and business itself, not a matter of technical play.

Next, I further summarized the four core reasons why it is difficult for teaching and training to run through the "comprehensive platform" model. Let's talk about it one by one.

Second, the four core underlying reasons why the teaching and training industry is difficult to become a "platform"

The first core reason is that the supply chain is difficult to organize.

Consumer goods industry, supply chain organization, in fact, mainly manages "goods" to manage inventory, warehousing, distribution and order matching.

However, the teaching and training industry itself is the logic of a "service industry". Teachers are servers, and users pay for teachers' service time. Therefore, the supply chain organization of the teaching and training industry needs to manage thousands of teachers to make them serve everyone in an orderly manner.

But there are two core issues here-

1) in the teaching and training industry, especially in some frontier new occupations and new skills fields, the service supply is often very scarce. For an industry like the Internet, so many years have passed. In fact, there are still few "teachers" in the whole industry who can teach well and standardize teaching.

2) "Teachers" are different from low-end service providers such as cleaning aunts and blue-collar workers. Teachers' cognitive level and knowledge reserve are often relatively high, so they are often more thoughtful. As a result, many companies and platforms are easily faced with challenges such as "kidnapping of famous teachers" and "leaving teachers", which is also a common challenge that all industries based on "people" must face.

Therefore, the supply chain organization of the teaching and training industry is naturally more difficult, and the complexity usually increases geometrically with the increase of scale-you serve 50 users a month, and you are often happy with nothing. However, after serving 5000 users a month, you will find that almost every link is a variable and a problem, such as front-end enrollment, scheduling, teaching assistant management, user teaching follow-up, online Q&A, etc.

The second core reason: the trading infrastructure is difficult.

In fact, the essence of this matter is one-most teaching and training products are naturally non-standard.

For example, if you buy an Iphone 13 from Taobao, there are two stores with similar ratings, A and B, both of which are standard. A shop sells 5000 yuan and B shop sells 4000 yuan, and you will easily make a judgment: buy B shop.

However, if you are going to study time management or operation, there are also two lecturers who have similar comments. Teacher A's class costs 3,000 yuan and Teacher B's class costs 2,000 yuan. Can you judge from this that you should choose teacher B's class?

The answer is no.

There is a simple reason. "Iphone" is standard, but "time management" is not. The iPhones sold by two different stores must be the same. Besides the price, you only need to compare the service at most. The "time management" mentioned by two different teachers is probably two completely different things.

Similarly, "Lenovo Ideapad E430" is a standardized product, while "communication course" is not; "Wang Lao Ji Herbal Tea" is a standardized product, while "Career Planning" course is not.

The biggest difference between curriculum products and other physical commodity products is "non-standard".

A platform can sell standardized goods, but selling non-standardized courses and "services" will have problems. Non-standardization means that the user's choice cost is high, which means that the user's needs can't be met in batches, and it also means that what is a "good" and suitable product for me may not be defined.

It is difficult to establish a trading infrastructure for non-standard products, and once the "transaction identification standard" provided by the trading infrastructure is insufficient, it means that the transaction cost of matching will increase greatly.

The third core reason: the transaction cost of matching at the technical level is also obviously high.

The unit price of a course with teaching service is often more than 1000 yuan, and the decision-making cost of users at this price is generally high, at least at the mass level, and it is unlikely to form an impulse purchase.

Therefore, even if you have the flow, the supply and the standardization of products, if you want to match the two sides to complete the transaction, you may still have to rely on "manpower", that is, a large number of human flesh sales.

But if so, then this platform business will be too difficult to do.

The fourth core reason: under the category of teaching and training, it is difficult to quickly establish a "positive closed loop" among traffic, supply chain and trading infrastructure.

Because the user behavior of teaching and training class is typical low frequency+non-repeated consumption.

For example, if you buy a mobile phone recharge card or a pack of snacks on Taobao, you will definitely want to buy it again when your mobile phone bill runs out or snacks run out, and if the place you bought last time makes you have a good enough experience, it will probably become your first choice.

But if you finish a class on time management or new media operation on a learning platform and get a good learning experience and effect, will you repeat this class?

Many commodities such as FMCG can be reused. Even if printers and other commodities are difficult to consume repeatedly, it will provide you with consumables that can be consumed repeatedly, while "courses" cannot. Courses and learning can often only be one-off products.

This means that for many teaching and training companies, if you can't give users a strong reason, even if your products, services and experiences are no better, users are likely to have only one consumption opportunity with you, especially for some skills, each skill is relatively independent. Once you learn it, you will often become more and more skilled and handy in the use process, and you may even have little chance to follow up the service.

Therefore, teaching and learning can easily become such a special product: if you can't learn, users will walk on the street. If you learn it, the user will give you a compliment, but he will still leave.

But the key point is that if it is low frequency, the possibility of repeated consumption under a single commodity cannot be seen, which means that for the platform side, it is almost impossible to rely on some commodities and "transactions" themselves to do platform traffic, but often it can only become the logic of external procurement traffic and internal marketing transformation to see ROI.

Under this logic, in fact, a so-called "teaching and training platform" is more likely to eventually work for Tik Tok, Baidu and other larger traffic platforms.

Third, summary.

To sum up, make a few summaries-

First, for the platform, in fact, the relatively easy platform is the traffic platform, and the more difficult platform is the industrial trading platform.

For example, the most basic attributes of WeChat, Tik Tok and Baidu are all "traffic platforms", which are all sold to advertisers and businesses with "traffic" as the trading unit for profit.

But like Taobao and Meituan, it is already an "industrial trading platform", that is, displaying and trading specific categories of goods.

Traffic is the simplest "marketing unit", but all industrial trading platforms need to involve a series of issues such as commodity management, inventory management and quality control monitoring. If the relevant capabilities are not perfect, there will be frequent problems in the transaction process, and finally the platform will be overwhelmed.

In China, most successful "industrial trading platforms" are based on consumer goods with very clear product standards, such as books, clothing, 3C products and so on. In the field of 2B industry, there are also vertical B2B trading platforms such as "looking for steel net".

However, education, medical care and other industries have failed so far despite the efforts of countless people. In essence, it is an industry that is more inclined to the service industry. It is really difficult to establish an "industrial" transaction matching ability.

Especially in the current era environment, in fact, with the help of content, short video, live broadcast, private domain, community and other capabilities, there will be more opportunities and space for you to do a small and beautiful business.

Third, for adult vocational education, after running for ten years, it may still be the traditional business model that deeply cultivates the industry, has a campus offline, and directly combines skilled talents with some academic qualifications, but they are the most worthy of long-term dependence.

For example, new oriental cooking, Tagou Wushu School, Lan Xiang Technical School and so on.

Above, share some scattered ideas, welcome to communicate.

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