ByteDance has a new move in the education field. Recently, Chen Lin, senior vice president and head of education business of ByteDance, conducted a full sharing entitled "Zero To One". On the occasion of the first anniversary of ByteDance's entry into the education industry, Chen Lin talked about his thoughts and outlook on this move.

In this speech, Chen Lin repeatedly mentioned its children's English education product GoGoKid, which has aroused curiosity among industry insiders. There were some rumors that GoGoKid had faced layoffs, and this time Chen Lin focused on responding to the doubts, as well as being positive about GoGoKid's future value and prospects, saying that it will invest more in the future.

This move seems to release a signal to the outside world, as the first self-developed product of ByteDance's education business, GoGoKid is still pinned on high expectations.

With the launch of GoGoKid, ByteDance's dream of education officially begins

In May 2018, ByteDance launched its first educational product, GoGoKid. It's an online English 1-to-1 learning platform for kids aged 4-12 that uses live one-on-one instruction from North American tutors. After the launch, it was considered by many in the industry as a direct counterpart to VIPKid, the online children's English-language learning unicorn.

Three months after its launch, GoGoKid took a fast and aggressive promotional campaign that made it famous.

GoGoKid is a tutoring platform for Chinese children to learn English online with teachers in North America. And its teaching materials adopts the U.S. mainstream primary school textbook (CCSS) and the Chinese Ministry of Education English curriculum standards (new textbook standards) dual alignment. It proposes an immersive learning method for children through an intelligent teaching system.

In 2019, there were rumors that GoGoKid was in the process of mass layoffs, with the proportion of layoffs ranging from 70% to 80%. At the time, ByteDance responded that it was a performance-based de-fattening and thinning, but the questionable voices once accompanied GoGoKid.

Chen Lin said that several key business metrics have been getting better over the past year, and there have been a very good number of candidates joining GoGoKid recently.

It has launched products such as Qingbei Online School and Guagua Long. Through investment and M&A incubation, its education landscape has now covered multiple tracks such as children's English, K12, intelligent education hardware, early childhood education, and children's thinking and enlightenment.

It can be said that GoGoKid is the beginning of ByteDance's education dream.

The one-to-one business model has yet to figure out the right path to make profit

Online one-to-one has been difficult to scale due to its high cost and difficulty in acquiring customers. While the online one-to-one business model has yet to figure out an excellent path to make profit, there's no denying that the track still has a bright future.

With the growth of per capita GDP in China, more and more middle-class people have started to pay attention to the education of the next generation, some data show that about 2% of household income in the United States is spent on education, while China more than 10%. According to statistics, the online English education market for young children has a size of about 60 billion, and the annual growth rate is 20%. And the continuous expansion and sinking of young children's English learning brands such as VIPKid and 51Talk also proves that there is still a huge space in the demand for this track.

Chen Lin believes that the one-to-one business model has a very large scope and future, and GoGoKid has the opportunity to change the industry.

Earlier, it was revealed that while GoGoKid does have some product tweaks and optimizations in 2019, ByteDance has never considered abandoning the one-to-one online English track.

ByteDance had a clear vision and believed that there was definitely an opportunity in the one-to-one business model. The adjustments at the time were just targeted optimizations at the tactical level, and the strategic level was always firmly invested.

GoGoKid may usher a second boom?

In 2020, an epidemic boosted the growth of online education. With its rapid growth of users, the entire education business saw a new dimension of growth.

ByteDance's educational journey peaks and turns, and GoGoKid ushers a new opportunity in such environment.

Chen Lin said GoGoKid's several important business indicators are getting better over the past year. And next, the company will continue to increase investment to the product. In addition, he also revealed that GoGoKid and Guagualong will also try to link up to provide users with live, recorded mixed learning scenarios. At the same time, users of recorded lessons also have the opportunity to convert to live lessons.

The linkage of the two products has the opportunity to drive a two-way flow at the user and operational levels.

Of course, this linkage is extremely demanding on the internal organizational culture. Chen Lin said that one of the major advantages of ByteDance's success is its organization and culture, which pursues high talent density, internal information flow, and context not control; it encourages different functional lines to collide, cross borders, and collaborate to generate innovation on a larger scale; and it insists on user orientation, not self-gratification.

At present GoGoKid was just established 2 years ago, from the product life cycle point of view, it is still in a period of rapid growth. Backed by the Internet giant ByteDance, it has a deep technical background. 

The company's support, the opportunity presented by the epidemic, the linkage with Guagalong, the technology and traffic advantages, GoGokid, may have a second boom.

Education is a slow industry, it is not a traffic business, and there are no shortcuts. The exploration of educational innovation is bound to be not an easy task, like GoGokid's twists and turns. But in any case, ByteDance has shown its determination to plough in the education field.

This is an article from WeChat official accounts Leifengwang (ID: leiphone-sz), written by Li Jingying, translated by Chris Yuan.