On March 12th, the 8th anniversary of its founding, ByteDance, the world's most valuable startup, announced a comprehensive upgrade of its organizational structure. At the same time, he mentioned that education business will be one of the new business directions that he focuses on.
Zhang Yiming believes that education is very important to stimulate people's potential, and education itself has huge potential. "The online tutoring market is very hot recently, and many people ask about my company's business progress. In fact, I am not anxious and have patience. I think it is still very early. The education business must have more fundamental innovations, of course, provided we have a deeper understanding."
Later, ByteDance said that the company's key target in 2020 will be on education. ByteDance senior vice president Chen Lin announced that in terms of education business, the company will recruit over 10,000 people this year. The positions opening to fresh students cover teaching, product, research and development and other fields.
Since Chen Lin shifted his focus to ByteDance innovation business last year, there are internal sources saying that Chen Lin's goal is to "run the third DAU product worth 100 million for ByteDance". Many people speculate whether this star product will be produced in the field of education.
In fact, ByteDance has been working in the field of education for more than two years, and its business covers from preschool education to adult education. ByteDance relies on its own traffic advantages to keep trying in the field of education, such as knowledge payment, online English products, K12 online education and education hardware, ect.
To C and To B work together
At the end of 2017, Toutiao held the "eduTECH 2017 Education Industry Future Summit". At the meeting, Zhang Yiming said "it is an inevitable trend for technology companies to cooperate with educational institutions, which is the optimal combination of technology and data."
After that, ByteDance began to expand and accelerate push into education market with a series of layouts in both To B and To C markets as well as the investment. In 2018, ByteDance dived into the education market with its own brand positioned as a content-paid app which offers a variety of contents covering career advice, parenting, culture, wealth management, as well as audiobooks. "Haohaoxuexi" (literally means "study hard"). According to the industrial and commercial registration information, its developer is Beijing Zhending Technology Co., Ltd., and actually, ByteDance is the major shareholder behind the company.
It offers a variety of contents covering lifestyle, career advice, psychology, parenting, culture, wealth management and other categories. And the course forms include audio book, audio class, video class, etc. Its users are relatively vertical, and the courses are not too professional, which is positioned as a content-paid platform between "Dedao" and "Ximalaya FM".
A few months later, in May 2018, ByteDance launched its online kid English learning platform GoGoKid for children aged 4-12 where Chinese children are taught English online by foreign teachers. It targets first- and second-tier cities as its main market, employs pure North American foreign teachers, and adopts a one-to-one live teaching mode. Meanwhile, it takes VIPKID as its biggest rival and invests a lot on the advertisement marketing at the beginning of the launch.
However, at that time, VIPKID was already the leading force in the education field, and GoGoKid is the later to enter the field. Even relying on strategies such as star promotion and lowering the price of customer orders, GoGoKid still failed. One year after its launch, news of GoGoKid's large-scale layoffs spread, whose layoff rate hit 70-80%.
GoGoKid failed to make ByteDance into the education market successfully, but Zhang Yiming did not give up. In December 2018, ByteDance also launched the AI intelligent English teaching platform aiKID, which is aimed at students in grades 1-4. It targets third- and fourth- tier cities as its main sinking market, adopts a one-to-one live teaching mode and employs pure North American foreign teachers.
The Passage (ID: passagegroup) checked aiKID's app, and its last update stagnated a year ago. In April 2019, it was reported that aiKID had been merged into GoGoKid.
The failure of GoGoKid and aiKID gave birth to another education product. In July 2019, the registered company of GoGoKid and aiKID launched a product named "Tangyuan English", which adopts a real-life image + AI oral teaching mode. In addition to "Tangyuan English", ByteDance has also acquired OpenLanguage, an app for oral English learning and Dubai, an app for memorizing words.
At the same time, ByteDance also uses M & A means to focus on the K12 field. In May 2019, the company has acquired the online education platform Qingbei (indicates best content and team) Online School. Moreover, it also officially launched its K12 online tutoring platform "Daliketang". Products for school-age primary and secondary school students, to provide subject guidance, focusing on "teacher + tutor" online live large class model.
Half a month after the launch of "Daliketang", the product made some adjustment and the brand name was changed back to "Qingbei Online School". For the development of K12 products, ByteDance also faces the challenges of mature players in the middle school track such as Xueersi, Yuanfudao and Zybang.
Except for the C-side, ByteDance also did the layout of the B-side business. In July 2018, ByteDance joined the To B business of Xueba100.com through strategic investment.
In January 2019, ByteDance said that it had acquired some patent use rights of Smartisan Technology and would explore related businesses in the education field. In May of the same year, it was reported that ByteDance was studying educational hardware, which wanted to compete with OKAY's intelligent education learning machine products.
After incorporating ByteDance, Smartisan Technology focused on developing educational hardware products. ByteDance hopes to apply Smartisan Technology's talent reserve and experience in the hardware field to the education hardware field.
In October 2019, ByteDance was revealed that it would release a direct-to-user K12 educational hardware product in early 2020, which was responsible for the original founder of musical.ly Yang Luyu. He said that the product is a 24-hour AI coach at home.
After the original hardware and software core team of Smartisan Technology joined ByteDance, it established a new department - Xinshi Lab. Besides the business of smart phones and smart hardware for ByteDance, it also provides services for K12 education hardware.
The B-side and the C-side work together. ByteDance has successively invested in education companies such as Zybang, Xiaoyang Education, Hope and Rising, Fclassroom and others. In addition, Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, also invested in Minerva, an American innovation university, and became a member of the school's board of directors.
Ambitions to enter overseas market
Zhang Yiming's educational ambitions are not limited to China.
He also disclosed in the full letter, "there are currently more than 5,000 foreign teachers in ByteDance education business inNorth America. We will continue to recruit talents for the education business in the future."
The outside world knows little about the business layout of ByteDance's overseas education business, and the company team has also adopted very good confidentiality measures for the projects being incubated. However, it is an indisputable fact that ByteDance to explore the overseas education market.
In October 2019, ByteDance used the short video product TikTok to test the online education market in India. TikTok launched the EduTok project in India, which is the first time the app has launched an education project.
TikTok has reached cooperation with a number of educational technology platforms in India, such as Vedantu, Toppr, Made Easy and Gradeup. Those platforms will provide relevant educational video content for TikTok. The content about math and science knowledge taught in school, learning a new language, physical and mental health, and motivational lecture videos, all can be found on TikTok.
The EduTok project provides users with content that can be quickly acquired, which can meet the user's learning time outside the book by learning videos within one minute.
According to The Passage (ID: passagegroup), ByteDance is now recruiting a team responsible for education products in overseas market, which is said to be a product similar to Banma Yingyu.
According to another source, the former person in charge of GoGoKid has also made a similar product of Zybang in India.
Some insiders in charge of ByteDance education business said that in ByteDance's overseas education market, India market perfects well at present. And the product is still in the incubation, which has not been officially announced.
And ByteDance has also recently been recruiting related talents for products and user operations in the Indian education market.
This is an article from WeChat official accounts The Passage (ID: passagegroup), written by Liu Diqing, translated by Chris Yuan.