Ape counseling but seeking small consummation

Text | Most talk about Funtalk, author | Yingying Sun, Editor | Wang Fangjie

Doing a company is sometimes like rushing to the road, traveling a hundred and a half and ninety miles. You can obviously see the flagpole at the end, a listed bell gong, a feast of wealth with bells ringing, but at this time the road is broken.

This is the real situation encountered by Ape Counseling since the official introduction of the "Double Reduction Policy" in July 2021. This premier online education unicorn, which encountered the force majeure of the times that summer, lost a straight sprint line and stood at the crossroads of fate with its peers.

Many of them decided to follow the customer lifecycle to grow into adult businesses. But judging from the information obtained from "The Most Talked" so far, Ape Tutoring has found another way of solving the problem, that is, to go back, back to the starting point of human beings, and then start again.

Boss direct employment shows that in February 2022, a company called "Beijing Yuanman Maternal and Infant Care Co., Ltd." hung up 12 recruitment positions, focusing on multiple positions of nursery teacher, nurse, obstetrician and gynecologist, and neonatologist.

According to the information registration, the company's address is located in e5, Lei Shing Hong Center, Chaoyang District, Beijing, which happens to be the office location of Ape Counseling.

Tianyancha also corroborates this fact. On December 17, 2021, an affiliated company of ape counseling parent company wholly owned Beijing Yuanman Maternal and Infant Care Co., Ltd. with a registered capital of 50 million yuan.

According to the introduction of business scope, Beijing Yuanman Maternal and Infant Care Co., Ltd. mainly provides centralized life care services, health management consulting services, and family services for pregnant women and newborns. The legal representative is Liu Dongmei. On February 23, 2022, the first branch of Beijing Yuanman Maternal and Infant Care Co., Ltd. was established.

Also on December 17, 2021, an affiliated company of Ape Counseling's parent company wholly owned a company called "Beijing Single Origin Coffee Co., Ltd." with a registered capital of 20 million yuan, and its business scope involved catering services, food business, as well as technology development, technology promotion, computer system services, software development, etc. The legal representative Chen Mengcang is a former colleague of Ape Counseling founder Li Yong in NetEase.

Earlier, Ape Counseling established Beijing Icefield Clothing, which specializes in down jacket business, and Chen Mengcang is also the legal representative.

From down jackets to coffee to maternal and infant care currently being recruited, ape counseling has been on all sides for more than half a year. The reason is actually clear at a glance, for such a unicorn company that has experienced several rounds of financing, although the main business has stopped suddenly, the gears of capital will not stop turning. It is understood that in the financing process of Ape Counseling, there were corresponding gambling terms, and the deadline was approaching. However, because of the double reduction, whether the clause has been modified or invalidated is still unknown to the outside world.

However, both investors and management teams such as Li Yong must hope that Ape Counseling can have a clear future. Therefore, all the efforts at the moment are aimed at making this company a success.

Even if it is much smaller than when it stood at the cusp of education before, this consummation will be much smaller.

01 Down jacket, mother and baby and coffee

In the past six months and a half, the life of the education and training company has become more and more difficult day by day.

According to the "Late Finance" report, in February 2022, after the supervision of high school subject training landed, Ape Counseling closed a number of local counseling centers, and the original dozen centers were only 4 in Xi'an, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Shenyang.

After K9, the profit path of the high school business was finally broken.

There is almost no respite, and according to the instructions of the Ministry of Education, the supervision of non-disciplinary off-campus training has also been strongly carried out from the dimension of charging. Coupled with the previous policy of "no online training for preschool children", the zebra, ape programming, pumpkin science and other businesses of ape tutoring are getting farther and farther away from the goal of profitability.

"There may have been 60,000 people before the double reduction, and when the double reduction just landed, we cut a few thousand people in that batch, and now I am afraid that the whole company has only a few thousand people." An ape coaching departing employee told "The Most Talking".

It's like a balloon punctured.

In March 2020, when Ape Counseling completed a $1 billion G round of financing, seven months later, Ape Counseling once again announced the completion of G1 and G2 rounds totaling $2.2 billion, with a post-investment valuation of $15.5 billion. In December, although there was no official announcement, Beijing Ape Education Technology Co., Ltd., an affiliate of Ape Counseling, added another piece of financing information with a transaction amount of US$300 million, and the investor was Yunfeng Fund.

It can be said that in 2020 alone, the total amount of financing for Ape Tutoring has reached 3.5 billion US dollars, which undoubtedly becomes the largest "unicorn" in online education. The size of the personnel has also been rapidly expanded.

With $3.5 billion and the dividends of the pandemic for online education, Ape Tutoring could have continued to swell in the summer of 2021. But that summer vacation ushered in not a multi-billion projection war, but a double reduction.

As a completely closed business, an employee who worked for The Little Ape Search still remembers how he felt when the policy was issued. "The news directly said that the downline search tool, our group is to do search questions and oral arithmetic, offline what I do, can only look forward to N +1, and the next seamless connection, of course, I am dreaming." He said the boss of their group took a week off at the time, "and we all joked that he might be looking for a job." In short, the sledgehammer finally landed, but no one expected it to be so serious, and the industry was gone. ”

The employee also said that when they left their jobs, the first opening of the square was basically completed, and the remaining employees were concentrated in Lei Shing Hong.

And all the ape tutors in Lei Shing Heng need to learn to accept reality, and then accept some outsiders who have not been exposed to them before. For example, clothing people who make down jackets, fast-moving consumers who make coffee, and nursery nurses.

According to boss direct recruitment, the current mother and baby business of ape counseling is already recruiting for the society.

As a company established in December last year, Yuanman Mother and Baby released 3 positions in december, and then increased recruitment efforts in February this year, launched 12 positions, and after comparison with a number of similar brands in Beijing, Yuanman Mother and Baby's salary is at a relatively high level.

02 Hardware, entering the school and going to sea

Of course, ape counseling is not to give up the education and training business.

"The Most Talk" observed that in this year's golden recruitment season of "Golden Three Silver Four", Ape Counseling has opened up a number of tutor recruitment special sessions over the years, and specially opened a special session called "Tool Application Department Internal Push" - hardware engineers with work experience in screen electronic consumer goods, product managers responsible for the research and iteration of educational hardware (flat panel) products, electronic product quality engineers with open experience in children's education hardware and supplier evaluation system experience... These have become the focus of ape counseling's vigorous recruitment at this stage.

Judging from the actions released externally, the business line of Ape Tutoring Single Zebra has intensively launched a number of hardware products such as Zebra Intelligent Learning Machine G1, Zebra Intelligent Learning Machine G1, Zebra Logical Thinking Learning Machine, Zebra AI Finger Reader, Zebra Hanyu Pinyin Recognition Machine and so on.

Ape Tutoring is stepping up its own hardware matrix. A back-end product employee who was laid off in the second half of last year told "The Most Talking" that at that time, they had left a ink screen, which was later launched as a small ape intelligent exercise book.

In addition, some employees revealed on the pulse platform that in addition to the C-end hardware, Ape Tutoring is also studying the hardware of entering the school, including smart blackboards and interactive touch screens.

Such a strategy is also in line with the school business launched by Ape Tutoring at the end of last year.

Some employees said bluntly, "In fact, the most promising thing for ape tutoring at the moment is not a down jacket, but a school business." ”

In October 2021, Ape Tutoring officially launched the school brand "Flying Elephant", which is positioned to provide intelligent education platforms and products for public schools, and is committed to meeting the technical and service needs of the whole scenario of B-end teaching. Within Ape Counseling, this business is also labeled "Innovative Product Research Department", which integrates the company's core technology, research and development and product personnel.

According to the "Most Talk", Feixiang has carried out pilots in several schools in Beijing during the winter vacation this year, and the pilot direction is at the level of tools and products that assist personalized teaching, and the current effect is good and is expected to be promoted on a large scale.

In addition, going to sea is also one of the transformation directions considered by the original education sector of Ape Tutoring.

Also according to the recruitment information, Ape Counseling recently opened a "dolphin internal push special session", released a large number of posts directly linked to customer acquisition, and the platform also shifted from Douyin, which has fought a deep-water war in China, to today's headlines, to Facebook, Google, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc.

The job requirements for Dolphin-Overseas Market Operations post read: Responsible for researching, planning and developing overseas user growth/activity/social fission strategies; performing advertising operations, and placing products on platforms such as Facebook and Google. One of the work contents of dolphin-overseas placement is responsible for the promotion of overseas advertising platforms such as Facebook, Google, Tik Tok, Adwords, Unityads and other advertising platforms of the company's products, and regularly monitors the effectiveness of advertising delivery...

This link is obviously that Ape Counseling has already run through in China, and there is mature experience to replicate.

As a strategic pioneer in performance advertising, Ape Tutor was previously known for its ability to industrially purchase information streams. To a large extent, this ability has also helped ape counseling to emerge and become the brightest star in the education and training industry. A peer even commented on ape counseling: "We burned more than 10 billion a year to follow, to follow up, and finally found that the money was spent, and nothing was learned." ”

In this way, at least in overseas business, Ape Coaching can follow the proven business style.

03 Era missed the duo

It is said that there are two kinds of misfortune in life, one is that people are not dead, and the money is spent. One is that people die and the money is still there. Many people feel that the core proposition of the current ape counseling is how to avoid the second kind of misfortune. After all, so much money was raised before, but after the double reduction, it was useless.

But in fact, the test of ape counseling is not only at the level of skill. In the past few years, it has gone quickly and smoothly, without the systematic experience of the old giants such as New Oriental and Good Future, nor like Gaotu, which has experienced the darkest moment and experience of approaching the abyss.

At the completion of the G round of financing, Li Yong, the founder of Ape Tutoring, mentioned in an internal letter that the development of a company was a double dance with the era in which it lived, and said that Ape Tutoring was the lucky one of that era.

In the book "Value" published by Zhang Lei, the founder of Hillhouse Capital, it also devotes a lot of space to the logic of investment ape counseling, which can also be roughly summarized as "investing in change and investing in adapting to the times".

Indeed, after the rapid development and popularization of the mobile Internet and the new generation of Internet natives became parents, under the multiple "era" factors of the outbreak of the epidemic, Ape Counseling once composed the first half of the entrepreneurial story from the education and training industry to break the circle and enter the forefront of the Internet with a valuation of 17 billion US dollars.

But times have changed.

From performance advertising to brand advertising, from subject training to preschool enlightenment, every strategic decision is at the forefront of the industry, triggering industry followers, and every step of the decision seems to have not stepped on the company, but finally stepped on the era. Its transformation is also so difficult.

From the perspective of hardware and mother and baby, this is a completely different logic from the content of the course, their repurchase rate is extremely low, the entire business logic is very heavy, it is difficult to say that through the simple information flow advertising to achieve short-term scale fission.

For example, practitioners in the field of hardware for many years have said that the product team, supply chain and sales network of hardware are very important, which is completely different from the logic of doing courses. "The reason why Dali hardware is doing well is because it acquired Luo Yonghao's hammer, and Dali's lamp was made by that team."

The practitioner even asserted that he felt that ape tutoring could not do hardware.

The performance can also be confirmed to some extent, such as the sales effect of the ink screen is not satisfactory. "The unit price of customers is more than 2,000, colleagues say that they sell dozens of them a week, and some of them are bought by themselves." An ape coaching employee said to "The Most Talking".

Such a passive situation, ape counseling is not completely unaware.

On March 9, 2022, the official account of Zebra APP announced that "Zebra * Youdao Co-brand Dictionary Pen was officially released", and NetEase Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 was newly launched on Zebra Mall.

These business moves are a bit quiet, and even when the internal employees of the two companies heard about it, they showed tacit shock and laughed that "there may be no eternal enemy." One of the employees speculated that zebra might have retreated to the content provision position on the dictionary pen product, and the two sides sought to maximize their interests.

"Are you saying that ape counseling has failed in entrepreneurship?" From the perspective of the company's operations, he did not take a wrong step; but from the perspective of results, it seems that he has indeed failed. An industry insider sighed.