"700 million users join forces to boycott DingTalk", "DingTalk has a punch-in function, but we don't have to punch in", "DingTalk will start cutting the menu and killing the menu from today", "Use the DingTalk test to buy a ticket, and then return it after buying, after all, it is a start-up company, and you still have to save money" ......You may not think that the above series of "smearing" DingTalk words came from DingTalk's own president Ye Jun.
Although it is a joke, from the perspective of DingTalk's development process in the past ten years, it is clear that one change is that in the era of intelligence, DingTalk's product design thinking has shifted to pay more attention to individual user experience. And this also means that DingTalk has gradually regained its user reputation commensurate with its user scale.
Eat 100 meals, the number of users reached 700 million
On January 9, Ye Jun was in DingTalk 75. At the product launch conference, it was announced that as of December 31, 2023, the number of DingTalk users will reach 700 million, the number of enterprise organizations will reach 25 million, and the number of software paying enterprises will reach 120,000.
In fact, 700 million users should be a national-level app for an Internet era app in China, but the development behind DingTalk is different from that of most companies. Ye Jun further explained that most companies rely on the C-end to obtain customers, and DingTalk's customer acquisition largely depends on the drive of some core industries, through collaboration, the upstream and downstream to DingTalk, is also the objective reality of the development of the last one or two years, behind this is 25 million enterprises in the use of DingTalk, today's DingTalk is really "eat hundreds of meals" DingTalk.
Founded in 2014, DingTalk, formerly known as the "Contact" of WeChat, failed to compete in the social track, the team changed its goal and established DingTalk, which is positioned in the enterprise communication track. From January 1, 2015Since the 0 version came out, DingTalk has gone through 75 iterations of major releases.
DingTalk 10 to 5Version 0 has witnessed and promoted the transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises from paper office to the digital office era characterized by cloud and mobile. After Alibaba's "Cloud Nail Integration" strategy, DingTalk announced that it would upgrade to a collaborative office and application development platform, and launched it in January 2021Version 0, i.e. low**. DingTalk led by the low-level software has changed the way of software development, everyone is a developer, and 80% of business applications will be developed by front-line business personnel.
The goal set three years ago has now been achieved. According to Ye Jun, the number of DingTalk low-** applications has exceeded 10 million, and the number of DingTalk full-** applications has exceeded 1 million.
When the digitalization process of Chinese enterprises entered a new stage of digital collaboration between enterprises, DingTalk continued to carry out iterative upgrades and launched DingTalk 7. in December 20220, the goal is "chain era, great synergy". This also means that DingTalk has shifted from focusing on individual efficiency and individual organization efficiency in the past to focusing on the collaborative efficiency between enterprises and even the entire industrial chain.
to 7Version 5, DingTalk launched a new intelligent product - AI assistant, which is the actual landing of AI agent. The DingTalk AI assistant has the ability to perceive, remember, plan and act, and more importantly, it has the ability to perform tasks across applications, which can be seamlessly combined with a wealth of third-party applications and enterprise-built applications on DingTalk.
DingTalk's core strategy is still relatively stable, that is, to do deep value, that is, to digitize the customer's business, because after helping customers achieve value, customers will recognize us. Ye Jun also said that from 70 to 75. After a year of polishing, DingTalk has made a lot of products for upstream and downstream collaboration, inter-enterprise collaboration, and cross-enterprise collaboration, and the upstream and downstream interconnection DAU between enterprises has increased by 10 times in the past year.
Delete the complicated and simplify, and DingTalk was "praised".
On the other side of the rapid growth of the user scale, in the ten years of development, DingTalk has been scolded to the point of almost "autism".
As we all know, the first wave of large-scale DAU in the DingTalk circle is from Ding, free **, attendance, and even strong reminders such as red dots and ding messages for obsessive-compulsive disorder, which have also become a sharp weapon for DingTalk to pull up DAU, which has almost become the label of DingTalk, and is an important reason why DingTalk is "hated" by workers.
The peak of condemnation by the whole network occurred after the Spring Festival in 2020. In February 2020, in the great wave of learning, primary and secondary school students across the country were together with DingTalk. But this "forced cooperation" has offended the majority of post-00s, in addition to the ** mouth cannon crit, there is also an overwhelming "hit one star" on the App Store.
DingTalk Weibo finally issued the first complaint on the rainy night of Valentine's Day that year: "Acquaintance is a fate, if you don't love it, please don't hurt it!."The next day, DingTalk Weibo said that it received a self-made "black nail" MV "You nailed it so good", and the product manager had cried and fainted!
Although the style of the incident makes people want to laugh, the product development logic behind DingTalk has to be re-examined.
Since then, DingTalk has turned on the optimization mode of simplifying the complex. For example, I cut off products that are more social, such as me and dotted insects;It also cut the hardware business such as attendance machines and gave these spaces to partnersDingTalk also no longer touches industry applications or business applications, such as finance and taxation, personnel and OKR systems.
At the same time, a series of features have been introduced that focus on the employee experience. For example, the launch of off-duty mode, focus mode and other functions, more and collaboration tab pages can be customized to add and delete, online aggregation of message smart cards and shortcuts, dry marketing information push window, from a function and an operation habit, to a unified operation link, unified + number, etc.
DingTalk was also discussed on Weibo for the "one-click red dot" function once. In August 2022, DingTalk launched the "one-click red dot removal", which allows you to clean up all message red dots with one click by simply pressing and holding the message button.
In the Internet era, red dots and pop-ups are the key means for product managers to provoke users, and most software will use the characteristics of human nature to promote activity. For DingTalk, which had 500 million users at the time, cutting off the "full screen red dots" was undoubtedly a major decision.
In this regard, DingTalk user An Ran said that it was surprising that DingTalk launched the "one-click red dot" at that time, because in the face of KPI pressure and click data, not all companies can have the rationality and confidence to control this hand, and it can only be said that it is worthy of being a team that plays out in the competition, and it should be cut, which is the long-term solution.
Attaching importance to employee experience and providing users with good tools" has become the development goal of DingTalk. Ye Jun believes that it is necessary to do a good job in making products, polish the products well, serve customers well, and solve problems well, so that customers feel that DingTalk is really better than before.
We dare to say this, but also because of the feedback from many customers, last week we got the latest NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey report, DingTalk's NPS has reached the highest peak in history, it is close to 7 points, thank you!What does a score of 7 mean?Among the 10 people who are willing to recommend the use of DingTalk, minus the number of people who oppose the use of DingTalk is equal to 7, which makes us feel that we have found a lot of encouragement and recognition. Ye Jun said.
DingTalk 75. A number of product upgrades have been carried out to create tools that young people love to use. For example, when the "knock" function is launched, the homepage of the app will slide down to nail three versions of "electronic wooden fish", which can be called "workplace blood pressure medicine".
If you have any grievances, don't send it to the App Store, just post it here, in fact, 'playing one star' is also quite complicated, you knock it twice here, all kinds of fun. Ye Jun also said, "On Weibo, I will say the word 'DingTalk' every weekend, which used to be scolded, but recently there have been some voices of praise, and we can post some encouragement to us on Weibo, and we are also very grateful." ”
Intelligent reconstruction, horizontal innovation is endless
The development direction and path of DingTalk are not determined from the beginning, and like other start-ups, they are all found in actual business practice.
In the first two or three years of its establishment, DingTalk mainly did IM (instant messaging) + OA (office automation), and invested 500 million yuan to open all-round advertising bombardment on all ** platforms such as subways, taxis, airports, high-speed rail, commercial buildings, graphic ** and mainstream portal news clients, and seize the strategic high ground in the 2B field. As a result of seizing the dividends of the mobile era, DingTalk quickly snatched users from the PC to the mobile side.
In June 2020, DingTalk launched the "Cloud-Nail Integration" strategy and deeply integrated with Alibaba Cloud. In September 2020, Ye Jun joined DingTalk, and then took over as the president of DingTalk, continuing to promote the "Cloud Nail Integration" strategy. In the second half of 2021, DingTalk laid out a series of major actions, including the establishment of an independent business department of music **, the acceleration of commercialization, and the placement of ecology in an important strategic position.
In March 2022, DingTalk also carried out a comprehensive brand upgrade, the focus of the logo changed from "lightning" to "wings", and the slogan was updated from "making work and learning easier" to "making progress happen", further strengthening the direction of digitalization.
In fact, behind this series of layouts, DingTalk has gradually found its own development path and clarified the boundary: only focus on the open PaaS platform, provide help and services to SaaS vendors, and provide services to enterprise customers directly by SaaS vendors on DingTalk, that is, DingTalk should do horizontal innovation, rather than vertical innovation.
In April 2023, DingTalk announced that it would access the Tongyi Qianwen model and start a comprehensive intelligent strategy. In August, DingTalk opened the AI PaaS to ecosystem partners and customers, using large models to help the ecosystem remake products. In November, DingTalk was positioned by Alibaba as a new batch of strategic innovation business "Four Little Dragons".
Enron said that it does feel that DingTalk has become easier to use, and there may be three main reasons: first, it has finally focused on collaboration and efficiency;Second, it started to seriously design the product around the "end user";Third, it has clear values, something to do and something not to do.
Up to now, DingTalk has completed the AI transformation of its own products, becoming the first national-level work application in China to fully open AI, and 700,000 enterprises have actually used it.
Ye Jun said that as the AIGC wave enters productivity and application scenarios, AI agent has become the best AI application entrance at present, and DingTalk's goal is to become a low-threshold, high-frequency and open AI assistant platform. In the next three years, 10 million AI assistants will be generated on DingTalk.
DingTalk is also gradually enhancing the ability of LUI batch instructions, and the previous GUI GUI experience will not be affected. "In the future, there will be fewer and fewer DingTalk image user interface buttons,Maybe the number of interface buttons today is the peak,In the future, a variety of buttons will be offline one after another,For example, it will be officially offline and collected,You don't need to collect it in the future,Just tell the AI assistant,This is from the enhancement of Lui's intelligent capabilities。 Ye Jun said.
Since the beginning of this year, DingTalk has also continued to reduce the commission of the open platform, facing the challenges of China's SaaS transformation in the AI era and the pressure of reducing costs and increasing efficiency together with the industry.
As Ye Jun said, looking back on the entrepreneurial road of DingTalk in the past, we often have to look back at "taking history as a mirror to know the rise and fall", no one is smooth sailing, no company is advancing all the way, and it is impossible for a company that has not experienced a "cold winter" to succeed. (Source: DingTalk Weibo, official WeChat).