In 2012, 18-year-old Wang Wei was faced with a choice: whether to stay at Chinese min University or transfer to the University of Sydney. Under the call of international education, Wang Wei chose to go to Australia and study alone. Now, twelve years have passed, looking back at the decision I once made, almost restarting my life, and laying the foreshadowing of the young entrepreneur singing all the way
In 2018, Wang Wei returned to China to start his own business, anchored the post-study academic tutoring market, and founded HD Edu Haidao Education, serving as the founder and CEO. In 2019, the product took root in Australia, and then entered the British and American markets, and the road of globalization slowly unfolded; In 2020, the self-built platform was launched to achieve full online, creating an era of online classes for post-secondary education and training. In 2021, it served 300,000 users and received investment from Evergreen Insurance; In 2022, the first academic integrity industry standard in the after-sales market was launched to fill the gap in industry norms. In 2023, the business scope will cover more than 40 colleges and universities in 4 mainstream study abroad countries in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and the cumulative number of international students served worldwide will exceed 400,000 ......
From a campus club in Sydney to a leading brand in the post-study market, Wang Wei shared with Duo Whale what HD EDU does and doesn't do, and what the AI era is intended to do.
The rigid and cyclical nature of academic counseling is closely related to the teaching system of different countries. Under the baton of the domestic college entrance examination, students' academic pressure is heavy on the K12 stage, especially before the college entrance examination, and the involution is serious. However, overseas, the academic pressure of students is heavy at the university levelThe education mechanism of wide entry and strict exit, the independent learning mode, the graduation elimination rate of 30% at every turn, and the strong demand for academic counseling for international students as a performance point.
Wang Wei recalled that during an impressive exam season, he was a teaching assistant in the library to answer questions, and there were thirty or forty students waiting to ask questions behind him. Because of the low efficiency of one-on-one Q&A, Wang Wei set up a club, distributed leaflets, posted posters, and started offline classes, with the result that more than half of the nearly 10,000 international students at the University of Sydney came to class.
Such a rigid demand is in front of us, and it is logical to commercialize it based on demand. At the end of 2017, Tencent's Honor of Kings team came to overseas schools to recruit and hit it off with Wang Wei. Because the club has a database for academic tutoring, it only took one week to recommend 700 accurate candidates for Tencent, and the head of the school recruitment team said that this is the most efficient overseas school recruitment for Tencent. At the beginning of 2018, at the invitation of Tencent, and considering the higher activity and talent density of the domestic capital market, Wang Wei returned to China with two other international students who were also in Australia to start a business and settled in Tencent's Shenzhen incubator. Later, under the recommendation of Tencent, it received an angel round investment from BlueFocus, and HD Edu Haidao Education came from this.
The selection of the overseas student academic tutoring market means that from the education cut, the user stickiness is strong, the consumption frequency is high, the service cycle is long, and the international students are undoubtedly a high-net-worth user group. Wang Wei said that HD Edu Haidao Education has a clear business model from the first day of its business, and it has never changedCombined with data accumulation, expand along the user learning, job search and even life sectors, do product matrix superposition, and dig deep into user LTV (total life cycle value), the higher the LTV, the greater the company's value.
Therefore, HD edu Haidao Education meets the needs of international students throughout the life cycle and has created three major business lines: HD Class, a live large-class product with academic counseling as the entrance, and HD 1V1, an overseas research application product HD Offer, which extends from academic counseling, and HD Career, a one-stop service platform for studying abroad and career development.
Divide it into words. The academic tutoring products HD Class and HD 1V1 are different products of the same business line after user stratification and ** stratification from a business point of viewThe former is for users with strong self-learning ability, and the latter is for users with customized needs or stronger payment ability. Whether it is HD Class or HD 1V1, both emphasize localization, adapt to local conditions, and teach students according to their aptitude. There are more than 4,000 teachers, also known as tutors, who are localized and provide users with companion learning through offline activities and local community activities.
The operating model of HD offer is divided into self-operation and mergers and acquisitions. The king is called,The main judgment logic of M&A is still to look at user LTV, or to collect high-traffic import products, or to collect high-margin products, and the core behind it is to look at the quality of product delivery, such as user offer rate. The support of HD Edu Haidao Education for the acquisition of brands is mainly traffic and brand empowerment. The reason behind this is that the study abroad industry is fragmented, traffic entrances are scarce, and brands accumulated by mass delivery are even more scarce. Therefore, if the company's own product delivery quality is good, coupled with the traffic empowerment of HD Edu Haidao Education, it can grow rapidly. In 2021, HD Edu acquired Singularity Education, which grew rapidly, tripling its revenue the year of acquisition and jumping the following year.
As for the career planning product, HD Career is a key step for HD Edu Haidao Education to open up the closed loop from talent training to talent delivery, and it is also the general trend of vocational education. At present, the domestic workplace environment is becoming more and more involuted, more and more companies are seeking to go overseas, and the demand for international talents is surging. Therefore, HD Edu Haidao Education connects the supply and demand ends, and sends outstanding Chinese students to domestic manufacturers such as Alibaba and ByteDance, as well as leading overseas companies such as Booking and Apple. To date, HD Career products have served more than 10,000 users around the world.
Wang Wei summarized that HD Edu Haidao Education's understanding of the industry can be condensed into two sentences:Anchor new industries, and strengthen the linkage development and talent transfer with B-end industries.
First of all, the opportunity for new vocational education will always come from the rise of new industries. Behind the rapid development of the industry, there is often a gap between the cultivation of higher education talents and the demand for market talents. Just as the current AI industry is rising, there will be a huge demand for talent behind it. Optimizing the talent supply structure depends on the cooperation between institutions and institutions. Second, the scale effect of vocational education is determined by the supply side and the demand side. The deeper the organization goes into the B-side, the deeper the influence and barriers will be built in the industry. Wang Wei disclosed that HD Edu Haidao Education is not only engaged in to C business, but also hopes to truly understand the needs of the B end and build bilateral relations. At present, HD EDU is inviting industry experts such as the head of Apple AI and the CTO of Tinder to jointly develop AI courses and products, hoping to provide more talents for the AI industry.
Convergence summary, HD Class, HD 1V1, HD Offer, HD Career, four product matrices, corresponding to the three major business lines, landed to the internal organizational structure, each business line is its own BU (business unit), independent settlement, behind the unified empowerment of the brand and traffic by the center. In Wang Wei's view,Traffic is not valuable, but product traffic with brand influence is valuable. 」Therefore, the four major products are unified with HD Edu Haidao Education to acquire customers, and the brand side will distribute the traffic with user tags to each business line, and different business lines can undertake conversion and endorse each other.
For example, when a data with a user tag enters the traffic pool, the system identifies that the user is a user of the HD Edu academic tutoring product, a professional finance, and now in the third year, there is a high probability that there will be a need to take the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) certificate or internship, find a job, or even immigrate. Then the operator will recommend the corresponding products and services for the user at the corresponding node of the user life cycle. In addition, because users have used HD Edu's academic tutoring products, they already have a certain brand trust foundation, which is easier to convert.
Wang Wei emphasized that the education industry is a service industry, and to truly form user value, it depends on solid delivery. Brands with strong trust endorsement cannot rely on marketing and promotion, but rely on solid delivery again and again. Therefore, HD Edu Haidao Education pays special attention to whether the value of the product is delivered in place. How do you define delivery in place? From the most obvious user evaluation, to the repurchase rate, score rate, offer rate and other result-based assessment indicators, HD Edu Haidao Education has a complete system.
In exchange for the brand awareness of HD Edu Haidao Education's benchmark enterprise in the post-stay service market, as well as the market share of 70% of the colleges and universities, 90% of the top universities, and the average user life cycle of 6 years, covering the job search stage of an international student from the preparatory stage to the two years after graduation.
Talking about market share and market competition, Wang Wei said that the post-study service market is a market segment of more than 200 billion yuan, covering clothing, food, housing, transportation, and education. HD Edu Haidao Education's current main post-stay academic tutoring market was still a blue ocean when it started its business in 2018, and now it has entered the middle and late stage of development, and the competition is becoming increasingly fierce. However, compared with the competitive situation, Wang Wei is more concerned about the competitive niche in which HD EDU Haidao Education is locatedStarting from the focus of international students' academic counseling, if they can occupy the main position of the industrial chain, they will have a relatively higher influence on other industries.
Wang Wei said he admires Recruit, Japan's No. 1 human resources company. Founded in 1960, after 20 years in the recruitment business, the company began to expand into other business lines and quickly grew into Japan's largest lifestyle service platform. Wang Wei said that the goal of HD EDU Haidao Education is to provide products and services throughout the life cycle of users' learning, life, job hunting, and even clothing, food, housing and transportation, and build a deep brand influence.
When talking about the post-study service market, we have to talk about the three years of the pandemic. Looking back at the epidemic, both crisis and opportunity coexist. When user demand and product delivery are greatly migrated between online and offline scenarios, how can HD Edu Haidao Education turn the crisis into an opportunity and seize the opportunity?
Wang Wei recalled that in the early days of the epidemic, international students bore the brunt. The outbreak of the epidemic in China has made it hopeless for international students to return to China. After customs clearance, the outbreak of the overseas epidemic and the uncertain study abroad policy have made some students reluctant to study online, many schools have even canceled exams, and the demand for student tutoring has also decreased accordingly, and the scale of the entire post-study service market has shrunk.
During this period, there were obvious challenges to HD Edu Kaido Education, in business decisions and even organizational structure adjustments. Fortunately, in 2019, Wang Wei made a key decision:Go online. This strategy enabled HD EDU to open up a complete closed loop of online customer acquisition, product services, and operation delivery before the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020.
Why go online? Wang Wei's main decision-making logic is always based on user needs. First, HD Edu Haidao Education is an intergenerational education service, and the target user groups are all digital natives, and from the perspective of changes in user cognitive preferences, online product and service interaction is more in line with user needs; Second,The online model has a stronger scale effect and replicability, and the concentration of the education market is higher. For the two reasons, HD edu chose to go online in the following year of its establishment, so it was able to maintain a 100% user growth rate during the epidemic, especially when the offline market was greatly squeezed.
In addition to the explicit challenges, there are also implicit challenges. For example, during the epidemic, should we continue to provide users with comprehensive value that covers product value and emotional value in addition to learning value? Wang Wei chose to stand in the perspective of users, and did everything he could do. So there are masks to be delivered, online study rooms, online meditation activities, and sales to chat with depressed students every day.
After the epidemic, pent-up demand has exploded, delivery scenarios have returned to offline, and organizational capabilities are also being reshaped. Taking customer acquisition as an example, during the peak period before the epidemic, HD Edu's overseas campus operation team had more than 500 campus ambassadors, who could efficiently acquire customers at a very low cost after building the spiritual core, distributing the benefit mechanism, and sorting out the collaboration methods. During the epidemic, HD Edu Haidao Education adjusted its customer acquisition strategy and switched to online content acquisition on platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu. After the epidemic, it is very important to reconstruct online and offline customer acquisition channels and improve the efficiency and quality of refined operations while scaling up.
In addition to modernization, compliance is also the only way for education enterprises to pursue large-scale delivery. In the education and training industry, there is a symbiotic relationship between institutions and schools, especially in the overseas independent learning mode, students cannot get a complete solution in the school, so a strong off-campus tutoring market has been derived. In other words, education and training institutions are not a substitute for school education, but a complementary product. However, in the post-study service market, especially in the academic counseling track, practitioners are uneven, often in the name of counseling, do shameful things, plagiarism, cheating, substitute teaching and other incidents that do not conform to academic integrity, and it is difficult for education and training institutions to be recognized by major universities.
Wang Wei said that as a leading enterprise in the field of academic tutoring in the post-stay service market, HD EDU Haidao Education has the responsibility to promote the standardized development of the industry. In August 2022, HD Edu Kaido Education was launchedThe industry's first Academic Integrity Compliance Guidelines, which regulates 17 red-line behaviors in detail, including the prohibition of substitute examinations**, the prohibition of answering questions during students' examinations, and the prohibition of using school questions to teach in any form.
Behind the introduction of the "Academic Integrity Compliance Guidelines" is a large-scale systematic project of academic compliance management. To this end, HD EDU has set up an academic integrity compliance department, and the team has studied the academic integrity rules and regulations and related legal precedents of more than 40 overseas schools. Wang Wei said that the process of establishing academic integrity compliance standards is a new and little-traveled path, and even schools sometimes have not yet clarified the standards. Among them, the biggest difficulty is to grasp the boundary, achieve a balance between user needs and school requirements, and gradually clarify the standards in the process of cooperation between colleges and universities and training institutions. To this end, HD Edu Haidao Education even meets the requirements of colleges and universities in accordance with the product standards of the school's official procurement courses, formulates the basic principles of HD Edu teachers' teaching, and integrates them into the product system research and development.
In October 2023, HD Edu reached a school-enterprise cooperation with the University of Chester, a public university in the United KingdomThe first school-enterprise cooperation in the post-study service industry。Taking the University of Chester as the entrance, Wang Wei said that in the future, he will promote the achievement of more school-enterprise cooperation in the after-sales market. However, he admits that the school-enterprise cooperation itself does not have much commercial value, and HD EDU Haidao Education cannot boast that it has run through the business model of international education school-enterprise cooperation. If it can be said to run through, at most it is a school-enterprise endorsement model. However, from the perspective of compliance, Wang Wei hopes that every post-retention service company can do its best to be compliant, even if it will bring more fierce market competition, but at least the industry will really bring long-term value to users.
At the end of 2023, HD Edu Kaido Education celebrates its 6th anniversary. On the one hand, there is a lively and lively celebration, and on the other hand, there is a continuous and in-depth executive strategy meeting. Wang Wei bluntly said that there are two main long-term development strategies anchored by HD edu Haidao education:
One, emphasizedNew traffic winsBased on the brand accumulation and user data accumulation of HD Edu Haidao Education, we will provide more products and services along the whole life cycle of users and create a post-retention market ecosystem. Two rules,「all in ai」The focus can be divided into two main areas: organizational AI and product AI.
What is AI for Organizations? According to Wang Wei's analysis, AI will affect organizational design, job value judgment, and job collaboration processThe essence of organizational AI is to improve organizational efficiency under the value proposition of new positions. In particular, the education industry is a manpower-intensive industry with a long delivery chain and is driven by manpower.
For example, in the past, sales training was often abstract and refined based on typical cases, and made into SOPs, corpora, and thesaurus, which were given to other sales, so as to narrow the gap in ability level. However, under the new paradigm of AI, the use of self-developed or third-party sales-side AI assistants, combined with HD Edu's professional database, can help each sales person to respond to user-oriented customized questions that are more in line with service standards and sales conversion efficiency requirements.
Wang Wei made a special mention of the key indicators of AI's impact on the organizational efficiency of educational institutionsHuman-to-person ratioimpact. In the entire service chain of education, the ratio of students that can be served by a single teacher is naturally limited by time and space. However, with the help of AI, teachers can greatly improve the efficiency of lesson preparation, can the ratio of people to servers be doubled without reducing quality? When AI becomes the core of high-quality teaching supply, can the human-to-service ratio jump exponentially? Wang Wei believes that things are done by man. Correspondingly, this year, HD Edu Haidao Education's human resources No. 1 position has been changed from a traditional human resources background to a senior executive with a more business background, which is the core decision behind the hope of driving organizational change from an AI perspective.
As for the AI of products, Wang Wei said that its impact is far-reaching, and the core can be developed from three aspects:First, from the perspective of interaction logicIn the education scene, the natural interaction between teachers and students is Q&A, students ask, teachers answer, students ask, and teachers answer. Therefore, in this new wave of AI technology paradigms, under the interaction mode of large modelsAI is highly adaptable to education scenarios.
Second, from the perspective of supply-side reform, AI education products are expected to truly achieve large-scale efficiency without sacrificing effectiveness. Wang Wei analysis,Education, especially education, is nothing more than balancing effect and efficiency, or balancing effect and gross profit. Because of the single effect, the best form of product delivery is one-to-one. However, the minimum unit cost of the one-to-one form is the teacher's unit hour, which will not decrease marginally with the scale of the product. In terms of efficiency alone, the best form of product delivery is tools, such as photo search tools. The essence of this kind of product is to highly productize, abstract, and then instrumentalize the needs of students, so that all users can efficiently enjoy the same products and services, but completely sacrifice the customization effect; In the middle, trying to balance the effect and efficiency of the product delivery form, there are small classes, large classes, recorded classes, etc., but they either focus on effect or efficiency, and cannot be taken into account. However, under this round of new technology paradigm of AI large language models, AI education products are expected to truly realize thousands of people and thousands of faces, breaking the impossible triangle of personalization, scale, and high quality.
In the second half of 2023, HD Edu successfully developed and launched an AI education product with a small-scale team of 6 people, which gained 100,000 users around the world in half a year, which was well received. Wang Wei said that when the minimum interaction unit on the supply side changes from the teacher's time to the call of the large model of 1,000 tokens, and the interaction mode changes from the teacher-student interaction to the teacher-machine-student interaction under the large model, this is a huge change on the supply side and an opportunity that entrepreneurs must seize.
Third,From the perspective of the international market, the new AI technology paradigm will bring incremental market opportunities for globalization. In the past, the delivery language of educational institutions determined the scope of delivery, for example, for those who do Chinese and English international education, the users were overseas Chinese students. The quality of delivery is basically determined by the company's educational ability and the teaching level of teachers. However, AI large language model technology can naturally break through language limitations and standardize and stabilize delivery quality.
Wang Wei emphasized that in the process of leveraging AI to expand the global market, although Haidao Education will be driven by rational and calm data technology, the brand background will always maintain temperature, and every user will be regarded as a real friend and partner. He gave an example of HD Edu Kaido EducationHow to build an intimate relationship with users。It is said that users sometimes ask some weird questions. For example, the University of Queensland in Australia is very beautiful, and there is a kind of turtle in the lake on the campus with green fur on its head. So users will ask, why do turtles have green hair? And the staff will seriously go to Google to search for answers, give users answers, and even tell users that in addition to the turtle with green hair on the head, the University of Queensland has other magical animals, and it is recommended to go and see it. Wang Wei said with a smile that he hopes that in the future, with the empowerment of AI technologies such as GPT, the operation students will be able to answer the strange questions of users faster.
AI is wonderful, but it's not cheap. If you want to bet on AI that burns money, funds are a threshold that cannot be bypassed. Wang Wei disclosed that HD Edu Haidao Education has snowballed its annual revenue of more than 100 million yuan with two rounds of financing, and in the case of large-scale customer acquisition, it has ensured low customer acquisition costs and subsequent conversions, with the first order being profitable and the cash flow being positive. Recently, HD Edu has been planning a new round of financing, one is to expand its self-developed products from the perspective of LTV, covering more colleges and universities, from the current 40 colleges and universities to 70 to 100 universities around the world, and accelerate the industrial integration movement in the process of market expansion; The second is to leverage new target users based on AI products and open up a larger market.
Wang Wei also bluntly said that although the new AI technology paradigm is sweeping the world, there are no technical barriers in the post-service industry at present. But looking to the future, if there is a company that can not only serve more than 2 million Chinese international students, but also expand its services to 12 million international students around the world, and even serve 2300 million college students around the world, thenI hope HD EDU Kaido Education is that company, Wang Wei said indifferently.
On the day of the 6th anniversary celebration, Wang Wei invited the first batch of tutors from HD EDU to share their feelings. One of them, who is now a product leader of ByteDance, said something that moved Wang Wei, No matter where my current career development is and where I will go in the future, HD edu Haidao education will always be my proudest label. 」
At the beginning of the business, Wang Wei's original intention was hopePositively impacting 100 million people around the world through education。Today, Wang Wei believes that this young company is still far from this ambitious goal. But when Wang Wei received heartfelt comments from teachers and students, and saw that the students who were on the verge of dropping out of school overseas and only wanted to mix up a graduation certificate finally graduated successfully, and their parents came to thank him, 100 million people was no longer a grand number, but a specific and touchable user, partner, and friend.
Just like the brand mission of HD Edu Haidao Education, let young people become creators, disseminators and beneficiaries of knowledge, looking back, that is Wang Wei's commitment to his 18-year-old self and every lonely student studying abroad to achieve success.