This article is from the WeChat official account Hansen Yu (ID: Hansen739), the author HansenYu, and the head picture is from Visual China
In 2021, I accidentally drove a car and found that Starbucks' POI page had opened up the Alipay applet, which could realize the functions of ordering food in the map and picking up food at the store.
I feel that there is a trend of multi-channel marketing in the local life industry.
Later, Xiaohongshu also reported that it can jump to WeChat applet on the site, and internally tested the jump path from GUCCI and other brands' public domain to private domain.
I had a meeting with the team and thought about whether to invest some energy in this direction. We believe that, In terms of private domain and channel marketing, digitalization may have the ability to increase revenue for businesses.
In the next week or two, we studied almost all the scenes of the local life industry.
It is found that the leisure and entertainment industry is suitable: high gross profit, heavy marketing, weak private domain.
The Chamber of Secrets is a good cut in scene:
Based on the above demand analysis, we have positioned a product: the subscription SaaS solution of integrated omni channel marketing, starting with the secret room industry.
We hope to take the Chamber of Secrets industry as an example to provide a private domain product for merchants, which can realize the functions of user reservation and competition.
At the same time, a product has been launched in map tools (Gaode, Baidu), transaction scenarios (Meituan, reputation), and content channels (Xiaohongshu, Diaoyin) to open up all channels for transaction closed-loop.
In the next two months, we took the lead in getting through the Polaris open platform of Meituan Reviews, and achieved API docking with Meituan; At the same time, we visited and gradually signed with ISV service providers in the above channels (with the ability to create small application online for merchants in Gaode, Tiaoyin and other scenarios), and also set up a sales team to expand and sign contracts with secret stores.
Everything went smoothly until a problem was found: Meituan's secret room competition function was not open to the public.
We were probably the only company in China that had API docking with Meituan's secret room scene at that time.
First, let's explain what the secret room competition means: some medium and large secret rooms can accommodate 8 people at a time, and there is a minimum opening number, such as 4 people. If two groups of players, two of them can play together, which also stimulates the social needs of strangers.
The secret room competition is a great industry progress, which optimizes the allocation of resources and stimulates more consumer demand. Moreover, it needs online tools to implement this scenario.
However, the fact that Meituan doesn't open its competition field to the outside world has brought us great resistance.
Because we can't always synchronize the reservation orders generated by Meituan to other channels. It's easy for merchants to make a choice between Meituan and other channels.
We are thinking of a compromise - since Meituan cannot be directly connected, manual update is also an option. Although the workload is heavy, businesses are more willing to increase revenue through multiple channels.
Our private domain system supports businesses to lock some people, which is equivalent to locking rooms in the hotel management system. For example, if the Meituan channel has reserved 2 seats for 8 full seats, we can edit the remaining 6 seats on the system.
This is a very simple product function - however, Meituan does not support it.
Meituan's system did not allow secret chamber merchants to lock some people at that time.
This is the choice of products, and it is also the most commercially valuable product function design I have ever seen.
Why? If I am a merchant, I have two friends to play in the secret room, and I also need them to book on the beauty group, otherwise it may lead to overbooking or not meeting the minimum number of people.
The secret room merchant was completely kidnapped by Meituan. You should know that Meituan may charge more than 10% commission for each order.
This is almost equal to that in the competition scenario, all the traffic of the merchants will go to Meituan once, with a commission of 10%+. This is the industry with the highest online penetration rate I have ever seen. Because of this product design, Meituan not only eliminated all competitors (Ali has no solution yet), but also cut off all offline traffic of merchants.
The market scale of the secret room industry is more than 10 billion. At present, the theme of competition is very high, and the customer price is very high.
Meituan almost monopolizes an industry by its product function design alone. If I am the CEO of Meituan, the product manager will directly reward 100w.
This also makes our private domain solutions so weak.
For Meituan, this is a clever commercial monopoly, but for the industry, it inhibits innovation.
We didn't expect such a result at first, so we took a detour for nearly half a year.
However, this made me think more about the moat of SaaS entrepreneurship.
This article is from Hansen Yu (ID: Hansen739), WeChat official account, and the author: HansenYu
This content is the author's independent point of view and does not represent the position of Hu Xiu. No reproduction without permission. For authorization, please contact hezuo@huxiu.com
