Conversations with Yi (EverString)
The forthcoming trend for engineering
Machine learning is increasingly becoming commoditized. DevOps becomes more important. Demand for specialized service where DevOps is encapsulated will further increase as demand for engineering tasks further outstrips engineering supplies.
On lead generation market
Companies in the lead generation space have need for scalable web crawlers. This helps offset the cost of retaining three in-house engineers.
Lead generation space has consolidated. There were priorly 120k such companies. There is 7k companies in operation. Majority of players are generating leads by scraping LinkedIn.
Consumer space require constant development of new features. Enterprise space requires service heavy. Enterprise space requires not just lead generation but entire channel marketing service suit (physical mail, online advertising, email marketing)
Lead gen hard to retain. The list becomes less valuable once it’s been used. 80% yearly churn is normal. One company reduces yearly churn to just 10% this by reducing second year subscription from USD800/yr to USD200/yr. further discount to USD100/yr if they don’t like. Recurring service is for grabbing fresh leads from same data source.
On Tele conference
Zoom’s product team compared with UberConference has developed a better understanding of the true conference needs of their users in various context. They have worked harder to ensure their product work seamlessly in identified scenarios. A typical example is the ability to join s conference bybthe press of a button on their mobile phone while driving instead of having to type the typical 4 pin digits.