Title mouthful, spread out:
Front end engineers are increasingly in demand at companies whose main business is “pay-for-b-side web toolkits,” especially whiteboard and canvas design products, In the fields represented by document products of text writing knowledge management, construction products of large screen of production page, audio and video products of video creation and processing, and team cooperation products of production and research process management, the spring has arrived for the front-end talents of type B tool-based products.
What is a tool
QQ is a chat tool, Foxmail is an email sending and receiving tool, Photoshop is a design tool, and Redmine is a project management tool. No matter what tools they have, they have little relationship with the front end in the past. Even if there is a web version, they mainly focus on display and simple interaction. Not a front end team of dozens of people who spend millions of dollars a month.
But today, tool ecological updates fast, more and more work, needs to be done in a Web page (the browser), whether it is a tool itself, or tool background, have a lot of interactive page, need to rely on the front-end engineer industrious hands, lines of code to knock out, with beautiful style for the comfort and convenience of interaction, the demonstration in front of its users.
The tool form in the past is mostly desktop software package, but today, the greater the capacity of the browser, the more mature the front-end cross-end language and program, the more work can be done in the front end, and then, the more scarce the front-end master can write business or can build technology, it is web tools products, very eat front-end resources.
Shiny tools
The Web versions of Google’s Gmail and Google Maps 17 years ago and 16 years ago became the king of “mail” and “Maps” shortly after they were introduced, and they still sit on the throne today, while Baidu’s Web Map, launched the same year as Google Maps, Up to now, it is still sitting in the top seat of domestic webpage map. Once the “monopoly” advantage is formed, tool-based products like mailbox and map will grow into an evergreen tree.
Incidentally, the AJAX application of Gmail/Maps (front – and back-end separation) has also, intentionally or not, accelerated the creation of a new profession of “front – end engineers,” who today are reinventing the Web for more tools.
It was also 17 years ago in HangzhouAladdintheE city, also launched a more advanced 3D city map, almost the entire city of Hangzhou online:
Can take it as a virtual version of a real city, to the later, the bus subway life circle, everything inside, just regret so advanced application, is not alive today, and my brother, since E city beat ali, are against the hardcore JS programming ability in E urban practice, all the wooshing promotion in the P8, get good career in return.
Tool-based Web software, technical barriers and business positioning, if it is well done, it will continue to be brilliant, otherwise it will be once bright, but flowing tool products, hard tool talent, where to change is scarce talent.
In the field of tools, Vue technology stack is a suitable option that takes both cost and efficiency into account. There will be a Vue technology special live broadcast this Saturday, you can participate in it for free by scanning the code. If the QR code takes effect, please add wechat Zaoeva invitation:
Registration link: www.huodongxing.com/go/tl33
Instruments of financing
Talking about recent Web tools product financing events that have gained attention?
Take design products as an example:
- “Figma” began secret development in 2010 and was launched in 2015. It has raised more than $300 million and is valued at $10 billion
- In 2013, “Canva” was launched in Australia, raising more than 400 million US dollars and valuing it at 40 billion US dollars
- Launched in 2015, “Blue Lake” has raised over 800 million RMB successively, and currently has nearly 100 employees in front of it
- In 2018, the “draft design” was incubated by “Joy Shopping”, a service provider of xiamen electricity shop solutions. Currently, there are more than 100 people in the front end
Of course, there are just taking the investment of instant design, as well as Chengdu Copy design, Beijing Ink knife and so on, design tools and products are still fighting, but the initial run out of the company, has very good profitability.
We want to focus on is like blue lake, have certain influence in the community, but there are still obvious technology gap distance Figma company, already have nearly no front end, the same draft to Canva, these products, the resources of the great consumption of front-end engineer, and as we all know, the front end of the senior engineers and technical experts, It’s extremely scarce compared to the demand in this market, and notice I use the word “extremely.”
Also note that it’s not just still image-oriented editing that counts as a design product. Video-oriented editing also works, and this feature is being quietly introduced on Canva.
Since Blue Lake /Figma can replace Photoshop to some extent, with the improvement of various capabilities in browsers and the breakthrough of broadband upstream and downstream speed, The various design software (such as Adobe Premiere and SolidWorks) in many fields, such as clothing pattern/home decoration effect collocation design, music creation, 3D design modeling of industrial works, can not be replaced?
The same is true for design tools, the same is true for documentation products, the same is true for project management tools, and the tools that used to be installed on a single machine will eventually move to the Web.
Used to Word/Excel, we seem to be used to flash drive/cloud drive passing, local file name (copy… In terms of usage experience and dissemination efficiency, especially within a particular organization/company from the asset platform, document management is a very headache, fortunately, the Web side of the document tools are beginning to proliferate.
Like Google Docs, graphite documents, Tencent documents, Kingsoft documents, Sparrow, flying books… , but the theory and experience, the document is “high development costs” type of product, the survival probability is higher in big companies, by big companies hatching success probability is higher, once the big company launching, ability to cut open the document, the document class entrepreneurial firms will face completely is not an order of magnitude of rolling technology, this is the technical document properties.
Design class of users is a cross-industry across the type of work, from the micro report XinHai video originality, coverage is very wide, and documentation tools of users is the industry of all type of work, as long as the inside an organization need knowledge flow and precipitation process, based on the permissions management platform for the private document is rigid demand, is applicable to any one person, from the CTO to market sales.
And engineering b-end products, there are very strong work attributes, whether it is low code building, or code management, or server operation and maintenance management… , there is usually a company research and development of “hard assets” hard costs, from the server to the engineer, are very expensive, how best to reduce the development cost and improve the efficiency of research and development, is for decades, companies in the pursuit of goals, until today, also did not run out of very ideal result, research and development is still the bottleneck of many companies resources, It is still a ridicule group whose performance and safety of many products are difficult to be guaranteed in quality, so it also contains a lot of opportunities.
Atlassian, for example, launched in 2010, has launched JIRA for team planning and project management, Confluence for team documentation, HipChat for inter-team real-time communication, Bitbucket for team development code sharing, It also acquired Trello, a project management service provider, and went public in 2015 with a market value of more than $5 billion. Today, the market value has reached $100 billion.
In China, ONES was founded in 2015, focusing on the research and development of management products throughout the whole life cycle of software research and development. In 2020, ONES acquired Tower, a well-known team collaboration tool in China, and expanded its business scope to project management. In 2021, ONES experienced three rounds of financing, B1, B2 and C. Financing is the capital behind the optimistic, but also the industry to develop to a certain stage of just need.
Tool challenges
Efficiency Efficiency efficiency, development efficiency is the biggest pain point. B the market demand more individuation, administrative appeal is stronger, need a lot of process in series, and interact with these processes, and certainly will need to add more pages to load, in the form, for example, a huge amount of very consumption form development front-end engineer resource, and this, can seriously slow down cycle, the project deliverables to do innovation, Low-code scaffolding is a new area of high r&d costs, and there is a long way to go to improve productivity directly or directly using tools to improve productivity.
Experience experience experience, professional product managers are often rare in the B-end field. They need to understand processes, interactions, users and research and development, which is too high. At the same time, there are quite a number of front-end functions with high technical difficulty to overcome, such as online document text editor, tables, canvas management of design tools… , any field to understand, it takes a technical expert at least one or two years, so this kind of tools in the use of experience, often have a lot of not good to use.
Efficiency and experience, efficiency can pile of people, and the experience you can’t, is a productivity itself is the bottleneck, one is the bottleneck of the experience of the product quality for a B end tool products, has a high requirement, which also has a high requirement for the engineers, and in this field, especially in the domestic, the front-end talent reserves, professional golden opportunity, Are also embedded in the high technical barriers.
These technical barriers are gradually thawing as the open source community advances and the quality of engineers improves, followed by the spring of this group.
Create, coordinate and process related note-taking software, design software, editor, project management, project software and message software, and finally make production and research process, process productization, product data and data intelligent.
Here are some tools I researched before writing this article:
Postscript, this paper is purely subjective, and it takes a lot of time to verify the data. In some places, it depends on the information and experience already mastered, which is for reference only.