Is it difficult for small aerial survey companies to make money? It's not that you don't work hard, but that you don't choose the right doorway.

A while ago, DJI released L 1 and P 1 products through the official WeChat official account, which exploded the circle of friends that night, and the article gained 65,438+million+readings. Looking around, which official WeChat account can achieve such a great success in the entire geographic information industry circle including the media? After seeing these two products, a bunch of people engaged in aerial survey and GIS were excited (I was one of them) and lamented that DJI really promoted the development of aerial survey. Excited, I think the popularity of aerial survey is a challenge (bad) for most aerial survey enterprises and an opportunity (good) for a few aerial survey enterprises.

In recent years, I have been working on LocaSpace and Wish3D three-dimensional earth software, mainly focusing on the research and development of application software for UAV aerial survey results, which gives us the opportunity to get in touch with a large number of UAV aerial survey enterprises at close range and hear the most voices: it is getting harder and harder to find a job, I haven't eaten any food, and I haven't had a fixed long-term cooperative customer for several years. ? According to our observation of these enterprises, it is found that the main reason for this situation is not lack of efforts, lack of contacts and inadequate relations, but the inevitable result of the development trend of large industries:

First, homogenization competition is serious. Since 20 16, we have trained hundreds of people in 3D modeling of UAV tilt photography, most of whom are not from traditional surveying and mapping circles. Originally engaged in photography, household appliances sales, mobile phone maintenance have entered the field of aerial survey to do business. The intuition at that time was that the market competition of aerial survey would become more and more fierce. The fact is that in the past few years, the market price of aerial survey has dropped by half every year. After all, after the threshold is lowered, everyone can do it and can only compete at a low price.

Second, the business depth is not enough. These aerial survey enterprises on the edge of food and clothing basically only provide data services, mainly flying orthographic projection and tilt. Send the data to the customer by air, take a hard disk and send it to the customer, and the service is over. Customers can't use data, lack the means and tools to use data, and the value of data can't be effectively utilized, making business unsustainable. As a result, jobs are getting harder and harder to find, but good technology is not applied. This contradiction has always been prominent.

Of course, there are also some aerial survey companies actively seeking changes, trying to plan smart parks, smart cities, smart xx and other big projects with drones as the starting point. But most of them didn't win the project for several years and returned without success. Such aerial survey enterprises rashly want to plan large projects without accumulating, understanding the pain points of customers' business, mature plans and demonstration cases. The problem with this kind of thinking is obvious, the steps are too big and too radical. To put it bluntly, there are some money in the market that you can't earn yourself.

On the other hand, we also see that a few small aerial survey companies have a good life. They have never been short of projects and have been short of manpower for a long time and have been making a fortune. So what good ideas can these profitable aerial survey companies learn from? According to our observation, they have the following characteristics:

1. Instead of staring at traditional surveying and mapping customers such as Natural Resources Bureau and Surveying and Mapping Institute, focus on a weak GIS application industry and cultivate it for a long time. Traditional surveying and mapping customers are often fiercely competitive and have been firmly occupying the site for many years. It is basically impossible to do first-class projects, and second-class and third-class projects have no future. At present, many non-traditional surveying and mapping customers, such as public security, highway design, engineering construction, agriculture, insurance and so on, also use aerial survey data one after another, and the demand is very great.

2. Business is not out of town, only local customers. As a result of this idea, customers can get on-site support within 2 hours when they encounter problems, and localized services can be in place, with high customer satisfaction and greatly improved demand communication depth. Many small businesses used to run all over the country. For example, enterprises in Hunan airlift data to Guangxi, and enterprises in Guangxi airlift data to Guizhou. Experienced people know that it is not easy to do ethnic business, with high price requirements and low rate of return.

The most important thing is to help users solve the problem of how to use data consciously. Aerial survey is only a means, not an end. The end result that customers want is to solve business needs, not to get a bunch of surveying and mapping results. "How to solve business problems with aerial survey data" is the secret for these small aerial survey companies to make a fortune. Most customers in the market are small and medium-sized customers (grass-roots units, districts and counties, township government departments). At this stage, the core appeal of such customers is not a large system, and there is no budget of several million to make a large system. They just want to solve their daily business problems.

For example, we came into contact with a small aerial survey company, which mainly served a local highway design institute. At the beginning of aerial survey business, after providing high-precision and high-resolution orthographic and oblique projection three-dimensional models to design institutes, designers did not know how to use them. If you just look at the model, it is meaningless to spend money on flight data. Through in-depth communication, it is known that the demand of designers and constructors is to find out the problems existing in the design scheme in time, reduce the number of design changes, stay up late, be criticized by experts, reduce the losses caused by rework, and find out the discrepancies between the construction and the drawings. The demand is transformed into a specific technical description, that is, the CAD design of highway is superimposed with the 3D model of UAV and DOM/DSM for comparison. This function is not complicated, but it can solve practical business problems. The aerial survey company approached us for a solution. Later, it helped users to solve this problem well. Users' demand for aerial survey data was particularly sticky, and a very solid cooperative relationship was established. Almost every engineering design project will look for other data.

For another example, a small aerial survey company flies a three-dimensional model to the district and county public security departments. In addition to providing data, he also provided customers with a small tool software to solve the problem of making security plans and emergency rescue plans based on the three-dimensional model in real life, which is very intuitive and plays a very good auxiliary role in command, coordination and upward reporting. It can be said that a few simple small functions are enough, so that the value of UAV data results can be truly exerted and the business can continue.

It can be seen that it is not that there is no demand in the market, but that the supply side needs to change its thinking and improve its business depth and service capabilities. If you don't pay attention to application problems, you will definitely not make money. Data application must be done, but how to do it? Great and all-round glory xx is not a big system. It may be the deep processing of data, or it may be one or two simple small functions, which can solve the problems that customers have been troubled for many years, open the breakthrough of aerial survey business, and the cooperation mode will move towards a virtuous circle.

I wish small aerial survey enterprises can find their own positioning and the days are getting better and better!

(This article is from the dictation of Jia Zong, the new CEO of Zhongke Tu, originally published in Wish3D official micro)