When you're building your own product, getting traffic really is one of the hardest parts. The anxiety comes in waves, and you're constantly looking for the next source of traffic.

Over the past few weeks, I had great reach on several Chinese social platforms. But I felt the conversion rate was only average, and some of the foundations inside my app weren't where I wanted them to be, so I deliberately slowed things down.

Over the last couple of days, I've started publishing content and looking for traffic again. Nothing I've posted in China has really taken off yet, but the results have been decent enough. What I want most right now is a breakthrough overseas—a viral post and a real surge of traffic. I've posted a few times on Threads and Instagram, but they've gotten virtually no traction. Anxiety is anxiety, but over the next few days I still need to keep experimenting, reading, and scrolling to learn what works.

Making a wish: I wake up and the numbers have exploded! Of course, that may just be a dream. In the end, I still have to keep my head down and do the work.

Form is the medium — it decides what users and readers actually see. On WeChat, people look at the image and read the post body; on Video Accounts, people watch the video and largely skip the text.

Different platforms also mean different things behind the scenes: different moderation rules, different traffic distribution, different audiences.

It is only after I started making content for commercialization and product launches that these ideas became concrete. Before, I knew the big concepts — but did not really know them.

知行合一 (the unity of knowing and doing) — it feels something like this.

These days, building a 50-point demo with AI may only take half a day, or even an hour or two. But from 50 to 80, there is often a huge chasm.

Most of the time, shipping a 50-point demo does not prove much. Shortening the distance from 50 to 80 — delivering a product experience and service with the highest completeness you can — is what matters.

Of course, if you have already found your target users and a business model with a 50-point product, that is also fine. Knowing exactly what level of product you are aiming for matters a lot.

Image generated with GPT-image-2.

Vibe coding has a common detour: you ship the demo first, skip the thinking and research along the way, and just keep asking the AI to tweak it.

But sometimes it pays to stop and look at how reference products solve the same thing — how others handle the same kind of problem. It saves you a lot of dead ends.

Written after hitting a few of these while building ColorWander.

Two recent thoughts:

1. Ideas are easy to copy. Completeness and details are not. Marketing and distribution channels are not. The data and corpus you have accumulated cannot be caught up with overnight either. Spinning up a demo has never been easier — everyone can say "I just vibe-coded a XYZ." But shipping a product with a complete experience is hard. Getting 100, 1,000, or more people to actually use what you offer is hard.

2. A friend told me: "All the friends I know who used to build productivity tools — none of them want to build pure productivity anymore." I said: "I think it is a stage thing. The more optimistic you are about model and agent capabilities, the deeper you go, the more pessimistic you become about pure productivity, and the more you care about things that are playful, fun, and human." I genuinely believe that.

Building products that are fun and humane matters more and more.