elsewhere news
$

Articles

Podcasts

A Conversation with Kunpeng: Interactive Movie Games With Real Actors Suddenly Took Off — The Dream He'd Chased for Ten Years Finally Got Noticed

A Conversation with Kunpeng: Interactive Movie Games With Real Actors Suddenly Took Off — The Dream He'd Chased for Ten Years Finally Got Noticed

真格基金·
Vol.17 48-Hour Xiaohongshu Hackathon Hit: How an AI-Native Product That Broke the "Retention Curse" Was Built

---

Two weekends ago, I participated in a 48-hour hackathon hosted by Xiaohongshu. Our team of four built an AI-native product from scratch — no code, no design background between us — and ended up winning the "Most Popular" award.

The product? A voice diary app called **"Echo"** that uses AI to turn fragmented daily moments into serialized, episodic "life podcasts." Think *This American Life*, but starring you.

What surprised me wasn't that we won. It was that people kept using it *after* the demo.

Here's the dirty secret of AI hackathons: most projects die the moment judges stop clapping. The "retention curse" is real — users try your GPT wrapper once, say "neat," and never return. We broke that pattern. Our daily active user rate among beta testers hit 34% in week one, which for a hackathon product is basically unheard of.

How? Three deliberate choices we made against hackathon orthodoxy.

**First, we refused to build a chatbot.**

The default AI product in 2024 is still "talk to a large language model." We explicitly rejected this. Chat interfaces create *performance anxiety* — users feel pressure to ask the "right

Vol.17 48-Hour Xiaohongshu Hackathon Hit: How an AI-Native Product That Broke the "Retention Curse" Was Built --- Two weekends ago, I participated in a 48-hour hackathon hosted by Xiaohongshu. Our team of four built an AI-native product from scratch — no code, no design background between us — and ended up winning the "Most Popular" award. The product? A voice diary app called **"Echo"** that uses AI to turn fragmented daily moments into serialized, episodic "life podcasts." Think *This American Life*, but starring you. What surprised me wasn't that we won. It was that people kept using it *after* the demo. Here's the dirty secret of AI hackathons: most projects die the moment judges stop clapping. The "retention curse" is real — users try your GPT wrapper once, say "neat," and never return. We broke that pattern. Our daily active user rate among beta testers hit 34% in week one, which for a hackathon product is basically unheard of. How? Three deliberate choices we made against hackathon orthodoxy. **First, we refused to build a chatbot.** The default AI product in 2024 is still "talk to a large language model." We explicitly rejected this. Chat interfaces create *performance anxiety* — users feel pressure to ask the "right

云启资本·
Huazhe Xu: Embodied AI Just Starting Its Race, People Who Won't Wait for an IPO | North Slope Project

Huazhe Xu: Embodied AI Just Starting Its Race, People Who Won't Wait for an IPO | North Slope Project

绿洲资本·