Right now, the most sought-after developer profile might just be the Xiaohongshu-native type.

"A new crack in the wall for entrepreneurship."

For a venture capital summit, the opening speaker usually sets the tone for the entire event. So a 17-year-old girl, escorted by her grandmother as her legal guardian, took the stage.

Her name is RPone. She started programming in elementary school and taught herself Swift to build ScreenPick, a screen recognition tool that once climbed to sixth place on the App Store charts. Another developer her age, Randy, couldn't make it because he had midterm exams to prepare for. His youthful face appeared on the giant screen as he told the story of coding until 3 a.m.

This was the scene at Xiaohongshu's Indie Developer Competition, in a space packed with two to three hundred indie developers where creative energy exploded. They came from all corners of the country, from wildly different backgrounds — former screenwriters, people who quit Big Tech with no safety net, students still in school, fishing enthusiasts. Their only commonality: the democratization of technology in the AI era had landed on each of them, and the context for entrepreneurship had become lighter.

The number of AI-native indie developers is surging, yet they're different from other AI-native entrepreneurs. They don't compulsively talk about PMF, product strength, or how far they are from commercialization — that's almost a stress response to facing investors. They don't constantly worry that a revolution in the underlying technology will overnight destroy their company; after all, they're "indie," so pivoting is light and easy. And with the emergence of communities like Xiaohongshu, capturing user demand has become simpler.

Most indie developers won't grow into giants like ByteDance or Meituan. They're more like a new lens for observing the AI era: AI doesn't just bring displacement — it also helps a new wave of people find cracks to start businesses.

Part 01

Why Everyone Envies Indie Developers

Guigui and his former Alibaba colleagues who left with him decided to move to a new place not far from Liangzhu. It was a symbolic moment, representing their abandonment of the past decade of fundraising-driven entrepreneurship for an indie development path built on paid subscriptions. In Guigui's view, this meant giving up the "grand narrative" and entering a "semi-hermit" life.

In the "grand narrative" phase, they had chosen a B2B project and sought VC funding. But "traditional entrepreneurship requires meeting clients, doing pre-sales and post-sales — that's not what programmers enjoy." Struggling in this pain, a casual complaint from someone around them sparked inspiration: podcasts are always four or five hours long, impossible to get through.

In the Liangzhu "semi-hermit" phase, they found this extremely specific product need and built Podwise. It's an AI-powered podcast knowledge management tool that transforms hours-long audio into structured text notes, supporting keyword extraction, multilingual translation, and offline downloads.

In Guigui's view, marketing and operations — everything unrelated to code — are the required courses for indie developers. Podwise completed its cold start on Xiaohongshu, where users spontaneously shared AI-generated notes to create secondary viral spread. A single hit post once brought a wave of user registrations, with nearly 4% of registered users converting to paid. After a Black Friday promotion, paid users increased tenfold. Podwise also emphasized community propagation and co-creation: for example, they developed a "generate shareable image" feature specifically for spreading on Xiaohongshu, and when users asked why they couldn't find it on the App Store, they hurriedly launched an iOS version.

AI liberated a considerable amount of productive efficiency — for instance, the team used GPT-4 to write 80% of their customer service scripts — allowing the team to remain lean at just three people. Currently, the three live in three different places, collaborating asynchronously through Discord and Feishu. The Podwise team seems quite satisfied with this lifestyle. As Guigui put it: "Everyone deserves a small business — one that frees you from wage dependence and enters a truly independent state."

This independent state of indie developers requires at least three preconditions: first, they no longer clock in at an office. Second, they start by satisfying a specific demand market, like Podwise, ensuring basic self-sustaining cash flow. Finally, they don't have to take the equity financing route from day one, which is also because many indie developers choose the paid subscription model — first driving up DAU and cash flow, then deciding whether to enter the equity investment-driven entrepreneurship system.

This state stands in sharp contrast to the frantic involution in today's AI entrepreneurship arena — while entrepreneurs in large models, embodied intelligence, and other tracks anxiously chase technological iteration, these indie developers maintain a rare composure.

Take Miao Ran, who developed Rainy Day and won the competition's gold prize. After the game's release, she decided to give herself a long vacation. Half the reason the game is on Steam is that it was a gift to herself: "rain" is a metaphor for the predicaments in her life — quitting a major game studio, failing at studying abroad — and the paper-cut protagonist who shelters from the rain ultimately faces the downpour directly, gaining the courage to "not get wet."

The other half of the reason is that for her, indie games are a dream, and living costs can be covered by her content creator work. During development, Miao Ran posted video logs like "A 30th Birthday Gift" and "300 Days to Make a Game From Zero," bringing over 30,000 players to her game.

Indie developers are emerging in concentration, and this has its contextual backdrop — waves of layoffs at major tech companies released large numbers of technical talents, forcing many experienced professionals to find new paths. There's also the technological transformation: the "democratization" of AI technology provided individuals with a technical foundation for innovation — open-source models, low-code tools, and cloud computing resources dramatically lowered development barriers, much like the openness of the Android/iOS ecosystem in the early mobile internet era, enabling solo operators to achieve technical breakthroughs that once required team collaboration.

More critically, social platforms have reconstructed the supply-demand chain. Platforms like Xiaohongshu compress market validation, user feedback, and product iteration into a closed loop of "develop-release-feedback." Developers can capture demand directly in the community, even co-create with users, streamlining the previously cumbersome market process.

Part 02

The Changing of the Guard

Liu Yi is a well-known OG in China's indie developer community. His MiDi Clock was nominated for a 2022 Apple Design Award. In his view, the reason many people become indie developers is actually quite simple: "You find and discover a need yourself. No one on the market has done it. You make it, run into some people with the same need, and users appear."

But this OG gradually noticed that the way many new developers discover needs has changed.

Shawn, a former Big Tech product manager, is one example. He developed anxiety disorder from work and was advised by his doctor to get more sun. Later, on Xiaohongshu, he discovered many people like him had a need for sun exposure to supplement vitamin D. This inspired him to develop an app called Sun Ally.

The app's interface features a small pill representing vitamin D. You have to get enough sun to fill it up, enabled by the UV detection feature on Apple Watch. Sun Ally launched less than two months ago and already has 20,000 users from Xiaohongshu.

Liu Yi himself is also changing, first by "returning" to the domestic market from overseas. Liu Yi developed a music app called MiDi Vinyl, inspired by vinyl record players, letting users recreate the ritualistic feeling of listening to vinyl at home. This product topped the overall App Store charts in the US and multiple other countries, with related TikTok videos receiving 1.6 million likes and hitting millions of downloads within days.

Liu Yi hadn't initially focused much on the domestic market. He casually posted a video note with a small alternate account, not expecting it to blow up on Xiaohongshu. Many users flooded his comment section, to the point that Liu Yi spent an entire day replying to messages — a feeling he hadn't experienced in years, of personally engaging with users when making products alone.

From this post onward, MiDi Vinyl also saw a wave of domestic user growth. From that point, Liu Yi decided to seriously operate his Xiaohongshu presence.

In some of the communities he belongs to, there are many excellent developers, but the entry requirement is "having been featured by the App Store." Yet on communities represented by Xiaohongshu, a kind of democratization has been achieved in a sense — you don't need any glamorous resume, you just need to pinpoint user needs accurately to complete a cold start.

Liu Yi's experience is quite representative. Early indie developers tended to emphasize circle culture more. They gathered in specific forums and WeChat groups, exchanging technical and product insights. While this circle culture was highly specialized, it also created certain thresholds and barriers. This model destined the user acquisition path for indie developers to be linear and slow.

In Liu Yi's view, making products has become easier now, because previously developers needed people who would always pay attention to their products. But with the emergence of communities, it's no longer only your followers who can see your work — decentralized algorithms and recommendation mechanisms can help developers match with people who like their products.

The emergence of communities has changed the rules of the game.

He keenly observed: "Now the new generation of developers should all be on Xiaohongshu, and the old guard is slowly migrating over too." This migration isn't accidental — it's because this massive community has created an entirely new developer ecosystem — where algorithms and recommendation mechanisms can precisely match developers with potential user needs, forming a more agile, lightweight positive feedback loop.

Part 03

"Xiaohongshu-Native" Developers

It is in this loop that the term "Xiaohongshu-Native" developer has begun circulating in the industry.

Sanbing, Xiaohongshu's technology vertical lead, told An Yong Waves: "The types of developers we see grow from needs within the community. Their needs aren't in some abstract grand narrative — they mostly serve the interests and pain points of ordinary AI users."

There are roughly over 50,000 such community-native developers.

The community provides a growth medium for these AI developers. First, the platform's traffic distribution mechanism achieves a certain degree of "democratization" — even a solo developer's small project has a chance at significant exposure. Liu Yi's MiDi Vinyl unexpectedly blowing up on Xiaohongshu, with a surge in single-day downloads, is the best illustration.

More importantly, it allows developers to speak directly with potential users, quickly obtain feedback, and iterate.

For example, we previously reported on "Dialogue with Zhao Chunxiang: How a Liberal Arts Student Made a Top-3 AI App". Zhao is a typical case — his AI food diary app "Stomach Book" co-creates with users. He replies to every comment, and for every user who posts a Xiaohongshu note, if the AI recognition gets over 3 likes, they receive a free membership.

This constitutes a user-driven growth flywheel of organic recommendations. Stomach Book subsequently climbed to third place on the App Store's Food & Drink category. Zhao Chunxiang continues developing new apps like "Stranger Alarm Clock" and "Cute Letter," seemingly without creative bottleneck. In his view, the way to continuously find needs is to "develop for organic recommendation."

As Sanbing put it: "Helping you find your precise users, using content themes to attract more people who precisely match your needs — these people often become their seed users."

For investors, although most indie developer projects are too early-stage to fall within funds' scope, they still immerse themselves in the community. One investor told us, "My job isn't sourcing deals from Xiaohongshu — it's that while scrolling through Xiaohongshu, I'm also completing my insight into user needs of this era."

We're still in the early days of the AI era. Technology and business forms are iterating rapidly, reminiscent of the golden age of early mobile internet — a new wave of technology-driven entrepreneurship has opened, with masses of people holding new technologies and new channels, able to participate in entrepreneurship with a lighter posture, free to grow wildly.

Now it seems like a collective migration toward the next era is underway, and the gathering of these indie developers is also sounding the true arrival of the AI era.

In a sense, Xiaohongshu is a bit like Zhongguancun's Startup Street back in the day — every post could be the next 3W Coffee. Entrepreneurship is still in an extremely early stage. There are no crazy cash-burn wars here, no exaggerated valuation games. There are only people who love creating, using technology to solve real problems.

We've reported on too many conflicts in the venture capital world, to the point that when entrepreneurship returns to its original face — "I want to make this thing" — it actually feels unfamiliar.

Image source | Provided by interviewees

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