400 Million Users in Two Years: How Did StressWatch Do It? | Talking with Patrick About Opportunity Spotting Methodology, Detours, and App Factories

For this episode, we invited Patrick, founder of StressWatch's development team "100 Bad Ideas," to share how he built a health product that has been featured on the App Store in over 170 countries and has nearly 4 million users in just two years. From MEIZU and Frog Design to fitness hardware company FITURE, and now to StressWatch, Patrick shares his observations and lessons on methods developers can use to spot opportunities, and how the "App Factory" of this era differs from the mobile internet era's playbook — and what new players have emerged.

Patrick told us that he and "100 Bad Ideas" welcome collaboration with other teams, and encourages everyone to reach out to him for more information. Patrick's Jike: okjk.co[1]

We would like to extend special thanks to our previous episode's guest Maozhu for kindly providing the recording space. We also continue to warmly welcome AI entrepreneur friends to pay attention to the AI Hacker House initiated by "Crossing" located at Shanghai Caohejing Park, offline events in late April in Shanghai, and the "Next-Gen AI Entrepreneurs" community. Specific details were introduced at the beginning of the podcast, and for more information please follow the "Crossing" WeChat official account.

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Apple Watch Squeals During Blind Date: How StressWatch Swept the Globe

🚥 Ronghui

Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of Crossing. Today we are honored to have Patrick Junfeng Fang as our guest.

Patrick is an experienced designer who has worked at companies including MEIZU and Frog Design. Currently, his new identity is as the app developer for StressWatch. As we understand it, this app has already achieved impressive results, which Patrick will introduce to us in detail shortly.

Today, we'll start with Patrick's background, exploring his insights from nearly two years of project development and his methods and takeaways for finding opportunities. Now, let's have Patrick introduce himself.

👦🏻 Patrick

Hello everyone, it's a great honor to be on Crossing. I'm Patrick. As Ronghui introduced regarding my personal information, let me briefly expand on that myself.

My professional background is in design. My career began at MEIZU, followed by stints at Frog Design and FITURE. For the past two years, I've mainly been focused on building "100 Bad Ideas" product studio, currently responsible for developing the StressWatch app. Based on the Apple Watch platform, it integrates stress monitoring, health management, and watch face customization features. It's worth mentioning that StressWatch launched exactly two years ago in April, so this podcast happens to coincide with the product's two-year "retrospective milestone."

Since launch, StressWatch has accumulated nearly 4 million global users, and received recommendations from the Apple Store in approximately 170 countries and regions worldwide. There have been quite a few exhilarating moments along the way. For example, between February and March last year, the app once topped Xiaohongshu's trending search list. I was working at the time when I suddenly received a screenshot from a friend showing my app sitting at number one on the trending searches.

🚥 Koji

What caused it to hit the top of trending searches at that time?

👦🏻 Patrick

It was right after the New Year, and a user shared a post titled "My Apple Watch Started Screaming During a Blind Date."

This user shared how she felt extremely stressed during a blind date, and our app happened to alert her on her Apple Watch that she was in a high-stress state. The comments section immediately exploded with discussion — many people asking "what app is this," others attaching their own stress monitoring screenshots from blind dates saying "I'm stressed too," sparking widespread conversation.

Another memorable experience was in Taiwan. We noticed that downloads there suddenly spiked one day. Later we discovered this came from heated discussion on Threads. After a user posted about their experience, it drew in numerous participants including professional doctors and well-known influencers. During that period, StressWatch reached second place on Taiwan's overall app download rankings, with ChatGPT in third — I specifically took a screenshot to commemorate it (laughs).

🚥 Koji

Wow, beating out ChatGPT.

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes, that gave me a great sense of accomplishment. Currently, we're actively expanding overseas, with strong performance in countries including Japan, South Korea, and Germany.

The Origin of the "100 Bad Ideas" Studio Name

🚥 Koji

Your studio is called "100 Bad Ideas" — what's the story behind that name? It sounds like something with an interesting backstory.

👦🏻 Patrick

The inspiration comes from magic. Beyond being a designer, I'm also a magic enthusiast.

🚥 Koji

I heard you were president of your university's magic club?

👦🏻 Patrick

That's right. Though I have fewer opportunities to perform magic now, I still follow related information, watch various magic performances, and study its history.

The name "100 Bad Ideas" has its roots in magic. Initially, when my partner Alex and I were brainstorming startup directions, we came up with many ideas and recorded them in a document. During this process, I listened to a podcast interview with a magician — Blake Vogt, one of the most creative magicians in the world today.

🚥 Koji

I only know Lu Chen (laughs).

👦🏻 Patrick

Blake Vogt is relatively well-known in the United States. He competed on America's Got Talent and placed among the top finishers. During college, he also interviewed for a magic consultant position with David Copperfield's team.

During the interview, Copperfield's team asked him: "Before we decide to hire you, can you guarantee at least one good idea?" Blake Vogt's response was quite illuminating: "I can't guarantee a good idea, but I can guarantee a constant stream of bad ideas."

I found his answer fascinating after hearing it.

I believe the core of magic creativity — and all creative work — lies in not rushing to dismiss new concepts, but rather seeking out the innovative, valuable elements within them.

Even when faced with a bad idea, you can build upon it to generate more ideas, and in the process of creation, good ideas will inevitably emerge. Allowing yourself to make mistakes is crucial.

So, I wrote at the top of my document: "Let's start with 100 bad ideas." When thinking about a name for the studio, a friend saw this line and suggested: "Why not just call it 100 Bad Ideas, since your document starts with writing 100 bad ideas?" And so the name was born.

🚥 Koji

That really is a great name. Similar to the core principle of brainstorming — don't reject any idea others propose, because that's the only way to spark more good ideas.

🚥 Ronghui

And I think the name has a very "American" feel to it. Americans often use this kind of naming in marketing to deflate seriousness and add playfulness and meaning.

👦🏻 Patrick

The friend who made this suggestion was indeed American (laughs).

From Designer to Entrepreneur: A Path of Professional Growth

🚥 Ronghui

Could you share about your previous work experiences at MEIZU, Frog Design, and FITURE? From today's perspective, how have these experiences helped and inspired what you're doing now?

👦🏻 Patrick

My professional history actually goes back even further. During university, I worked at a small advertising agency that specialized in providing advertising services for the fishing industry — quite a niche field.

🚥 Ronghui

By fishing you mean fishing in the literal sense?

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes, literal fishing — the kind where you catch fish in water.

🚥 Koji

That really is an extremely vertical, niche advertising company. Why choose fishing as a direction?

👦🏻 Patrick

The fishing industry is small but structurally fragmented, composed of numerous small companies.

These companies need professionals who understand fishing to help create their ads. At the time, I wasn't proficient in fishing, but my boss was an expert, so I joined as the first employee. There are many such small fishing companies with advertising needs that can't afford large agencies, creating room for small advertising firms to survive.

After graduation, my career has had a distinctive characteristic: I've never worked at what you'd call a traditional internet company. The three main companies I've worked at — MEIZU and FITURE are hardware-software integrated companies, while Frog Design is a design consultancy. Looking back at my 2016 experience at MEIZU and 2018 at Frog, it feels like I may have missed the last train of internet development. Many colleagues at the time were joining rapidly growing internet companies like ByteDance and Pinduoduo.

🚥 Ronghui

What was your specific role at MEIZU?

👦🏻 Patrick

At MEIZU, I mainly focused on visual design, responsible for the operating system's visual and interactive experience.

🚥 Ronghui

MEIZU is a company that places great importance on design, right?

👦🏻 Patrick

Indeed, all phone manufacturers place considerable emphasis on user experience and design. Among domestic phone brands, MEIZU is one of the most user-experience-focused companies.

🚥 Ronghui

At Frog Design, did your work content depend on who your clients were?

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes, at consultancies like Frog, each client corresponds to a different project.

At MEIZU I mainly focused on interface design, but I wanted to broaden my horizons and engage more with pre-design work such as user research and the 0-to-1 product building process, so I chose to join Frog Design.

I was fortunate at the time — I really wanted to join, and a colleague happened to be leaving, creating a vacancy that allowed me to get in. At Frog, I participated more in the 0-to-1 innovation process, providing product innovation services for large clients or startups. We conducted extensive user research to identify product opportunities and functional innovation points — this process gave me tremendous experience with building things from 0 to 1.

🚥 Ronghui

From my understanding, does Frog Design have some fairly classic methodologies for user research?

👦🏻 Patrick

Overall, the methodology follows Design Thinking, which is widely applied across numerous design firms including IDEO.

Simply put, it involves synthesizing insights from research, divergent thinking based on those insights, then creating prototypes and testing them, ultimately using prototype validation or iteration to arrive at a viable MVP product.

🚥 Ronghui

Sounds like a pretty classic ToC product development process.

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes. Frog's client base is mainly large enterprises — companies that may lack sufficient team bandwidth or capabilities internally, or that outsource particularly risky projects to us. We've served large companies like Tencent, and also worked with more startup-oriented companies at Series B and C stages.

🚥 Ronghui

What do you mean by risky projects?

👦🏻 Patrick

These are primarily product innovation projects. For large enterprises, product innovation is typically a high-risk activity. They tend to engage external design consultancies (agencies) for two reasons: to supplement creative capacity, and so that if the project fails, the blame can be shifted to the agency (laughs).

🚥 Koji

What's the most out-there project you've ever worked on?

👦🏻 Patrick

I worked on a car-washing robot project — very interesting. The user parks their car in a designated spot, and then a robot moves around the vehicle to wash it.

🚥 Koji

Was it a humanoid / embodied robot?

👦🏻 Patrick

Not an embodied robot. It was roughly refrigerator-sized, equipped with multiple brushes, and could circle around the car to perform the washing.

🚥 Ronghui

Did this project actually get deployed?

👦🏻 Patrick

We did build a prototype at the time, and the client company used it to raise funding. But I'm not sure what happened with actual deployment afterward.

🚥 Koji

Many agency practitioners often lament that they can't realize their own design ideals — they can only serve client demands.

During your time at Frog Design as an agency, did you ever create work that satisfied the client while also making you proud?

👦🏻 Patrick

The nature of agency work is that project initiation and requirements ultimately come from the client. In this process, the agency applies professional expertise to achieve the client's goals.

While some projects turned out quite satisfying — like the car-washing robot I mentioned, where the entire experience design process was enjoyable — the person setting the problem was always the client, never myself. This working pattern gradually wore on me. I wanted to try setting my own problems.

So when I left Frog, I had only one criterion: join a startup. I explored several opportunities and ultimately chose FITURE, mainly because they were developing exercise-related hardware, and I was personally interested in fitness topics. I believed there would be more innovation opportunities at a startup.

FITURE is a health and fitness hardware company. A few years back, their product form factor was a smart mirror — a mirror with a built-in screen. In its off state, it's an ordinary mirror; when powered on, it becomes a hybrid mirror-screen device. The device has a camera and AI capabilities that can recognize the user's exercise performance.

For example, it can help count reps and correct form. If a user isn't lifting their legs high enough during high-knees, or bends their waist during strength training, the system alerts them. It's a product combining hardware, software, and AI.

🚥 Ronghui

I've seen some fitness influencers use it — it provides workout classes for users to follow along. Its comparable product would be the one acquired by Lululemon.

👦🏻 Patrick

Exactly. There was a product in the US called Mirror, also a mirror-plus-screen form factor, but without camera recognition capabilities. It was later acquired by Lululemon.

🚥 Ronghui

Were you stationed abroad while at FITURE?

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes. After working domestically at FITURE for a period, the US team had business needs, so I spent a year in New York. This experience had a major impact on me — it was my first time living abroad long-term. During that period, I gained understanding of North American lifestyle habits, and participated in some North American user interviews to understand Americans' state in the health and fitness domain.

Although I later left FITURE, these experiences also guided us toward founding what is now 100 Bad Ideas. Even though we develop various products, our core focus remains on the broad health, wellness, and fitness domains.

Differences and Opportunities in East-West Health Markets

🚥 Ronghui

You mentioned doing many user interviews during your time in New York. Can you share a few particularly memorable North American user needs?

👦🏻 Patrick

In the health and fitness direction, some findings genuinely surprised me.

First, the user demographic differs from China. The overall age of health and fitness consumers in the US is about 10-20 years older than in China. Domestic users (including our current StressWatch users) are mainly concentrated in the 20-35 range, whereas in the US the age span is much broader — I frequently receive feedback from elderly users about StressWatch.

Including with FITURE's product previously — we imagined our target user might be 30-40, but actual purchasers skewed much more toward 40-50.

I think this relates to stages of national development. The current 60-70 age group in the US was born during an era of economic prosperity (the Baby Boom), with substantial health and fitness needs and strong economic capacity, willing to spend in this area. China's demographic structure is different — those willing to spend on health and fitness tech products remain a relatively younger cohort.

Second, fitness demand in the US is already highly segmented, with users willing to pay for very niche fitness needs. For example, there's a US wristband called WHOOP — an impressive case. In China, fitness bands have been driven down to the tens-of-RMB price range, yet WHOOP targets fanatical exercise enthusiasts who want to precisely quantify their body data.

The WHOOP band resembles a screenless watch; this form factor accommodates a larger battery, enabling high-frequency measurement while maintaining battery life. A WHOOP band sells for roughly $200-300, with an additional ~$20 monthly subscription fee. In China, the model of spending $200-300 on hardware plus $20 monthly subscription is hard to imagine.

But in the US, for fanatical exercise enthusiasts, $20-30 monthly is nothing — especially in the exercise domain, where people are generally willing to invest. The recently much-discussed Oura ring operates similarly, plus its ~$6 monthly subscription. This hardware-plus-software-subscription model is quite common in the US.

There's also a bedside lamp called Hatch that sells very well in the US,主打 natural light illumination that wakes users according to solar rhythms in the morning. This type of software-hardware-integrated subscription model is relatively普及 in the US, but much rarer in China.

🚥 Ronghui

That reminds me — Americans generally place extremely high importance on health data.

For example, during any hospital examination, medical staff will invariably ask about daily exercise habits and frequency. If you have fitness habits and corresponding data, you can show this data to them as well.

This is also why the Health data in Apple phones connects seamlessly with Apple Watch — much of this data can even be shown to hospitals.

👦🏻 Patrick

Indeed, this stems partly from the high costs of the US healthcare system, and partly reflects cultural differences.

🚥 Ronghui

How did these observations inform your later development of StressWatch or your choice of the health domain?

👦🏻 Patrick

Initially we weren't clear on the specific direction. About 2-3 years ago, right when ChatGPT was taking off, we proposed many ideas and also considered possibilities in AI.

Before developing StressWatch, we actually built an AI Bible website where Christian believers could ask Bible-related questions, satisfying their needs for reading and studying scripture. Despite trying different concepts and demos, we ultimately decided to focus on the Apple Watch stress monitoring product form.

Within this product form, we identified several key opportunity points.

First, the pandemic was nearing its end, and demand for blood oxygen monitoring had driven Apple Watch sales growth globally. Second, as I mentioned with WHOOP and Oura, HRV (heart rate variability) monitoring had become a major selling point in the US market. This concept was already quite popular in the US, with many products making it a core feature. While relatively few people in China knew about this concept, HRV itself is very interesting — it largely reflects the body's recovery state and psychological stress state. And the topic of stress is particularly important in East Asian culture.

We believed this was a concept already widely accepted in the US, whose underlying philosophy of stress and bodily recovery also resonated strongly with East Asian culture — yet no one had addressed it in the East Asian market. So we felt this might be a critical PMF point.

Third, we analyzed existing stress monitoring software on the market. First, such software was extremely scarce in the Apple ecosystem — the few that existed were generally bland and "tech-bro" in design. Including Garmin, Coros, and various other smartwatches, many have stress monitoring features, but typically just display a numerical value like "today's stress index: 85" without further interpretation.

We believed the theme of stress should be expressed through emotional design. We could make it emotionally resonant, even skewing toward female users. Considering the increasing installed base of wearables, the blank space in the domestic East Asian market, and the significant value emotional design could add to user experience — with these three opportunity points converging, we ultimately decided to build this product.

🚥 Koji

Can you give examples of how your emotional design manifests specifically?

👦🏻 Patrick

After using our app, you'll notice that the most prominent element on the homepage isn't a numerical value, but a dynamic illustration — what we call the "Stress Bubble" character illustration. This is a small figure that changes based on the user's state.

For example, when you're relatively relaxed (higher heart rate variability, lower resting heart rate), indicating your body is in a relaxed state, the Stress Bubble character turns green, leisurely lounging on a swim ring, wearing sunglasses and sunbathing. When you're under more stress, it becomes a red little bubble, hiding under a tree while the surrounding environment shows a stormy scene.

The environment around the Bubble changes "weather" according to stress state — the ideal state is sunbathing under clear skies, the worst is a rainstorm, with cloudy and light rain states in between. Through this illustration, users can intuitively understand their daily state and feel empathy.

The watch app works similarly — upon opening, it displays a dynamic expression rather than telling the user a pure number like "stress index 95 or 85." We believe pure numerical values have limited meaning; what's more important is conveying a state and matching it with appropriate visual presentation. Additionally, considering users' desire for Apple Watch face personalization, we later added multiple watch face options, letting users decorate their watches according to preference.

Startup Explorations: The Ideas That Never Came to Be

🚥 Koji

Understood. StressWatch is already a fairly successful product — many of my friends use it, and its data, rankings, and revenue performance are all quite strong.

I think listeners tuning into our podcast today, besides wanting to hear StressWatch's story, would also like to hear about those 100 bad ideas of yours — which ones you thought were promising but didn't have time to pursue. This might offer some inspiration or direction for entrepreneurs currently searching for their path.

👦🏻 Patrick

Some of these ideas I jotted down but never implemented, and later someone else actually did them (laughs).

🚥 Koji

Why don't you walk us through the other 99 bad ideas one by one (laughs).

👦🏻 Patrick

For example, among the ideas that someone else already realized, there's a watch app called SunAlly for tracking sun exposure.

This product originated from a new feature Apple announced at WWDC two years ago — the Apple Watch could track how much time users spent outdoors in sunlight. At the time, I thought this feature could be nicely combined with concepts around sun health, skincare, and tanning. I recorded a similar idea but never acted on it.

We also considered developing a diving feature for Apple Watch, since Apple Watch Ultra already supports diving. We researched diving content extensively, and I even went to Mexico to learn diving skills.

But ultimately we didn't pursue this, because we couldn't obtain authorization for Apple's diving APIs. These APIs aren't publicly available to developers; they require special channel applications, with strict verification of diving-related qualifications — such as extensive industry experience, or access to facilities with professional testing equipment. Of course, if anyone can get API authorization, feel free to try developing it, or collaborate with us (laughs).

That's one thing we wanted to do but didn't.

🚥 Koji

These ideas all sound quite interesting.

👦🏻 Patrick

Right, we also conceived some AI-related products, like the AI Bible project I mentioned earlier.

We actually developed it, but didn't maintain it long-term. The reason was that it was just a passion project at the time, and we're not Christians ourselves, so we lacked some product insight. Later we discovered a team had built something similar — I think from Romania or some small European country — their Bible Chat app is operating quite well.

🚥 Ronghui

Were you already in the entrepreneurial stage at that point?

👦🏻 Patrick

That was a transitional period, a gap after leaving my previous company.

🚥 Ronghui

So this was before you created StressWatch?

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes, before developing StressWatch, we'd spend weekends thinking about projects we could work on. But formal entrepreneurship started after leaving the job.

At the time, my co-founder and I were aligned — we wanted to try new things, work on projects we were interested in, and could accept having no income for two years. So we decided to set aside some time for experimentation.

🚥 Koji

I want to ask here — did you genuinely believe you could accept having no income for two years?

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes, that was our own judgment.

Personally, I'm not someone with strong material desires. I assessed my bank account at the time and thought, in the worst case, I could move back to my hometown, where I wouldn't need to pay for housing, and could do things with minimal consumption.

🚥 Koji

This decision was actually very challenging. And from the very beginning, you were already prepared to persist even with two years of no income.

👦🏻 Patrick

Right, this is indeed a luxurious choice.

🚥 Koji

It's actually a luxury for young people today.

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes, my personal situation was special. I had no mortgage, no loans, was unmarried, no children — so I could sustain a very simple lifestyle, plus I didn't have much material desire anyway.

🚥 Ronghui

You previously worked long-term in a service provider role, and you mentioned you had to join a startup. Later when you joined FITURE, you shifted to a client-side identity. Did this career path transformation come from a particularly strong desire to build your own product with your own hands?

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes, I've always believed that throughout one's career, you should constantly expand your boundaries. At MEIZU, I was mainly responsible for experience design, and I started thinking about the pre-design research process and how needs originate. At FITURE, I further broadened my perspective, focusing on new markets and new domains, searching for innovation opportunities.

Ultimately, I was no longer satisfied with being the problem-solver — I wanted to be the person asking the questions, and validating whether those questions had value. That's the experiment I wanted to conduct.

I previously listened to a podcast interview with blogger Shi Lifen, a creator I greatly admire. He makes travel vlogs, but with unique content — specifically visiting unusual, bizarre places. For example, grand yet completely empty buildings.

In the podcast, he shared his creative strategy: give himself a six-month deadline, accept having no income during that period, but simultaneously create a list of 20 episodes. He committed to completing these within six months, and if his venture still hadn't succeeded, he'd return to the workforce.

I found this approach viable, so I also set a two-year timeline for myself. Looking back now, the two-year arrangement worked out okay.

🚥 Koji

The timing of our podcast recording happens to coincide with when your two-year deadline arrives.

👦🏻 Patrick

Right, the product has been on the market for about two years now.

🚥 Koji

Congratulations on successfully reaching the life stage you envisioned.

🚥 Ronghui

What ups and downs did you experience during this process?

For example, when you tried many paths early on without smooth progress, how was your mindset? Of course you mentioned you had planned things out clearly, set a two-year deadline that hadn't yet arrived, so your mentality was probably relatively relaxed — but what was the actual state during the experimentation process?

👦🏻 Patrick

At the very beginning, there was actually a lot of anticipation, but also some confusion.

I wrote down 100 bad ideas, but wasn't sure which ones to implement, and didn't have a clear sense of what I absolutely had to do. It was right when ChatGPT was starting to explode, and we were thinking about how to leverage AI technology. We came up with many AI-related ideas, but after careful consideration and market research, concluded this might not suit us.

My personal view is that AI is a foundational capability that will become as ubiquitous as water and electricity, inevitably transforming every industry. But at the time, I saw three possibilities:

First, there's a clear Matthew effect in AI — ultimately maybe only one or two companies will dominate model development. Unless you have abundant capital and top-tier talent, it's hard to compete with OpenAI; this direction wasn't suitable for us.

Second, if AI is infrastructure, then the key is user data — but as a startup, acquiring user data presents a contradiction, because as a startup you likely don't have user data.

Third, return to domains you're familiar with and skilled in, looking for possible integration points — this creates many product opportunities.

But here's the paradox: if you return to a familiar domain, you don't necessarily need to use AI. If a domain is both familiar and opportune, whether to integrate AI actually doesn't matter that much.

So ultimately we developed the StressWatch product. After launch, it performed well — from the private beta and the Xiaohongshu posts we released before the beta, to beta sign-ups, to user activity in the beta group — everything indicated this was a product with potential. Users were discussing our product in the group every single day.

They say there are various ways to test whether a product has achieved product-market fit (PMF), including quantitative and qualitative methods. One qualitative method is to put users in a group, release an MVP test version, provide no guidance whatsoever, then observe whether people are still discussing the product after a week or two. If nobody's talking, it's truly dead (laughs).

But at the time, users were discussing our product in the group every day — this gave us hope. Soon we saw user growth, plus Apple's feature — this was hugely encouraging for us.

However, one mistake we made was underestimating the product's potential, mainly due to mental limitations. We thought this product was limited to Apple Watch users, and the Apple Watch user base wasn't that large, so we estimated the product wouldn't have particularly massive growth overall. We initially thought 100,000 to 200,000 downloads would be pretty good.

Because of this low estimate, after product launch, besides basic bug fixes, we didn't invest much energy into product feature development or operations. Of course, operations didn't completely stop — we still collaborated with Xiaohongshu KOLs on a fixed weekly basis — but overall we didn't commit fully. At the time, we scattered our energy across many other opportunities, including some job offers or other projects, like diving and various other things.

🚥 Koji

Looking back, do you think if you had gone all-in and focused on this one thing, you could have achieved even better results than now?

👦🏻 Patrick

If I could go back, I'd do two things:

First, focus all R&D and design efforts to refine and deepen the product;

Second, raise some funding — not necessarily VC funding, perhaps from friends or other channels — and rapidly invest in growth.

🚥 Koji

Why specifically emphasize not VC money?

👦🏻 Patrick

I think VCs tend to prefer projects with higher uncertainty and higher returns.

Our product ultimately is still more of a utility-type cash flow product — it won't have that high a return rate, and may not be suitable for VCs. There are many other funding sources in the market — someone previously mentioned the 3Fs...

🚥 Koji

Friends, Family and Fools — friends, family, and "fools."

👦🏻 Patrick

Right, plus publisher funds — many publishing companies will invest to help with product distribution, or you could grit your teeth and front the money yourself.

But more importantly, we should have been more focused on this product at the time. Because we weren't focused enough, we left about half a year open. During that period, some competitors saw our product and either developed similar products directly, or added the same functionality to their existing products. In that half year, the products they developed or the stress monitoring features they added even achieved better growth than ours.

🚥 Ronghui

Half a year is indeed quite a long time.

👦🏻 Patrick

It's quite a long time. However, I think we were also somewhat fortunate — while there was competition, it wasn't that intense yet. If I could do it over, I definitely wouldn't waste that half year.

🚥 Koji

Was the lack of focus in your early projects due to risk diversification?

👦🏻 Patrick

Yes, and also exploring new possibilities.

But I think the main reason was that I hadn't yet realized: when a product has clear product-market fit (PMF), no matter how small that PMF seems, it's worth going all in.

🚥 Koji

How small was the PMF at the time? For example, what level of ROI could you achieve from paid acquisition?

👦🏻 Patrick

When the product first launched, discussions were scattered rather than spreading widely.

Without any operations, daily revenue might be just a few dozen dollars. Combined with the platform limitations of Apple Watch, we believed the product had limited growth potential — maybe just enough to cover living expenses. I clearly underestimated the ceiling for wearable device products. There simply weren't similar success cases in the market at that time.

🚥 Koji

On the Apple Watch platform currently, what's the scale of the most commercially successful, largest applications?

👦🏻 Patrick

You can look at Welltory as a reference. They started years ago and now have nearly 10 million users. While I'm not sure of their exact revenue, the global Apple Watch user base certainly numbers in the hundreds of millions.

Theoretically, an Apple Watch app has the potential to reach at least tens of millions of users. That's nothing for a major company, but for a small team, tens of millions of users is already quite substantial.

🚥 Ronghui

Your perspective offers very relevant lessons for independent developers today.

If someone in a similar position to yours back then faces this seemingly contradictory choice between "keep experimenting" and "focus intensely," what advice would you give?

👦🏻 Patrick

First, pay attention to whether your target users have strong demand, and whether you can feel that demand quickly after launch — through discussion volume or conversion rates.

No matter how small the demand, if it's strong demand, it's worth investing time and energy.

This echoes the argument in The Innovator's Dilemma: the best starting point for startups is in demand areas that major companies look down on — areas where big companies can't meet their growth requirements, but where genuine strong demand exists.

If you can find such an area, it's very worth going deep. Even an Apple Watch app can grow to several million users, which is already quite good for a small team.

🚥 Ronghui

What emotional or rational signals would tell you to make that judgment and focus your efforts?

👦🏻 Patrick

Emotional signals include user discussion volume, product growth speed, and in our early days we collaborated with many bloggers who were very willing to promote us because they found the product novel and well-made — willing to do so for free or through simple resource exchanges, like us providing some codes and they'd help promote us. This is extremely advantageous for early teams lacking funds.

From a rational angle, analyze traditional internet metrics: does next-day retention reach 30-40%, does seven-day retention reach around 15%, do retention numbers meet baseline standards, and quantifiable data like customer acquisition difficulty.

Methodology for Finding Product Opportunities

🚥 Ronghui

Patrick previously shared with us his approach to finding product opportunities. Could you expand on that for our listeners?

👦🏻 Patrick

Through practice with multiple products, we currently have two successful products: StressWatch and PeakWatch. I've summarized several lines of thinking:

First, for small teams, rather than searching for PMF (product-market fit), it's better to think in reverse and search for MPF (market-product fit). PMF is an idealized expression that assumes you have a product first and then search for a market, looking for people who might buy into that product. It suits products like Notion.

🚥 Koji

You think Notion is too complex because you haven't become its user yet.

Once you use it, it's like Schrödinger's cat — you'll find it both simple and natural, that humans should use such a tool to write documents (laughs).

👦🏻 Patrick

Another possibility is that my documentation needs aren't strong enough — my work focuses mainly on design. Notion is indeed an innovative product that requires a certain learning curve. Products with such forward-looking concepts typically need venture capital and longer validation cycles.

The reverse approach is to first observe what's already in the market. For example, copying a product from one country to another — this was very common in China's early internet era. Another is discovering information gaps. Take our StressWatch product: we saw the information gap between China and the US around the HRV concept, combined with a lack of quality products in the market at the time (most were only around 60 out of 100), and through design and overall optimization we elevated the product to 80-90 points, entering a blank market with demand, so things went smoothly.

Many developers reference category leaderboards when building products. We made a similar mistake — seeing highly-ranked but not very complex products and thinking we could build a better version. But there's a problem here: directly copying or only being 5-10 points better than competitors is possible. But users won't migrate their existing habits for such marginal improvement — migration cost must be lower than the value users gain.

To give an extreme example, even if your product is 10 points better than a competitor, if that competitor already has a large user base, when you publish promotional content, their users will insist that what they're using is better. This makes the product very difficult to promote. I suggest referencing competitors for inspiration, but don't directly copy.

If you're going to look at product rankings, I suggest focusing on products ranked around 200-500 in a subcategory, because this indicates some user demand without particularly strong competition.

If you find poor-quality products that still have users, you may have discovered an opportunity. Products at the top are there for a reason — it's very hard for you to do better.

🚥 Koji

That's an interesting angle: focus on products ranked 200-500, not great quality but already in the top 500.

In the process of finding 100 bad ideas, are there other angles and approaches for finding ideas?

👦🏻 Patrick

I just mentioned the leaderboard perspective. Beyond that, the second point is don't be afraid of small demand.

I once saw a very valuable framework with a horizontal and vertical axis. The horizontal axis represents population size, the vertical axis represents demand intensity. Using the classic 80/20 principle, you get four quadrants: 80% of people's 80% demand, 20% of people's 80% demand, 20% of people's 20% demand, and 80% of people's 20% demand.

80% of people's 80% demand (strong demand from most people) is basically already occupied by major companies — ride-hailing, food delivery, communication, etc., already have Meituan, WeChat, and other services.

80% of people's 20% demand (weak demand from most people) suits being a sub-business of large companies — if a department has a main business, they can use that traffic to feed these side businesses and reduce customer acquisition costs.

🚥 Koji

Give an example.

👦🏻 Patrick

Take Mobike — it satisfied a universal but not intense demand. Users were willing to pay but with limited payment amounts, making it ultimately suitable as a sub-business under Meituan.

For small teams, the best fit is focusing on "20% of people's 80% demand" — niche user groups with intense demand. These users are few but their demand is clear. For example,狂热运动爱好者对健康监测的需求非常强烈. As someone who exercises regularly, I go to the gym 2-4 times a week and even prioritize hotels with fitness facilities when traveling — that's a typical strong-demand scenario.

Another interesting case is food recognition apps specifically developed for diabetics. Ordinary people may have limited interest in photographing food to identify its components, but for diabetics, understanding specific nutritional content is health-critical — a rigid demand. Such products target a niche audience with small user base but intense, stable demand, enough to sustain a small company's operation.

The final quadrant is "20% of people's 20% demand" — typically unsuitable as a company's main product, even unsuitable to operate as a company. However, as AI improves programming efficiency and reduces development costs, this portion of demand may gradually be met in the future, but for entrepreneurs, the priority should be lower.

Another point I've learned: regarding AI, I think it suits people who already have a certain product, or who can relatively easily access a specific community. Because with AI, people often start from a technical angle — first having a big trend judgment, then converging to product ideas, and finally landing on specific users. But reverse thinking may be more effective: first understand the characteristics and needs of a specific user group, then develop products targeted at them — this lowers customer acquisition costs and makes products more aligned with actual demand.

For example, after developing StressWatch, we launched PeakWatch specifically for Apple Watch fitness enthusiasts. Because we already had the StressWatch user base, the new product had no cold start problem — we could directly test it through our existing user community.

The book The Minimalist Entrepreneur also mentions a similar approach: first find a nearby community (like neighbors or a club), observe their needs, develop a product or service for this community, then gradually scale up.

One final addition: paying attention to new technology trends is actually very important, especially for iOS developers — WWDC every year is essential. StressWatch getting global Apple Store feature was precisely because I repeatedly studied the WWDC keynote (watched it several times) and developed corresponding features based on Apple's new mood logging-related API.

This API allows developers to more conveniently write mood logging data into Health Kit without building their own servers. We immediately developed mood logging functionality in StressWatch, which happened to align with Apple's promotion direction, thus receiving a global feature. Including the sun exposure feature I mentioned earlier — similar situation. Looking further back, when Apple opened up home screen widgets, it also gave rise to a wave of theming companies.

🚥 Koji

Keeping pace with Apple.

👦🏻 Patrick

Of course, keeping pace with AI is equally important (laughs). Though AI seems to have some reverse effects — I saw a meme the other day describing how OpenAI comes charging in, threatening all startups that are only two years old.

Learning from Mistakes: Startup Experience and Lessons

🚥 Koji

You mentioned a lot of approaches just now. Which ones came from lessons learned the hard way?

👦🏻 Patrick

Almost everything we've figured out came from going down a lot of wrong paths.

First, when you find product-market fit, don't hesitate — go all in. Second, small teams shouldn't be afraid of small needs. At large internet companies, projects usually need to target massive markets to get approved. But for a small team, serving tens of thousands of paying users is enough to sustain operations.

Product experience isn't the deciding factor. The key is finding a niche where your team's strengths shine, rather than adding incremental improvements to already mature products. Also, growth strategy is just as important as the product itself. My cofounder and I came from hardware-software integration and consulting backgrounds, so we lacked experience with pure software growth and had to keep learning. Getting from 0 to 1 is step one, but going from 1 to 100 might require a hundred or a thousand times more effort and resources.

🚥 Koji

You believe growth opportunities matter as much as product opportunities. What growth opportunities have you spotted and seized in the past that yielded strong positive feedback?

👦🏻 Patrick

StressWatch is a great example. When we saw the product performing well domestically and noticed a gap in East Asian markets, we quickly decided to go overseas. At first we didn't have much experience with international expansion, so we basically just launched paid user acquisition for the product.

Every product has its window. Beyond the users themselves, the same applies to growth. Early on, our customer acquisition costs in multiple countries were extremely low because there was no competing product. Now those same markets cost two to three times more.

On the overseas opportunity: while China and the US are huge markets, it's fine to start by capturing smaller markets like Japan, South Korea, or European countries — these regions have strong spending power.

🚥 Ronghui

Any wrong turns on the growth side?

👦🏻 Patrick

Several.

First, we didn't go all-in on growth from the start. Second, we didn't understand how to grow overseas products and under-invested in resources.

It wasn't until more than a year after launch — around June last year — that we seriously ramped up ad spend across many countries. In hindsight, that was a bit late. Now our strategy is: once a product validates PMF and has no serious bugs, we move quickly on international expansion.

🚥 Ronghui

What are your plans or intentions for StressWatch now?

Since you mentioned building a new product too — are you planning to pour all your energy into StressWatch and that new product you just mentioned? Or will you develop other products as well?

👦🏻 Patrick

We currently have three products in operation: StressWatch, PeakWatch, and "练就" (Jianjiu, a fitness app). We'll be investing considerable time in all three this year.

For 2024, our team is split into two groups handling StressWatch and PeakWatch respectively. We have about ten people total, full-time and part-time combined.

Future development will shift depending on the stage of each product and the company. For example, health utility products reach a point where adding too many features becomes inappropriate — especially overseas, where users prefer one product that does one thing well. We may reserve capacity to develop new products, or explore collaboration with other teams, acquiring small products or teams, and other possibilities.

🚥 Ronghui

Would you want to be acquired?

👦🏻 Patrick

Not considering it for now. But I think what matters most is people.

I believe the success of a product and organization mainly depends on what kind of people are on the team.

All my energy is already going into existing products. To build something new, I'd need to find new people.

We're open to various forms of collaboration, including product partnerships, company partnerships, or acquisition structures. Friends who are interested can reach me through the show.

The Success Model and Lessons of Global App Factories

🚥 Koji

From what you said, it sounds like once people build their first success story, they want to make a second, then a third, keep expanding, and gradually grow into an app factory.

In fact, both domestically and globally, quite a few such app factories already exist. Among them, are there any you particularly admire?

Because when you say "factory," most people immediately think of assembly lines, soullessness, simple copy-paste — negative associations. But are there app factories you genuinely respect, even aspire to become?

👦🏻 Patrick

There really are a lot of app factories. We're still a small workshop, but the goal is to gradually evolve into a factory model. Exactly how that operates is still being explored.

The mature app factories I've seen are quite numerous. For example, AIBY — they started early, operate their products well, and have strong monetization capabilities. Beyond that, there are companies in Vietnam, Turkey, and other regions. StressWatch was actually copied by one of them. Some of these companies are doing really well. People hear "factory" and assume the products will be shoddy, but if you download them, you'll find each one is quite polished.

Let me give a domestic example. There's a Beijing company called Enerjoy. There isn't much public information about them because this type of company typically doesn't raise funding and keeps a relatively low profile. Enerjoy has launched multiple products, and when you actually use them, you'll find the overall design, animation quality, and monetization strategies guiding users to pay are all exceptionally well done.

For instance, they have an app called MePlus. At its core, it's a to-do list app. They keenly spotted a market gap: traditional to-do list apps are designed for efficiency-focused office workers, yet many homemakers also need to manage tasks, with few products tailored specifically for them.

Beyond pure productivity needs, people have emotional and self-growth needs too. If you look at this product's App Store screenshots, you'll see it shows a homemaker mopping the floor.

🚥 Ronghui

Homemakers are busier than office workers.

👦🏻 Patrick

Hahaha, exactly. It's basically a to-do list built around homemakers, and it has a substantial number of downloads.

🚥 Koji

What's different about this to-do list compared to ordinary ones?

👦🏻 Patrick

First, the design is very cute and playful. Second, it cleverly integrates multiple functions.

Beyond the basic to-do list, it offers many ready-made template lists — things like "Personal Growth Checklist" or "Five Habits to Transform Your Morning." These are perfect for users with self-growth goals or who want to improve their routines, letting them get started easily. I think it does paid conversion particularly well. Try it yourself and you'll see. After browsing through its copy, you'll likely feel a strong impulse — "No, I have to subscribe to this."

🚥 Ronghui

Speaking of which, I recall a domestic company that was quite famous in the mobile internet era. They developed a calendar app and also launched a countdown app. I remember that countdown app was very popular at the time, beautifully designed too.

🚥 Koji

Days Matter.

👦🏻 Patrick

Going back to early app factories — back then the App Store had just launched, and user demand was surging.

These teams developed many quality apps, got featured by Apple, and users were downloading heavily. That wave's characteristic was relying mainly on organic traffic. But over time, organic traffic gradually declined because the total number of apps in the market kept growing, which gave rise to the second generation of app factories.

The rise of the second generation is actually closely tied to the globalization of overseas expansion infrastructure. As platforms like Facebook and TikTok acquired users globally, they themselves became massive advertising platforms. Many companies, especially early movers, could reach global users on Facebook and TikTok at relatively low acquisition costs. That was a hugely advantageous infrastructure benefit.

This category includes Enerjoy, and also Ruqi domestically — they developed plant identification apps like "形色识花" (Xingse), which sparked considerable discussion recently. It's precisely because of ad platforms like Facebook that these companies could relatively easily reach global users, especially those with high willingness to pay and strong monetization potential.

🚥 Koji

You mentioned the difference between the first and second generations just now. Why didn't the first generation evolve into the second? It sounds like just a growth capability gap, not a product capability problem.

👦🏻 Patrick

Growth capability really is hard to cultivate. I've observed similar cases. For example, that MePlus I mentioned earlier — it wasn't actually the first product of its kind. Before it, there was another one (I forget the name) that was also self-growth themed, beautifully illustrated to-do list app. That product also got quite a bit of Apple featuring early on, and they relied mainly on organic traffic. But they failed to adapt in time to the shift toward paid acquisition as the primary growth strategy. The result was that over time, this company's user base gradually shrank and their influence faded.

🚥 Koji

Our Crossing public account is currently writing an article, scheduled to come out around the same time as this podcast episode.

The article is titled "Ten Things You Absolutely Must Know About Ruqi," because this company has maintained quite a high level of mystery. But a while back, when their revenue data was leaked, that single piece of income information caused a sensation across various platforms.

To that end, we conducted extensive research, gathering interesting material from Boss Zhipin, LinkedIn, and even Maimai. Through these indirect sources, we can glimpse how this company achieved its current level of success and eye-catching revenue — and there are indeed quite a few distinctive elements behind it. We welcome everyone to follow our public account for more details when the article comes out.

🚥 Koji

We just discussed domestic companies; now let's talk about international ones.

👦🏻 Patrick

Internationally, there's a French company called Lumi that I particularly admire. As a designer, I naturally have a soft spot for well-designed products. Lumi's website is beautifully crafted, and the design quality of every app in their portfolio is quite high. They focus primarily on health and fitness-related product development.

There's also a Ukrainian company called Genesis, which owns numerous products. Their app BetterMe ranks highly on health and fitness charts in many countries.

Another one worth mentioning is Voodoo — actually a gaming company. I find their operational model quite fascinating and worth sharing.

Voodoo is a French hyper-casual gaming company. They don't just develop their own games; they also offer publishing services. We once had conversations with them and discovered they possess formidable growth capabilities. Beyond publishing their own titles, they can provide publishing services for other developers — their strength is substantial.

Their internal innovation mechanism is also quite unique. According to one report about them, their internal product division is split into two teams: one focused on prototyping, the other responsible for operating formal products. The prototype team consists of the most creative talent, those most interested in gameplay innovation. They continuously experiment with novel gameplay mechanics, then hand them over to the growth team for initial distribution and growth experiments. Once a particular mechanic demonstrates strong test metrics, it's immediately transferred to the business unit, which then develops it further, designs monetization points, and commercializes it.

I find their separation of the prototyping division from the product business unit quite interesting — perhaps this is a management approach that suits their gaming business well.

🚥 Ronghui

Sounds like an incubator.

👦🏻 Patrick

Indeed. There's also a Chinese company called Abishkking that's performed exceptionally well in the fitness app space, employing a "self-cloning" strategy — abs and chest workouts for women, abs and chest workouts for men, and so on. During the pandemic, they accounted for half of the top ten most downloaded health and fitness apps globally.

🚥 Koji

This approach sounds incredibly imaginative — a wild, unorthodox playbook.

👦🏻 Patrick

It really is wild. Although many such enterprises are called "app factories," you'll find they employ quite different strategies and models.

Some companies excel through superior product quality and keen market insight; others specialize in self-replication, building comprehensive product matrices. Then there are those like Abishkking, whose core competitive advantage lies in powerful monetization capability — they achieve remarkably high conversion rates from acquired users. If your product is facing challenges with conversion rate improvement, I'd recommend studying Abishkking's products.

🚥 Koji

Patrick has given us a tremendous amount of information today. If everyone here went off to research and dig deeper into all this content, it would probably take several days.

Combining these insights with the various methodologies we discussed earlier for finding creative ideas, I believe listeners of this podcast episode will certainly gain abundant收获 and inspiration.

🚥 Ronghui

One last question: looking back over the past two years, compared to entrepreneurs who started developing around the same time, do you consider yourself lucky?

👦🏻 Patrick

I consider myself extremely fortunate. Looking back two years ago, there were numerous projects that launched almost simultaneously, yet most have since ceased operations.

To not only successfully develop a product and achieve user growth, but also maintain a team of nearly ten people and reach self-sufficiency — there really aren't many cases like ours. We're currently in a relatively stable state. While we face competitive pressure from similar products, it's not an existential, life-or-death urgency. So I'm quite certain I'm very lucky.

Over these past two years, I've personally experienced significant growth and progress. The primary change is, as I mentioned at the very beginning, I've learned to pose my own questions, seek my own answers, and form independent value judgments about these questions. Second, since my previous role was primarily product design-oriented, I lacked sufficient experience in how to comprehensively operate a business. Now, from recruiting talent and project initiation, to researching product growth strategies and marketing budget planning — I need to participate in every aspect, forming a complete business chain.

To put it in the most direct, even somewhat brutal terms: it's about how much money we invest each month, and how much revenue we generate.

As a bootstrapped team without external funding, we've maintained a cautious approach to spending. Whether hiring talent or conducting market distribution, we ensure ROI meets expectations before proceeding to the next step.

Particularly last June, when we began aggressively pursuing growth in overseas markets, daily spending on ad accounts rapidly climbed to a substantial figure — the change was visibly apparent. For about a month during that period, I barely slept well. The first thing every morning upon waking was checking whether those invested funds were producing the expected conversion results.

🚥 Koji

Was it because things were very unstable?

👦🏻 Patrick

Mainly it was lack of experience and anxiety about invested capital. Initially we had no relevant distribution experience, so we enlisted an experienced friend to assist.

But the funds being invested were accumulated through our own efforts — there was uncertainty about whether this investment would generate returns. A few days of ad spending might equal several months of personal earnings. Faced with this situation, lacking experience, it's natural to feel nervous. However, after operating for a month, we found we weren't losing money; the invested capital would return within two months. This gave us confidence to continue pushing forward.

In reality, while these app factories may look good on paper, most capital flows into ad platforms — it's essentially a cash flow business. Unlike many internet products that gradually reduce customer acquisition costs through network effects, the products we're developing now lean more toward tools. As scale expands, customer acquisition costs may actually rise, because on ad platforms, the more volume you purchase, the higher the CPI (cost per install) tends to be.

🚥 Koji

As homogenized competition increases, pricing within the industry often gets bid up.

But considering that user subscription models are based on recurring payment characteristics, does this business strategy offer considerable flexibility? If a company decides one day to stop aggressively competing for customer acquisition and instead adopts a more conservative approach, would the established user base, due to usage habits and consumption inertia, maintain relatively high payment loyalty and longer lifetime value, thereby creating a stable harvest period for the business?

👦🏻 Patrick

There will inevitably be some churn in the user base — many people will choose to cancel subscriptions. This actually depends on the product's nature and different renewal rate performance. Certain products may more easily attract impulse-based subscriptions, so their renewal rates may not remain at ideal levels.

From a growth strategy perspective, companies typically continue customer acquisition activities, but the key is determining when the tipping point arrives — the moment when the cost of newly acquired users, compared against the value of churned users, makes the overall books unbalanced. At this point, it may be necessary to constrain acquisition budgets to a smaller scale, allowing the product to maintain its actually sustainable user base. This naturally formed user ceiling may represent the product's true market ceiling.

🚥 Ronghui

Do you think now is a good time to start a business?

👦🏻 Patrick

First, the maturation of global expansion infrastructure has created unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurs. Looking at many companies, particularly app factory-type businesses, we find developers from relatively less developed regions like Vietnam and Turkey able to establish factory models within just a few years — teams of dozens simultaneously operating dozens of products. This is thanks to the rich global infrastructure now available, making global product development extremely convenient. While we may be relatively familiar with Western markets, perhaps having experienced them firsthand or possessing language abilities to communicate with local users, for regions like Africa that we may never set foot in throughout our lives, modern infrastructure similarly enables us to effectively reach these markets.

Second, AI-related capabilities have significantly improved globalization efficiency. In the past, multilingual support and translation capabilities were relatively weak; now, with AI technology, rapid product globalization is achievable. Whether it's multilingual adaptation of the product itself, or processing feedback and communications from global users, AI can substantially enhance product operations and growth efficiency.

Third, with AI augmentation, entrepreneurs can attempt diversified product experiments at faster speeds, dramatically improving trial-and-error efficiency.

This point is particularly important — creative ideas themselves are not scarce; everyone has numerous seemingly wonderful ideas that may prove unworkable in actual execution.

An organization's core competitive advantage lies in how efficiently it can experiment with and validate these ideas. AI enhances our trial-and-error capability through improved efficiency, and increased trial-and-error frequency correspondingly raises the probability of discovering products that truly achieve product-market fit.

🚥 Koji

Before, you might have been a "100 Bad Ideas Studio"; now with AI, you've directly upgraded to a "1,000 Bad Ideas" or even "1 Million Bad Ideas" studio, because trial-and-error costs have dropped so dramatically.

👦🏻 Patrick

Exactly.

🚥 Koji

Thank you, Patrick, for sharing these wonderful stories, methodologies, and interesting, useful information beyond our knowledge boundaries. This conversation has been tremendously rewarding. You're welcome back at Crossing anytime.

🚥 Ronghui

Thank you, Patrick.

👦🏻 Patrick

Thank you — I look forward to coming back again.

Subscribe to the "Crossing" Podcast

🚦 We focus on the industry transformations and new entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the new generation of AI technology waves. "Crossing" is Steve Jobs' metaphor for Apple — describing it as standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, where great products are born. AI is transforming industries across the board; we seek out, interview, and bring together "active actors" of the AI era. Together with them, we explore and embrace new changes, new possibilities.

👦🏻 Host Koji: Co-founder of The Fair and Tangdao. I believe technology, especially AI, will fundamentally transform society and empower humanity in the future. Everyone is welcome to chat with me, bounce ideas, and connect on the next possibility. Koji on Jike[2], Koji's website[3]

👧🏻 Host Ronghui: Works at a tech VC, former Silicon Valley correspondent for CBNweekly. Ronghui on Jike[4]

References

[1] okjk.co: http://okjk.co/

[2] Koji on Jike: https://okjk.co/0JSUes

[3] Koji's website: https://koji.super.site/

[4] Ronghui on Jike: https://okjk.co/0cbnYV