A New Perspective Opens Up the World

I used to look down on making ‘traffic-driven products,’ but lately I’ve started to change my mind a little.
From a business perspective, they stand up very well and make complete sense.

For example, everyone online now seems to be teaching you how to use AI to build a personal brand, or ‘IP.’ Every evening I come across several livestreams like this.
What they sell is also pretty much the same: AI workflows built with Coze that help you generate all kinds of content faster, covering all sorts of content formats across platforms—video, images, and text.

On Xianyu (闲鱼, an online marketplace) and Pinduoduo (拼多多, an online shopping platform), you can also buy packages of hundreds or thousands of AI workflows for a few dozen or a few hundred yuan. (Anyone with even a slight urge to collect things will find it hard to resist .)
It’s foreseeable that, for a while, the internet will be flooded with homogeneous junk content.
As for whether ‘junk personal brands’ will emerge, that’s up to fate. People have certainly done all they can . (Pu, just kidding~)

Only the people I know who have actually incubated personal brands, who understand the underlying logic and value of IP, and the content creators who have shot and edited over a thousand videos themselves really know just how little regard they have for these AI toys.

Sometimes I wonder why everyone wants to squeeze into this field and compete so fiercely.
Then it started to make a little sense: oh~ maybe it’s because everyone’s field of vision is surrounded by independent online media. All they can see are content platforms, so the ‘world’ they see is only this big.
This is the scenario where AI can currently do the most and deliver results. There’s nothing else.

But is that really the case? Is there nothing else, or can we not find it? Or do we not have the patience to look?

Still, we can’t deny that these ‘traffic-driven products’ do have a market. They sell like crazy in livestreams every day.
Even if they can only sell for three months or half a year, their business logic still holds.

What I actually need to reflect on is this: just because I personally admire ‘craftsmanship-driven products,’ I shouldn’t look down on making ‘traffic-driven products.’
That isn’t a mature enough view of business.

And I need to understand that most products serve a particular phase. Very, very few ‘eternal’ products exist in the first place; that’s too idealistic.
In reality, making a ‘traffic-driven product’ successful also requires developing many abilities.
Products can’t last forever, but your abilities can.

The abilities you build up will help you make the next, and then the next, better product. Maybe one day you’ll find yourself on the path to becoming a master of product craftsmanship.
Of course, the difference is that you treat making ‘traffic-driven products’ as practice and a way to build your abilities, rather than focusing solely on using them for speculation and extracting money from people—cashing in once and running.
There’s still a huge difference between the two.

So, looking at it from another perspective suddenly opens things up a lot.

There’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask a more experienced woman in business:
Every time you enter a completely new field, how do you balance the inertia of path dependence—replicating successful experiences—with the need for innovative thinking?
Sometimes, in an era of disruptive technology and change, path dependence won’t help you discover new lands.

But I haven’t had a chance to ask yet.
I’ve also been thinking about this lately. Let me try putting it into practice first, and I’ll ask her for advice next time I see her. It’s worth writing a separate piece about.