Whether a side hustle gets off the ground is much like whether trading stocks makes a profit—you can’t say it was all for nothing just because you suffered heavy losses in stocks. If you trade stocks or run a side hustle with a sharp mind, you will also gain deep insights and perspectives on the industry and economy. (This is also why losing money in stocks or selling low and buying high is called “paying tuition.”)

The Ultimate Goal of a Side Hustle

I believe the ultimate goal for everyone starting a side hustle is—financial freedom.

Bodo Schäfer, in his The Road to Financial Freedom book series, defines financial freedom as: “Only when you have enough money to live off the interest alone are you truly wealthy and independent.” He also points out the way to achieve it: “You want to own a money-making machine, rather than spend your whole life being a money-making machine.”

He also notes that “the target wealth figure is merely a yardstick to measure whether you have truly reached your goal; it is much more about character. What matters is who you become in the process. Life is short, and one shouldn’t waste it away in mediocrity.”

Regarding the “freedom” in financial freedom, before starting a side hustle, one needs to reflect: outside of your main job, do you still want to trade your labor for income?

In summary, I believe the path to The Road to Financial Freedom lies in becoming an expert in developing or using automated tools. Development allows you to actively explore unfamiliar domains and create value. Naturally, manufacturing shovels for others is the best path. On the other hand, using tools carries a lower cost, where the key lies in selecting the right tools and domains.

In work and business, the ones who make the most money are never those doing the actual manual labor, but those who aggregate resources to fulfill demand.

The Side Hustle Impossible Trinity and Principles

The Impossible Trinity: Low barrier to entry, high ceiling, and sustainability. You can only pick two out of the three.

Principle: Rapid closed-loop execution and quick positive feedback. As the saying goes, people change because of pain, and keep taking action because of gain.

A good side hustle yields earnings in the following four areas:

  • Earning money — Income from the side hustle.
  • Earning insight — A deeper understanding of business and human nature. This helps in making better decisions and lays the foundation for earning more in the future.
  • Earning skills — Enhancing your own skill set, such as AI, writing, community management, etc.
  • Earning systems — Building a system through projects and establishing your own methodologies for getting things done.

A side hustle is not just a way to make money; it should also be viewed as the infrastructure for your personal IP, a bridge converting traffic between public and private domains, enabling long-term commitment.

On Article Writing

Although using AI for writing is an entry point for a side hustle, you must first be able to write clearly yourself. If a person’s artistic sense is terrible to begin with, how can they create works that others appreciate?

An article in Da Hui’s Progress Hacker WeChat official account discussed AI writing and explained how to write a hit WeChat Official Account article. In fact, this can be applied through transfer learning to all scenarios, such as daily communication, document collaboration, work summaries, and presentations. Below are some excerpts from the article. Special thanks to the original author, Da Hui—his Knowledge Planet is currently free for a limited time; he is a very generous guy.

The recommendation algorithm for WeChat Official Accounts mainly depends on two factors: the attractiveness of the title and the article’s completion rate. Simply put, make the title appealing, and make the content good enough for people to read to the end. Furthermore, if you want to get into the recommendation pool, you should spend 80% of your time polishing the title.

Viral Titles

A title with viral potential satisfies three principles:

  • Wide coverage reach — Targeting popular, mass-market platforms everyone knows about.
  • High level of pain point — Pain points are essentially fear; the degree of fear, e.g., “It’s impossible to get started now.” The title expresses negative realities, while the article provides solutions.
  • Triggering social motivation — After entering and finishing the article, readers find it provides fresh perspectives and solid actionable insights, prompting them to like and share.

The three steps to creating viral titles are: Copy - Swap - Create.

  • Copy — Prioritize finding viral titles that fit your topic and use them directly.
  • Swap — Maintain the grammatical structure and replace the nouns in the viral title.
  • Create — Create titles yourself or with the help of AI tools.

When it comes to titles, if you can find one that works, avoid reinventing the wheel from scratch. This isn’t taking shortcuts—it’s replicating success. Just like climbing a mountain, you should try to follow well-trodden paths; relying purely on trial and error makes it easy to fall into a ditch.

If you can find a viral title that fits your content, use it directly. If it cannot be used directly, keep the structure, make fine adjustments, and replace nouns without changing the verbs. If all else fails, brainstorm yourself or use GPT to generate combinations.

It all comes down to doing your homework beforehand. Modifying titles plays a huge role in boosting traffic flow.

When creating content for self-media, treat collecting viral titles as a regular assignment. A good title can increase exposure ten- or even a hundred-fold.

I have also written some ATA articles on Alibaba’s intranet. Among them, the one with high likes and bookmarks was titled “Poor Bros Training a Conversational LLM — Based on Chinese-LLaMA-Alpaca-2”. The phrase “poor bros” in the title copied an idea from another fellow contributor, referring to training LLMs on a shoestring budget. Although many colleagues had experience using LLMs, they all wanted a step-by-step tutorial to get started with training LLMs, and this article hit that exact pain point.

Completion Rate

Two key strategies:

  • Control article length — Articles that are too long can discourage readers. It is recommended that viral articles be around 800 to 1,000 words long. This length not only satisfies originality requirements but is also concise enough to maintain reader attention. (Analogous to context token limits and amnesia issues in LLMs.)
  • Use stories to engage readers — People love listening to stories. By expressing the principles and information you want to convey through a story, readers are more likely to read through the entire piece. (The same applies to public speaking; The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs also emphasizes the importance of stories and vision.) If you are not good at storytelling, you can use GPT—which excels at crafting stories—to assist in brainstorming attractive plots and frameworks, making the article livelier and more engaging.

Writing Techniques for Product Promotion

Techniques for Introducing Products in Articles

Six methods:

  • Write about users and user stories — Empathy stemming from shared identity and experience is the greatest source of trust, and trust is the foundation of monetization. People aren’t inspired by a product, but by a person.
  • Write about selling points — Present selling points through storytelling.
  • Write about reasons — Because you benefited from it yourself, you want to promote it to more people. “A just cause enjoys abundant support, while an unjust cause finds little support.” When you occupy the moral high ground or “Way” (Dao), your product sells effortlessly. People who want to reach the same state as you will be willing to do this together with you, buy the product, and join your circle.
  • Write about scenarios — Build scenarios. Low-end sales pitch selling points; high-end sales pitch emotion and values. High-ticket items or designs with history put immense thought into this.
  • Write about pain points — Hit user pain points directly (no end in sight, not wanting to live like this, refusing to be gaslighted/manipulated, etc.), deeply binding your product and circle with the user’s mindset, pain points, future, and solutions.
  • Write about user testimonials — Paid knowledge is like a deity in a temple: incense burns brighter not because the deity demands things from people, but because it has much to give and can fulfill people’s wishes, spreading its fame through word of mouth. Note that while showcasing success, you should also praise your users. Don’t fill your WeChat Moments exclusively with transaction logs, order screenshots, and chat histories; instead, become the person others aspire to be—that is true personal IP.

Turn All Consumption into Means of Production

Write every single minute you spend into an article or a WeChat Moments post. Live life with the mindset of a dedicated problem solver (“test-taker”); the most critical aspect of running self-media is having means of production.

Whenever you buy access to a community or spend money in a shop, summarize why you were persuaded to buy every time you convert. You can write it down to showcase to others, influence their mindset, and subsequently convert them into buying your own product. Time and energy are extremely precious, so maximize their value.

Sources of writing topics:

  • Write long, detailed responses to user questions on WeChat Moments. This makes them feel genuinely valued, while others with similar questions will also gain insights from the post and may return to buy your products in the future.
  • Most people have similar questions—there aren’t endless variations. Put yourself in their shoes, explain things clearly, and help them make better choices. They will be grateful and perceive you as down-to-earth and dependable, making them likely to buy your product later. Sometimes conversions are driven by the product; other times, by the person.

Don’t focus purely on product selling points; instead, deliver solid, actionable content, offering solutions that solve problems for others or provide universal value.

After writing, review your work from a third-party perspective: when someone reads your content, do they see a screen full of advertisements, or do they actually walk away with value?

Free Knowledge Planet

Personal IP + Hook

Hook: What benefits you offer the reader + private domain entryway + self-introduction

Reasons to use a free Knowledge Planet:

  • High open rate for free Planets — In a free Planet with 10k members, each post receives over 1k reads, with an average open rate of over 10%. In contrast, WeChat Official Accounts have an open rate of around 2%.
  • Simpler creation and operation than Official Accounts — Write a few sentences or tens of words, and post unlimited times daily. Perfect for fragmented reading and writing.
  • Content can be generated as images — Convenient for sharing to WeChat Moments and WeChat groups.
  • Unlimited capacity — A single WeChat account has a limit of 10,000 contacts.
  • Flexible permission settings — Can be configured so that only the owner, partners, and invited guests can post, creating your own home turf, which works exceptionally well for building trust and converting sales.

You can also use AI to expand Planet posts or combine multiple Planet posts into a single, content-rich Official Account article.

Therefore, in terms of open rates, operational difficulty, and distribution efficiency, a free Knowledge Planet is ideally suited as a content production base and private domain headquarters.

Running a Knowledge Planet Successfully

Consider three aspects:

  • Content — Short content; frequently post inspiring short notes. 5 to 20 posts per day.
  • Operations — Run lucky draws, daily check-ins, homework assignments, etc. This boosts open rates and retention. Prizes can be books, column access, or WeChat red packets to gradually deepen connection.
  • User Acquisition — Bringing new users into the Planet via WeChat is very convenient.

AI-Powered Knowledge Planet

  • Use AI for naming and designing icons
  • AI-assisted topic selection — When short on inspiration or unsure what to write, generate topic ideas and content through conversational AI.
  • Use AI for data analysis

Building Sustainable Infrastructure

If writing knowledge is only used to earn ad revenue, you will only make short-term money. But if you start from your core personal IP and treat the Official Account as infrastructure—a bridge converting traffic between public and private domains—then it becomes a sustainable business.

In the process of writing, accumulating materials, building a user base, formulating SOPs, and constructing a self-media toolkit means you have earned money, insights, skills, and systems alike.

Breaking Out with a Personal IP

Leverage trending topics and brand reputations; get close to the sunlight, and you will shine yourself. When selling branded products, you naturally become an expert in the eyes of users.

Personal IP isn’t just empty talk—it must be driven by tangible results and achievements. Gain exposure in the public domain and build retention in the private domain; in essence, personal IP is trust and light.

Without seeing, there is no believing.

Without exposure, there is no trust.

Show up often so your target audience can see the scenarios, the results, the process, the raw materials, and everything they want to see.

Case Study: AI-Assisted Writing

The most lucrative monetization model is old demand + new tools: helping others write is an old demand, and AI is the new tool.

In the age-old industry of writing assistance, leveraging AI tech to boost efficiency allows you to scale up. Traditional writing assistance is just making a living for hard-earned pennies, but adding AI enables scalable growth.

With AI, laypeople who master basic prompting techniques and clearly understand user needs can produce high-quality original content.

Top earners aren’t necessarily vastly superior in capability or cognition. Rather, they entered the market early, gained an early information asymmetry, and through persistent effort, built their own competitive advantage.

Three classic entry approaches:

  • Becoming a writer — Classic employee mindset, selling your own skills and time.
  • Taking orders and writing yourself — Self-employed mindset running the full process solo; easy to lose track of priorities.
  • Studio / Resource aggregator — Running storefronts and creating content on the front end, while hiring writers for delivery on the back end.

Track and Architecture

Whether a business is profitable and how much it makes depends firstly on the track (niche), and secondly on the architecture. The difference lies in the architecture: architecture requires that every current product and investment be frictionless and contribute to future growth.

Design the top-level architecture and underlying logic well right from the start, and you will immediately appreciate the magic:

  • The business becomes a self-growing flywheel
  • The founder doesn’t need to fight fires everywhere
  • Maintaining daily operations requires very few people
  • Self-organizing collaboration with agile execution

Every project has a lifecycle. If approached with a plan, every project serves as a stepping stone on your path of growth. Without a plan, once the project dividend period ends, starting another project means building from scratch again.

Running a business means architecting a profit machine. Once the machine is built, only three tasks remain:

  • Laying out traffic channels
  • Streamlining sales conversion workflows
  • Maintaining daily operations

It is like building a machine: continuously polish and tune it, and it will become a money printer. Take Da Hui’s free Knowledge Planet, for instance—spending just a dozen minutes a day posting content generates income.

The core secret to earning money is innovating in customer acquisition and acquiring customers with novel strategies. Do not treat e-commerce as the primary acquisition channel, but only as a supplementary one.

Choice of Clients and Platforms

When running a project, if you can go after high-ticket clients, definitely avoid low-ticket ones. High-ticket clients are mostly high-net-worth business clients, making them extremely valuable when retained in your private domain.

Writing assistance is a non-standardized virtual service; the communication costs and AI generation effort for a 100 RMB order vs. a 1,000 RMB order are virtually the same.

In the early stage, you can practice with a few low-ticket orders. Once the process runs smoothly, you must transition to high-ticket orders. In writing assistance, an order of 1,000 RMB qualifies as high-ticket.

Characteristics of high-ticket deals: one is having the ability to pay, and the other is needing to uncover user requirements.

Across e-commerce platforms, the exact same service commands a higher price on Taobao than on Pinduoduo, Xianyu (Idle Fish) higher than Taobao, and Xiaohongshu (RED) higher than Xianyu. It’s similar to how a bottle of water is priced differently in a hotel, a KTV, or a supermarket. Non-standard services like writing assistance align more closely with platform positioning, which is fundamentally tied to users’ psychological expectations. For example, users go to Pinduoduo looking for cheap deals to complete a task without spending much money.

The way forward for low-ticket services: template-based and automated services to boost acquisition capacity. For instance, hosting scripts are highly reproducible with reusable intros and outros; after building a few templates, you can simply swap out names and make minor tweaks.

Pitfall Avoidance

The core key is clarifying client requirements; otherwise, you’ll end up with rework. Clients fall into two categories: those with explicit requirements and those with vague requirements.

  • Explicit requirements — Write the article directly based on the article type combined with AI prompts.
  • Vague requirements — Communicate repeatedly with the user to ensure your understanding is spot-on.

Once requirements are clear, draft an outline. Always re-confirm the outline with the client.

Finally, generate the article. To prevent free-loading, add watermarks or provide only a portion of the content, delivering the full document only after payment is confirmed.

To avoid pitfalls: Find reliable people, don’t test human nature, and design a system to prevent issues (reliable people plus a solid reward and penalty system). Encountering free-loaders or ghosting is normal—even blood brothers often fall out when co-founding businesses. Treat it as operational loss: unavoidable, but reducible.

How to Acquire Customers

User behavior path: Attention → Interest → Search → Purchase → Usage → Habit

Many items end with the purchase—they are never used, nor do they form a habit.

Writing assistance is essentially virtual service e-commerce. Based on user behavior paths, there are three customer acquisition methods:

  • Traditional shelf e-commerce — Taobao, JD.com, Xianyu, where people search for goods via search bars or category browsing.
  • Social e-commerce — Pinduoduo, with group buying and bargain price slashes (“Kan Yi Dao”).
  • Interest e-commerce — Douyin, WeChat Channels, Xiaohongshu.

However, humans are lazy. Outside of heavy-decision purchases, active searching will become less frequent, which is why Taobao faces an uphill battle. Still, traditional shelf e-commerce is worth doing early on to get quick feedback while accumulating private-domain users.

Once you have a base of private-domain users, you can acquire customers directly on WeChat Moments. If you haven’t established an image as a master writer before, share content from a consumer’s perspective. For example: “I needed to write something, but couldn’t get it done after days of trying. Later I met a friend who is amazing at writing, and they finished it for me in no time. If any of you need writing done, feel free to reach out, and I can introduce you to this friend.”

To maintain sustainable income, follow this route: Deeply cultivate a specialized domain, acquire customers through content, and offer sales within your private domain—that is how you make money and build your own moat.

Comprehensive Skill Development

Write on WeChat Official Accounts using viral article strategies to attract traffic and leads.

The rewards fall into three categories:

  • Earning money
  • Accumulating private-domain users
  • Building your own small team

In the AI era, AI can handle most tasks. However, emotional resonance and interpersonal skills cannot be solved by AI in the near future, making them increasingly important and valuable.

Three Stages

  • Earning 3k RMB/month — Spend 3–4 hours writing daily. If you can sit still and enjoy writing, consider this model.

  • Earning over 10k RMB/month — Write while partnering with other writers to take on more orders. Orders you can’t write can be outsourced to others while still generating income for yourself.

  • Earning over 50k RMB/month — Professional studio approach. Establish robust writing workflows, define clear divisions of labor, and secure stable partner writers, distribution channels, and sales conversions.

Ending Story

There was a study-abroad and immigration agency whose business was processing top-talent visas for a certain region. The company had only two employees. For handling the entire process, they charged around 10,000 RMB total, yet made tens of millions in revenue.

The highlight lay in their pricing mechanism: if successful, they kept 10,000 RMB; if unsuccessful, they charged only 3,000 RMB as a handling fee.

The trick was that they could practically do nothing—just collecting documents for show without genuine effort. One person ran ads, and the other received clients. If a client’s documents were complete and succeeded on the first try, it passed right through; if incomplete, they didn’t bother following up. (Personally, I feel this severely damages one’s character, and reputation remains essential. However, if running a WeChat Mini Program with no review mechanism, reputation can be ignored.)

This model has many variations in business. For example, post-graduate entrance exam prep classes: 10,000 RMB for the gold class and 3,000 RMB for the standard class, with the gold class offering a money-back guarantee if you don’t pass.

Take my own experience as an example: after my Hong Kong Quality Migrant Admission Scheme application was rejected, I purchased recommendation and self-recommendation letter writing services. There was definitely a full SOP process involved, along with clear traces of AI usage. Most importantly, whether a visa application succeeds is a long-term black box with massive inherent uncertainty. Therefore, I believe this story is very real.