Student Question:
Hello, Master Chi. Last Saturday at five in the morning, I was jolted awake by an urgent phone call. My business partner was calling to say he was pulling out his investment. On top of that, one of our core marketing people was also resigning. Up until recently, my entrepreneurial journey had been mostly smooth sailing — I genuinely made money. Then in 2023, I got overconfident and decided to jump into live-stream selling myself. It was an absolute disaster.
I first entered Douyin (TikTok) around 2018. In those two years, it didn’t matter what you were doing — as long as your team wasn’t completely incompetent and you had the nerve to charge money, you could rake it in.
Then came 2020: entertainment live-streaming was declining while live-stream e-commerce was on the rise. Whatever you sold, there was a 90% chance you’d profit.
By 2021, merchants were flooding into live-stream selling, and making money from related training was almost embarrassingly easy.
In 2022, trainers and live-stream merchants were appearing everywhere. Pivoting into scenario optimization still had strong demand — contracts worth tens of thousands, even over a hundred thousand yuan, were easy to close.
I caught every one of those waves before 2022. Then in 2023, I got cocky, jumped into selling product myself, and lost everything.
Some say entrepreneurship is a matter of Chinese metaphysics (xuanxue). Others say it’s a game of probabilities.
Master Chi, my question is: How do you navigate across industry cycles and find your true positioning?
Master Chi’s Response:
Different seasons call for different winning cards.
Take Douyin between 2018 and 2020: as long as you found a viral traffic hook and had a team that wasn’t completely hopeless, you could generate solid returns. User awareness back then was generally low — that was your edge.
Now, at this stage, even if you have viral content and a strong team, the most likely outcome is that you’re busy but barely profitable. Because today’s users are far more sophisticated.
When traffic is cheap and a platform is still developing — before user judgment matures — even an ordinary team can post decent results.
At that stage, a business owner’s most critical move is to plug into resource circles quickly and build relationships fast. There is no shortage of ways to make money. What you need to fear is a major opportunity arriving when you’re not positioned to grab it.
But when traffic dries up, users become sharp and discerning, and your team isn’t exceptional — in that environment, of course you’re losing money. That’s exactly why most business owners end up in the red at that node.
Entrepreneurship is a game of probabilities.
You need to think simultaneously across three nodes: platform cycle, industry cycle, and personal fortune (yun shi).
- Platform cycle determines your cost of entry.
- Industry cycle determines the scale of expected returns.
- Personal fortune determines how smoothly things actually unfold.
How do you read the platform cycle?
Look at two things: traffic volume and user maturity.
How do you gauge traffic volume? Count how many people are teaching courses on the platform.
How do you gauge user maturity? Post an educational short video and watch how many people save it.
How do you read the industry cycle?
Use data platforms to analyze three to five years of trends. Research and investigation must account for at least 60% of your total workload.
The second key move: skill transfer.
Similar platform cycles demand similar capabilities. People who have worked inside major platforms tend to find entrepreneurship easier — not just because of the resources they carry, but because people from large platforms have seen the complete shape of a business cycle.