Student Question:
Hello Master Chi. I’ve been reading your shares in the community about building side hustles. Quite a few members there have been busy with neighborhood group buying and personal IP ventures for the past six months — those doing home renovation work have already landed over a dozen new projects, and the lawyers have picked up seven or eight new clients.
I’ve been envious of their progress. I only recently took action myself, following your advice. I started a neighborhood group buying side hustle while raising my child at home, making full use of my spare time. My net monthly income is now around 3,000 yuan.
I’d like to ask you, Master — how can I better develop my personal IP?
Master Chi’s Response:
When doing anything, the most important thing is to grasp the critical leverage points.
For personal IP, the single most important core is positioning.
Why do you need positioning?
- Time is limited — let users quickly understand the value you can offer.
- Sustained focus compounds — it captures and holds users’ attention.
- Clients share common attributes — making monetization far easier.
Why do some people start a side hustle brilliantly, then stumble after a small early success? They start wanting to change, to pivot, to do more — and end up losing every client they’d built.
The main culprit: everyone wants to go big and cover everything all at once.
Take one of my students. She started a side hustle around real estate — helping people find and buy homes. Her core clients were middle-class buyers, the kind looking for a mix of owner-occupying and investment. Her edge was real: her day job put her in constant contact with exactly these people, she had solid personal relationships with many of them, and she’d personally bought and sold several properties herself and made good money doing it.
Then, after some early success, she wondered: could she also start recommending cosmetics or health supplements to the same clients?
The result? Her original real estate work never properly solidified. Her energy scattered across new products. The new products never took off. Client satisfaction dropped. She spent far more time — and her income didn’t increase.
So the sequence must be: find one point first.
Don’t attack on all fronts. On your chosen point, push your competitiveness as far as it will go. Put real distance between you and your competitors — leave them far behind. Build an absolute advantage in that one area. Then, and only then, expand into adjacent business.
Positioning comes down to three things:
First — Who is your target audience?
Second — What value are you providing? What specific problem are you solving?
Third — What makes you different?
- Internal differentiation: What are your unique advantages?
- External differentiation: Format, personality, entertainment value, and so on.
The elements that express your positioning are: your name, bio, image, content, and context.
On WeChat Video Account:
The audience: High-educated users that short-video platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou haven’t managed to reach — and skewing older than Douyin’s base.
Rethinking private domain: Video Account must be built in conjunction with private domain. It is the central hub connecting all your WeChat private domain touchpoints.
The snowball model: Private domain → leverage public domain → funnel back to private domain → activate private domain.
What it is NOT: It is not WeChat Official Account. It is not simply posting videos.