In the second half of last year, Yiren posted several trending topics on Shengcai Youshu (a Chinese business community), one of which was about “vertical niche accounts.” I got excited, thinking I could make money like the pros. Five months later, I finally understand how hard content creation really is.

1. Overview

Last April 18th I joined Shengcai Youshu, and that same month I co-subscribed to Lenny’s Newsletter with a friend. I originally signed up for the AI tool recommendations (like Cursor), but I soon realized the subscription articles and videos were exceptionally high-quality. I tried to study them, but my English wasn’t good enough to keep up.

In the second half of the year, vertical niche accounts became a hot trend. So I started using AI to translate and interpret Lenny’s Newsletter articles, publishing them to a WeChat public account — partly to help myself learn, and partly to try my hand at content creation.

But gaining followers was genuinely hard. I published my first article on September 25, 2025, and it took until January 19th of this year to reach 100 followers.

Then last month, two articles seemed to hit the algorithm’s recommendation pool, and I started gaining followers every day. As of today, I’ve just crossed 200 followers.

2. The Details

Content Sources

Primarily Lenny’s Newsletter content. Over time I also added material from a16z, Y Combinator, Every, Silicon Valley 101 and other well-known podcasts, plus some overseas individual YouTube creators. Most of it is AI-related, driven by personal interest.

I also draw from articles and videos recommended by Baoyu (a well-known tech translator in the Chinese community).

Workflow

At first, everything was manual: transcribe the video or audio, feed the transcript to Gemini Web to generate the article, create prompts for cover images and illustrations, generate images through Nanobanana, convert the markdown to WeChat’s format, and manually insert images. The whole process took over 30 minutes each time — I still don’t know how I kept it up.

I tried automating with N8N in between, but it didn’t work well and could only handle part of the process.

It wasn’t until Baoyu open-sourced his baoyu-skills, combined with Claude Code’s power mode, that I was able to cut the entire workflow down to just 10 minutes.

For details, see: Claude Skills Automated WeChat Publishing

Ad Revenue

I activated ad revenue (流量主) on January 20th, but since the follower count is still small, I’m only making a few cents per day — not even ¥1.

The Account

The account is called: Lenny的增长笔记 (Lenny’s Growth Notes)

Description: Curated translations and in-depth interpretations of top Silicon Valley product newsletters. Daily insights on product management, user growth, and career advancement.

If you’re interested in AI, product, and growth content, feel free to follow along.

3. Takeaways

Today, Caoz (a well-known Chinese tech blogger) published an article titled “Sharing Is Learning — In the AI Era,” arguing that the act of sharing helps the author continuously update their own understanding.

I registered this WeChat account over two years ago and had been using it for random personal notes. I never expected it would actually start gaining followers recently. This positive feedback has motivated me to share even more. My small goal: share at least twice a week, and sync everything to my blog at xiaofeng.show.