January 16, 2026, another early morning.
Yesterday was packed. First, we pitched our strategy and products to institutions and received some recognition. The good news is that our own long/short strategy gained a certain level of approval from the institutions, and we are quite confident in managing these funds. Next, we'll push these projects forward.
Then we had an internal discussion about the path to making money.
If we want to earn 20 million a year, what are the possible routes?
Asset Management Business in Mature Markets
Follow the successful path of predecessors. Engage in domestic asset management, develop a strategy for domestic products—whether stocks or commodity futures. Then raise 500 million, achieve a 20% annual performance, earn 100 million, and take a 20 million cut.
Proprietary Trading Opportunities in Emerging Markets
Emerging markets often struggle with financing. PolyMarket is currently a hot market. Through proprietary trading, develop a market-making strategy with a daily return of 1%, start contributing to the market's scarce liquidity, achieve an annualized simple interest of 365%, invest 5.47 million, trade for a year, and earn 20 million. If calculated with compound interest, the initial principal would only need 530,000.
Build a Product with Users
Whatever we do, first create a hit product to attract users. Even if it doesn't make money, it’s about building buzz—after all, users are assets. The primary goal is to expand the user base in a vertical niche. Then, after gaining traffic, monetize by directing it to our various products. If we can attract 10,000 users, each user would need to contribute an average of 2,000 yuan in revenue. The contribution among users varies significantly; this is just a simple breakdown of the 20 million target.
The key is to try multiple approaches and not put all our eggs in one basket. Even failing quickly is fine. Don’t act without seeing results—we need feedback to keep moving forward.
For a small team like ours, improving productivity is also crucial. In this regard, the utilization of AI is very important. I’m really looking forward to the day when C1’s LegionMind meets my expectations.
Speaking of CZON, C1 gave me some feedback.
- Classification is relatively slow. Every time a file is edited, it triggers a full classification, which takes a long time. It needs to be improved to incremental classification.
- Hope to have date tags in the navigation for an easy overview of the timeline.
- Hope to have a one-click feature to generate formats for social media like WeChat Moments, Xiaohongshu, Twitter, etc., making it easy to publish and share, post directly from the platform, and retrieve comments from the corresponding platforms.
The rest is simple, but the multi-platform publishing feature is more complex. It requires integrating with each platform’s API, which might take some time. The simplest way is to generate text & images in the corresponding formats, and then let users copy and paste them onto each platform themselves.
