This article is adapted from a talk I gave at an AI Going Global Meetup in Shenzhen. The event focused on AI and global expansion, but my subject was more fundamental: markets change, while the underlying logic of business and growth does not. These are lessons from roughly ten years of product and operations work.
01. About Me
I’m Len Chou. Over the years, I have managed a fund, spent roughly a decade as a product manager, worked as an operations partner, and built businesses in ecommerce and digital healthcare. I later moved from Hangzhou to Shenzhen and joined a company focused on GPU rental and API token services.
The roles look unrelated, but the work underneath has always been the same: understand the business, find a value exchange that works, then replicate a proven loop.
Healthcare, ecommerce, construction SaaS, a Layer 1 network, and model APIs appear completely different. In practice, they repeatedly run into the same questions. I care less about the channel or tool of the moment than about the business logic they share.
02. Going Global Changes the Market, Not the Logic of Growth
Going global changes the language, channels, payment methods, and culture. AI changes product forms and delivery efficiency. Neither makes the fundamentals disappear. Why does a customer choose you? What are they willing to exchange? Can that exchange keep happening?
That is why this article is not about a particular overseas channel or AI tool. The deeper question is whether we can still build a working business after moving to a new market. Users still need a reason to buy, someone must make the decision, someone must pay, and the company must deliver.
03. Build the Business Before You Chase Growth
I have never been comfortable describing myself as a growth operator. I would rather call myself a businessperson. Growth is not simply more traffic. It is the repeated expansion of a value exchange that already works.
If the first exchange has not happened, growth only magnifies the problem. First prove that someone needs the value, is willing to pay its cost, and that you can keep delivering it. Scale comes later.
04. Six Questions Behind Growth
I break a business into six connected questions: understand the business, define the value, find the central conflict, complete the exchange, close the loop, and replicate it.
The order matters. Without understanding the participants and incentives, a team cannot define the real value. Without finding the conflict, it may build features for a false problem. Without completing one exchange, the supposed business loop is only a diagram. Growth emerges after the earlier steps hold together.
05. Confirm That It Is a Business
A business is a value exchange between people or groups. The customer receives something they need, and the company receives revenue that lets it continue operating.
The product is only the vehicle. An app, website, or agent matters less than whether the exchange could happen without it. Product work should make a valid exchange more efficient and reliable.
As a product manager, I see the job as balancing user value and business value. Instead of first asking what app to build, I ask whether the first transaction can happen. If it can happen without software, complete it first. That is the essence of an MVP.
06. A “User” Is Rarely One Person
The user, decision-maker, payer, and internal promoter may all be different people. There may also be someone who actively blocks adoption.
Many products solve a real need and still fail because the incentives do not line up. The person receiving the benefit may not bear the cost. The payer may not receive the benefit. A buyer may approve a product while the actual user refuses to change their habits. Calling all of them “the user” hides the most important conflict.
07. Metrics Should Lead to Action
I divide metrics into three groups. Vanity metrics look impressive but do not change what the team does. Ten million downloads mean little if activation and retention are near zero. Actionable metrics reveal where to intervene, such as activation, retention, conversion, and meaningful commercial behavior.
A business usually needs only one or two north-star metrics. They represent the outcome at the heart of the product or business model. Metrics exist to diagnose problems, set priorities, and prompt action, not to prove that the team is doing well.
08. AARRR Is a Map of Business Problems
AARRR divides the customer journey into acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. A business may reorder them, but the framework still helps answer where customers come from, when they first experience value, why they stay, when they pay, and whether they bring others.
These are not five letters for a report. They are a map for diagnosing a business. Each stage must correspond to real behavior rather than an isolated field in an analytics system.
09. Start Funnel Optimization Upstream
I usually look for the most important upstream break first. A payment rate of 5% may take enormous effort to raise to 6% or 7%. Retaining another ten to fifteen percentage points when customers first experience value can produce a much larger effect downstream.
This is not an absolute rule. It is ROI thinking. Time and resources are limited, so the team should prioritize problems with both a wide impact and meaningful room for improvement.
10. Healthcare: Focus on What the Customer Is Ready to Do
The first case comes from Weimai, a digital healthcare platform. Many competitors displayed doctors from across China, yet patients still needed examinations, surgery, treatment, and follow-up care locally. A patient in Shenzhen might consult a doctor in Beijing or Nanjing but have no practical way to continue offline care.
We concluded that digital healthcare was not only about online consultation. It had to establish trust through local doctors and complete the service loop offline. Instead of competing on doctor count, we asked how patients could meet and trust a doctor during a real care journey.
11. Choose a Market Where You Can Win the Cold Start
We focused on local doctors and made smaller cities our primary market. A budget that covered one expensive first-tier city could cover several smaller ones. Those cities still needed digital healthcare, but competition and entry costs were lower.
A cold start is not an abstract search for a blue ocean. It is a choice of battlefield under resource constraints. We built local networks where larger competitors were less willing to invest, then used the number of cities to create scale.
12. Each Moment in a Hospital Has a Different Conversion Task
We mapped the patient journey through registration, waiting, payment, test results, and the end of a visit. Intent differs at every moment.
Registration could lead to the relevant doctor’s service. Waiting created time to connect patients through hospital Wi-Fi and WeChat. Payment could bring them into a follow-up communication flow. After the visit, trust in the doctor was strongest, making it the right moment to offer follow-up consultations.
Our highest-converting touchpoint came after the appointment. We placed a QR code on the doctor’s desk and reframed an internal label, “patient check-in,” as language patients understood: “Add your doctor on WeChat.” Patients could scan it for three free questions. Many later purchased the doctor’s services after a meaningful conversation.
13. WeChat as Lifecycle Infrastructure
We did not treat official WeChat accounts as follower pools. The system identified the hospital, department, doctor, and QR code that brought each patient in. Messages on the day of treatment, day three, day seven, and one month later reflected the patient’s condition and stage of care.
The accounts formed lifecycle infrastructure for identification, follow-up, and conversion. A small team of roughly two business staff and three engineers accumulated about 35 million followers and turned the network into a major source of orders. The important point was not the total. We knew why people arrived, what they needed, and where the next value exchange might occur.
14. Opening a Tool Can Create a Growth Flywheel
After optimizing the process inside one hospital, implementation became the bottleneck. Our own team could not deploy hospital by hospital quickly enough, and healthcare was poorly suited to aggressive referral mechanics.
Many hospitals lacked product and operations capacity. We packaged registration, payment, report lookup, and lifecycle management as free tools embedded in hospital WeChat accounts. In return, doctors joined our doctor-facing platform. Hospitals received a usable system, while we continued serving patients through doctors and lifecycle operations. More than twenty hospitals launched in the first week. Growth came from turning our capability into something partners wanted to adopt.
15. Cross-City Growth Requires an Organizational Model
The free tools improved deployment inside a hospital but did not solve expansion across cities. Product, data, and operations could be standardized. Hospital relationships and local execution could not be copied remotely from headquarters.
We opened the central capabilities to experienced local leaders and shared part of each local subsidiary’s profit. Headquarters supplied the product, people, funding, data, and operating model. The local CEO brought years of relationships and execution experience. Cross-city growth became the product of headquarters capability and local trust.
16. Trust Is Often the Scarcest Cold-Start Resource
After Weimai, I tried building a social commerce business. While the industry competed for mothers as customers, I chose university students because their relationships spread naturally across schools, cities, and even countries.
The scarce resource was not traffic but trust. I spent time on campuses and found the people students already relied on: phone-card sellers, club leaders, dorm-floor representatives, residence staff, and instructors. I was looking for existing trust nodes, not a way to insert an unfamiliar platform from outside.
17. The Most Minimal MVP Uses No Development
I had little money and no complete team. I found suppliers, recorded costs and margins in a spreadsheet, and gave it to those campus trust nodes. Without building a complex system, the business produced roughly RMB 5 million in profit in its first month. Students would buy, campus partners could sell, and suppliers could fulfill the orders.
That is my definition of an MVP. It is not a smaller platform. It is the cheapest way to validate the most important business assumption. Once the transaction worked, software became a tool for replicating it hundreds or thousands of times.
The business later moved toward student credit, but regulation no longer allowed those financial services. A business loop must work within policy and social boundaries, not only at the level of demand and fulfillment.
18. Construction SaaS: Adoption Is Not Just a Usability Problem
The next case was a construction SaaS company. Its product covered 80% to 90% of competitors’ features, yet years of investment had produced no real customers or revenue.
After two or three weeks on construction sites, I found that features were not the core problem. Recording data created extra work for frontline staff, and transparency threatened some existing interests. Owners received the benefit while workers bore the adoption cost.
Even customers who had purchased competing products struggled to keep frontline staff using them. Asking workers to open an app, take photos, and enter data on top of their existing process was not a problem that another training session could solve.
19. “Can’t Use It” Often Means “Don’t Want to Use It”
Adoption friction is not limited to interface complexity. On construction sites, transparent records could expose material loss and remove gray areas that benefited some people. Transparency created value for the owner and a loss for parts of the frontline organization.
“We can’t use it” can mean three different things: the operation is genuinely complex, changing habits carries an extra cost, or the user does not want the system to work. A team that fails to distinguish them may keep simplifying the interface without changing adoption.
20. Redesign Incentives Around Each Role
The answer was not more features. We had to redesign each role’s incentives. The owner had paid but could not see management value, so I built more than twenty dashboards in two weeks. At first they were nearly empty, but every blank chart identified missing data and the person responsible for it. Owners who wanted visibility now had a reason to drive data entry.
Frontline workers still bore the operational cost. From an annual software fee of RMB 80,000, we proposed monthly rewards for people who completed the data work. In the first month, every reward was claimed, management reports filled with data, and anomalies were flagged. Owners acted on the information, which further reinforced the process.
21. B2B Sales Depends on a Role-Based Adoption Formula
Selling a complex B2B product means making an adoption mechanism work inside the customer’s organization. Decision-makers need management value, frontline workers need sufficient motivation, and internal connectors need to reduce the friction between levels.
Actual use is a precondition for scalable sales, not a bonus after delivery. If the product cannot work inside one customer, more sales only create more implementation problems. Once adoption works, the company finally has something it can replicate.
22. A Customer’s First Rejection May Be About the Presentation
I once ran an advertising business that bought a large share of traffic on a leading Chinese platform. Banner click-through reached 40%, but 60% to 70% of visitors left after reaching the product page. We bought traffic on a CPM basis, so every exit represented a cost without a transaction.
The strong entry metric showed that people were willing to look. The failure happened when they saw the first product set. Their first rejection did not necessarily mean they had no demand. It might mean they rejected the current products or presentation.
23. A Strong Entry Point Can Hide a Weak Landing Page
Looking only at orders could have led us to blame the audience and buy more traffic. The funnel showed something different. A 40% click-through rate had already proved interest. The break appeared on the landing page.
Instead of asking how to win more clicks, we asked what visitors were rejecting: the underlying need, the product itself, or this particular selection.
24. Another Choice Increased Orders
We tested a linked image styled as a close button. Clicking it did not exit. It opened another group of products, and closing again revealed another selection. The pattern absorbed much of the original drop-off and increased orders, although I am not publishing the exact percentage.
I call it a hack, not an advanced method. It offered more choices but also made leaving harder and could harm the experience. The useful lesson is that metrics can improve without user value improving. A team still has to ask whether it is helping people find what they need or merely raising the cost of exit.
25. Remove an Industry’s Default Cost
On a North American Layer 1 project, I had one effective team member and a budget of USD 20,000 to acquire and retain early users. Competitors could spend tens of thousands of dollars a day on influencers and ads, so copying their playbook was impossible.
I thought about how 360 entered antivirus by making a paid category free. In blockchain, the default entry cost was gas. Before trying a new chain, users had to acquire its native asset, exchange funds, and transfer them. Our limited budget was better spent removing a universal barrier than buying more traffic.
26. Free Gas Only Opens the Door
We used most of the budget to subsidize gas. After simple anti-bot actions, users received enough for roughly ten to twenty on-chain interactions. The amount had to remove friction without becoming attractive to professional farmers.
We spent only another USD 2,000 to 3,000 on distribution. Market expectations around future airdrops drove organic discussion. Activity grew quickly and ranked highly in major wallets, but free gas answered only how users would take the first step, not why they would stay.
27. Subsidies Ignite Growth but Cannot Replace Demand
Free gas attracted real users, airdrop seekers, and many sybil bots. The next task was to identify valuable demand in the address data rather than keep increasing subsidies.
We found users holding substantial Bitcoin-related assets who wanted both yield and liquidity. At the time, users often deposited Bitcoin into protocols for a receipt token and restaked that token. We created another exchange: deposit the receipt token and borrow dollars so locked assets could become liquid again.
The model carried serious risk. We had to verify the assets backing each token, build alerts and liquidation processes, and connect dollar liquidity providers. Subsidies produced the first addresses. A real need for capital efficiency created the continuing loop.
28. Rethinking Growth Through an API Token Business
The final case comes from the API token business I currently lead. The market includes many aggregators that combine model quotas from different sources and resell them. We are building a compliant version through formal agreements with model providers in China and overseas, without serving gray or black-market supply.
The company also operates GPU infrastructure, so we can deploy some open-source models ourselves. That gives us more control over availability, pricing, and stability than pure resale. The business is still developing. The important work is to understand what business it really is and which supply constraints determine whether it can last.
29. Growth from Large Customers Can Hide an Unhealthy Business
When I took over, I had to choose between recharge value, customer count, and other metrics. I focused on actual token consumption. A customer who prepays but never calls the API has not demonstrated lasting demand. Continued consumption means the API is creating value inside the customer’s product.
I also remove a few exceptional accounts when assessing business health. Large customers contribute revenue and profit, but they can hide the condition of everyone else. Use the full numbers to evaluate the financial result, then examine the broader customer base to judge whether the model can be replicated.
30. API Tokens Are a Supply-Chain Business
Customers compare price and quality, but they also care whether quota remains available and models remain stable. If an upstream provider fails, can we switch to another resource, data center, or self-hosted model? These questions all point to supply-chain capability.
Low prices alone cannot create a lasting relationship. Marketing can bring one visit. Delivery means providing stable access when customers need it and switching resources when supply changes. Traffic determines whether customers arrive. Supply determines whether they trust us with a core workload.
31. Let Customer Growth Drive Your Growth
First find high-consumption use cases such as agents, developer tools, and batch workloads. Then reduce compatibility and migration costs, help customers reach the first stable API call, and shield them from upstream volatility through active resource scheduling.
The deeper work is customer success. I speak directly with early customers about how their products can attract more real users and grow. Token consumption should rise because their products create more value, not because we repeatedly push them to recharge. Their growth then drives our consumption and revenue.
This business does not yet have a finished ending. I am still looking for the decisive leverage point in the API token market. Without an answer, the honest response is to keep operating and observing rather than manufacture a conclusion for a presentation.
32. Growth Is Not One Department’s Job
I often say that design should move closer to product, product closer to operations, and operations closer to the CEO. Job boundaries need not disappear. Each role should understand one more step of the downstream result.
Designers need to know whether a solution helps users receive value. Product managers need to connect features to business results. Operations must understand revenue, cost, and supply. The CEO must align these roles around the same business loop.
A growth team cannot repair a business whose value is invalid, supply is unstable, or incentives conflict. The whole company must understand how its work affects the value exchange.
33. Six Principles to Remember
- Understand the business before pursuing growth. It must support a real transaction. Otherwise more traffic only wastes more resources.
- A product must carry a sustainable value exchange. Apps, websites, clients, and agents are forms. Both user value and business value must hold.
- Find the central business conflict first. Local trust mattered in healthcare, incentive misalignment blocked construction SaaS, and entry cost constrained the blockchain cold start.
- Apply ROI thinking to the MVP and cold start. Complete the first transaction before investing heavily in software that may never be used.
- Subsidies can only ignite the process. People who enter for an incentive still need real value if retention and conversion are to continue.
- Own the business loop, not only the metric. Metrics guide decisions. The destination is a sustainable business that respects legal and ethical boundaries.
34. Growth Is How the Whole Company Understands the Business
Hospital registration, campus trust nodes, incentives on construction sites, a close button on an ecommerce page, gas on a blockchain, and supply for model APIs appear unrelated. Each asks the same questions: in what context will a customer act, who can drive the transaction, what blocks the value exchange, and how can a valid result be replicated?
Frameworks organize thinking but cannot replace contact with a real business. The answers often live outside the meeting room, in hospital corridors, university dormitories, construction sites, customer usage data, and frontline incentives.
Whether the work is product, operations, growth, or international expansion, it must keep completing an exchange that both sides accept. Build the business first. Then use product, organization, channels, and capital to replicate it. Growth is not one department’s responsibility. It is how the whole company understands the business.
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