Dialogue: "Kitten Fill Light" Chen Yunfei: A 35+-year-old introvert from a large company, breaking the middle-aged curse through resignation, sojourning, and AI development.
36Kr "Career Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
The career crisis at the age of 35 is an insurmountable hurdle for many people. Chen Yunfei, who single - handedly developed the "Kitten Fill Light" APP, chose to leave the workplace voluntarily at this time.
Chen Yunfei described his life after leaving the big company to "Career Bonus": like many people, he first embarked on the long - awaited nomadic life. At first, the journey was full of freshness and comfort. But as time passed, he was gradually enveloped by the emptiness of idleness, making him feel like he wasn't truly "alive". He needed to feel that he was progressing and growing. So, even during his nomadic journey, Chen Yunfei often spent a whole day in a coffee shop, learning AI knowledge that interested him.
Chen Yunfei has a talent that is easily overlooked: extreme focus. However, everything has two sides. This extreme focus sometimes leads to deficiencies in certain abilities. Chen Yunfei had worked in the workplace for more than a decade, and handling workplace relationships was never his strong suit. But he didn't care about it. Instead, he indulged in the state of whole - heartedly devoting himself to work.
After leaving the workplace, Chen Yunfei self - studied knowledge related to AI and programming. For some time, he spent all day in the coffee shop, from the opening to the closing. From starting to use AI to create products he liked to having his long - form videos on Bilibili go viral due to their high - quality content. This introverted person in the workplace broke through himself and gained real freedom. Behind this process, what we are concerned about is how did he find the field he liked and seize the opportunity to monetize it?
Before leaving the big company, this quiet user researcher was bound by the workplace evaluation system - becoming a manager - for three years. And the most wonderful arrangements of fate often start from the moment of letting go of obsessions. After leaving the big company, Chen Yunfei found his comfort zone and achieved an income far exceeding what he had earned in the big company before.
Chen Yunfei discovered that true freedom is not just about escaping the workplace, but about communicating with the world in a way that he loves.
Accidentally entered the financial circle and fled within half a year ╱ 01
Entangled by the obsession of "becoming a leader" ╱ 02
The introvert's first on - camera video ╱ 03
Reached the top of the App Store ╱ 04
Two years after leaving the job, returned to Aranya ╱ 05
Q&A with the bonus figure ╱ 06
Accidentally entered the financial circle and fled within half a year
"I'm a selfish person. I only want to do what I like to do."
For Chen Yunfei, understanding himself is more important than anything else. In a period when most people are confused, determination is also a kind of talent.
In 2006, Chen Yunfei graduated from high school. At that time, China's financial industry was booming, and relevant business majors were the top choices for students' college applications. Chen Yunfei applied for the economics major at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. But soon after entering the university, he gradually found that he was not interested in the professional courses. So, skipping classes and hiding in the dormitory or spending time in the library reading what interested him became his norm during college.
However, there was one professional course in college that fascinated him, which was behavioral economics. It is an interdisciplinary subject between psychology and economics, mainly studying human behavior.
Graduation year, his classmates around him all entered the financial field. Chen Yunfei also entered an insurance company in Wuhan through campus recruitment and became a property insurance management trainee with a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan. About half a year after starting work, Chen Yunfei felt that he couldn't adapt. Four years of college had made him deeply realize that finance was not what he really wanted. This discomfort intensified after starting work. Eventually, he chose to quit his job without a new one lined up - this was also his first such resignation in his career.
This experience of choosing the wrong major made Chen Yunfei understand himself better. "I can only do what I like to do."
In 2011, the mobile Internet was in a critical stage of transformation, and Chen Yunfei also felt the prosperity of the Internet. After quitting his job, he wanted to find a job that could allow him to deeply study human behavior and was in the Internet industry.
After some research and posting messages on the Tieba, Chen Yunfei finally discovered the field of "user research".
But at that time, there were not many recruitment needs for user - experience - related positions. Only a few big companies like Alibaba and Baidu had such positions. Due to the mismatch of his major, he failed to enter a big company and finally joined a design consulting company in Shanghai with a monthly salary of 4,000 yuan. However, he finally got to engage in user - experience design work as he wished.
"This job is only responsible for designing user - experience solutions, not for implementing them." After some time, Chen Yunfei found that he received no feedback from the solutions. He thought: I want to go to a company that really makes products and have a look.
Entangled by the obsession of "becoming a leader"
In 2012, 24 - year - old Chen Yunfei went to Beijing alone. With a try - it - out attitude, he interviewed and joined Sohu Changyou. At that time, Tencent's game user - research team was relatively mature, and NetEase was also deploying relevant teams. Sohu had just started to be aware of the need to do user research.
During his more than one - year tenure at Sohu Changyou, the team he was in expanded from three people to seven. He also grew with the team and completed the construction of the game user - research system from scratch. However, this joy of growth didn't last long. The work rhythm of the project team was disrupted by the power struggle among the company's senior management. As a person with a calm nature, he hated the complex infighting in the workplace and chose to job - hop.
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From 2013 to 2016, Chen Yunfei worked in a big company. But the "big - company disease" in the big company invisibly reduced the work efficiency of many colleagues. Many people would go to have meals or go shopping after coming to the company and only return to their workstations around four or five in the afternoon, "overworking" until nine. But Chen Yunfei didn't follow this. He preferred to work on time and leave after work.
Just then, another Internet company extended an olive branch to Chen Yunfei, promising him a management position and stock options. This offer seemed hard to refuse, but the company was actually far from going public. After joining, the promised stock options were difficult to cash in the short term. At that time, expecting a promotion and a salary increase, he found that his career development prospects were still shrouded in mystery.
In 2017, Chen Yunfei job - hopped to another fintech company that offered a "management position and stock options" and relocated to Hangzhou.
Interestingly, after joining the new company, he found that he was the only full - time employee in the management position, and all the others below were interns. The ongoing campus recruitment had always had a hard time finding suitable candidates. One year later, when the P2P bubble burst, although the company went public, the stock options could not be redeemed.
After going around in circles, Chen Yunfei returned to Beijing again, and his career path returned to a big company. This time he joined Meituan. He also started with user research. After an organizational adjustment, Chen Yunfei was transferred to product operation.
Product operation was a "new world" for Chen Yunfei. In this new position, he could for the first time witness how his user research was applied to the product and verify his research by changing some small details of the product, achieving a closed - loop. These new experiences made him extremely excited.
At Meituan, Chen Yunfei also got to try many things beyond his ability boundary. For example, he had never done traffic investment before. He analyzed user data, summarized patterns, and planned investments. He also carried out cross - channel cooperation by linking high - frequency scenarios inside and outside the Meituan ecosystem and optimized the entrance conversion path in combination with product data tracking. Eventually, the conversion rate of new users and the penetration rate of function usage were significantly improved.
These things all had very clear data results and indicators that could be measured. He enjoyed the happiness brought by the feedback of these indicators on the one hand and immersed himself in dealing with data and users that he liked on the other hand.
The introvert's first on - camera video
The 35 - year - old career crisis in big companies is not just talk. On the day he left the big company, Chen Yunfei also fell into short - term anxiety: what to do in the future?
But as an action - oriented person who doesn't want to be trapped in emotions, he started his nomadic life. The idle state in daily life made him realize that although he had achieved the long - desired wishes during his work, life had become less and less full of expectations.
He began to pick up his old ideas. At the end of 2022, GPT amazed the world. At that time, Chen Yunfei had tried using AI in the work scenario. Anticipating the wave of AI, when Chen Yunfei left his job, he preset that his next job must be related to AI. To better master AI, Chen Yunfei, with 90% introvert attributes, forced himself to record videos and share them on Bilibili and YouTube.
● Chen Yunfei studying during his journey
At first, the traffic of Chen Yunfei's videos was not optimistic. But when leaving the big company, Chen Yunfei's expectation for himself was "not to make money within a year". He didn't plan his savings usage carefully either, so he didn't care much about increasing his followers.
Unexpectedly, half a month later, continuous updates on the social platform brought a turning point for Chen Yunfei.
A community invited him to give a sharing session on the prompt - word skills of ChatGPT. It was the video recorded from this community sharing session that got more than tens of thousands of views on Chen Yunfei's Bilibili and YouTube accounts and brought thousands of new followers to his accounts. Chen Yunfei suddenly felt that the video medium seemed quite suitable for him.
After getting positive feedback, he was more willing to try recording videos. He no longer felt ashamed to hear his own voice as he did at the beginning of making videos. He even had the courage to shoot an on - camera video. "I don't think there's anything wrong with showing my face. It will bring a stronger sense of trust to the audience."
Chen Yunfei usually learns AI mainly through Jike, as well as some resources officially released by GitHub and large - model companies. "But when using AI, learning is secondary, and application is primary." Chen Yunfei mentioned that the content he shared was mainly based on his own practical experience. For example, the "28 ChatGPT Usage Skills" he summarized and uploaded in August 2023 also got more than 300,000 views on both YouTube and Bilibili.
"If you are too eager to turn something into income, it will backfire." Chen Yunfei summarized. "You should start from yourself. It's most important that you gain something. Only in this way can you tell others something."
Reached the top of the App Store
Chen Yunfei, who was immersed in AI, also worried about the potentially high sunk cost brought by the AI transformation. After all, he had been doing user research for more than a decade. It seemed a bit wasteful if he only focused on AI in the future.
After leaving his job, Chen Yunfei was troubled by the lack of application scenarios while learning AI. He remembered a Python book he had bought casually before but always found it hard to read. He forced himself to self - study for a week, "asking Teacher C (ChatGPT) when he couldn't understand". After really trying to use AI as a tutor for a week, Chen Yunfei made several Chrome extensions but was not very satisfied. He also realized that his AI programming ability was probably at that level at that time.
It wasn't until August 2024 when the AI programming tool Cursor became extremely popular that he realized the opportunity for AI programming had come.
During the days when he discovered Cursor, he often spent 16 hours a day in the coffee shop until it closed.
"I didn't feel the passage of time at all during those days. I was just amazed at how interesting Cursor was." He found that he could combine AI and programming to turn his ideas into reality, which inspired his inner passion.
Before the "Kitten Fill Light" APP came out, Chen Yunfei had made more than 20 products, including "Learn Words by Taking Photos", (AI text optimization tool) HumanizeAI, "Fashion Critic Master", etc. (see huasheng.ai for details). One attempt after another made him completely immersed in AI and programming.
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Chen Yunfei didn't expect that the "Kitten Fill Light" would break through the circle so much. The initial idea was that he found his girlfriend needed a fill light when taking photos, but the process of opening Xiaohongshu, searching, clicking on notes, zooming in, and then brightening the screen was too long. Chen Yunfei, with decades of user - research experience, keenly discovered this need of female users and judged that the "Kitten Fill Light" was a project worth doing.
At that time, Chen Yunfei's girlfriend didn't think the fill - light app would be useful because there were so many such notes on Xiaohongshu. But he still tried to make it with Cursor and recorded a teaching video. After making the product, Chen Yunfei shared it on Xiaohongshu to communicate ideas with more users and get feedback.
As a result, once the "Kitten Fill Light" was launched, it was favored by a large number of female users, and users were also willing to share it. In just a few days, the number of likes on the recommendation notes exceeded ten thousand.
According to the users' opinions in the comment section, Chen Yunfei quickly iterated the "Kitten Fill Light Pro", which also quickly climbed to the first place on the paid list of the Apple App Store.