Free Is the Most Expensive

A friend once said: In the commercial world, free is the most expensive.

It’s true that generous free strategies can boost short-term margins—but they often trap you in an inefficient loop.

For example, one of the most effective ways to learn is to seek out the very best teachers. Yet the internet is flooded with free content—so much so that it places enormous demands on your ability to filter and synthesize information. When your mental models are still underdeveloped, those “free” resources can easily drown you in noise and misinformation—leaving you stuck, not empowered.

Or take my experience building websites over a decade ago: I was obsessed with free search traffic. But eventually I realized that, for any serious business, the proportion of commercial value contributed by free traffic inevitably shrinks as the company scales.

The result? A company that’s profitable—but permanently capped in size.

Once your core business model proves viable, the next move should be rapid experimentation with paid acquisition—building a repeatable, scalable ad model. That’s how you erect a real moat.

The Logic of Commercial Thinking

Recently, I’ve been exploring overseas opportunities with friends. One clear opening: many overseas Chinese have savings, ambition—and zero idea what to do next.

The right commercial logic starts not with traffic, but with industry selection. Especially when working with overseas Chinese communities, a common anxiety is: “Where will the traffic come from?”

I disagree. Traffic is the least worrisome part—it’s also the easiest to solve. Spend money, and you’ll get precise, measurable traffic. We’ve mastered this rule. If something can be solved reliably with money, it’s not a strategic problem—it’s an operational one.

So the real questions are:

Which industry are we entering?
What’s the underlying business model?

Only after those are clarified should you ask: How do we acquire traffic?

Here’s where people misstep: They say, “Our industry is clear. Our model is proven. But we dare not buy traffic—we lose money every time.” So they conclude: “Traffic *is our core competency.”*

That’s backwards. It reveals a blind spot in evaluating their own model’s efficiency and competitiveness. A truly competitive model will sustain paid acquisition—if it doesn’t, the issue isn’t traffic; it’s either the industry or the model itself.

Take a colleague’s edtech product: no one wanted to promote it. Why? Because its unit economics were broken—it generated less than one-third the revenue per user compared to healthy benchmarks in the same category.

We run similar diagnostics internally: using our monthly ad budget as a fixed resource, we measure how much revenue each product generates per impression. That simple metric instantly exposes gaps in competitiveness—and forces us to iterate on product design, pricing, or delivery—not just spend more on ads.

Positioning and Persistence

In recent conversations with MCN founders, we agreed on one truth: For any creator to become a major IP, two things matter most—positioning and persistence.

Both assume one prerequisite: the person must genuinely possess the potential and capacity to grow.

Positioning means defining three things clearly: your business model, your content genre, and your persona.
Persistence means executing relentlessly within that position—iterating your offerings, refining your live-stream scripts, delivering consistently—not chasing trends.

Most people fail at one or both. Some pick the wrong lane and burn energy fruitlessly. Others start strong but quit before momentum builds.

How to Become a “Big Person”

To me, a “big person” isn’t defined by title or fame—but by the capacity to get big things done.

How do you cultivate that?

Surprisingly simply: believe in universal truths.

Believe in self-reliance. In self-reflection. In lifelong learning. In humility.

Your daily focus shouldn’t be on chasing novelty—it should be asking: Am I living these principles today?

Keep the big truths for yourself. Leave the small justifications—for tactics, exceptions, excuses—for others.

The Magic of Paid Acquisition

Paid acquisition has one irresistible superpower: compound returns, once the model clicks.

Say we launch a knowledge product. Our host converts viewers in the livestream at a rate that meets our ROI threshold. Initial tests show a Day-1 ROI of 1.2: invest $100 → earn $120 → $20 profit.

Now reinvest that $120 the next day. At the same ROI, you earn $144. Repeat.

In theory, after 100 days, that original $100 balloons to $80 million.

Reality, of course, intervenes: as volume grows, ROI decays—until it plateaus at a sustainable level.

But because of this compounding magic, those who truly understand paid acquisition don’t wait. When conditions align, they move fast—and leverage scale before the window closes.

Simplifying Complex Problems

Simplicity equals efficiency.

If a task feels exhausting or overly complicated, something’s off—either your direction is wrong, or your method is.

Every seemingly complex problem hides a simple root cause. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find it’s not complexity you’re facing—it’s incomplete understanding.

The most effective solutions we build aren’t elaborate—they’re direct. “Simple” here means stripped to the core insight, not dumbed down.

Think of Euclid’s Elements: from just five axioms, he built all of classical geometry. Real solutions work the same way. Start with one clean, undeniable principle. Then derive the implementation—not the other way around.

Lately, I’ve reviewed dozens of post-mortems and proposals. Over 80% of their content is filler—redundant, vague, or irrelevant. Such documents waste time, stunt growth, and obscure real problems.

Why are simple, effective solutions so rare? Two reasons:

Perception bias: In many workplaces, brevity is mistaken for shallowness—a silent “rule” that rewards verbosity over clarity.
Cognitive cost: Finding the simple truth is hard. So people pad their output with fluff—not to impress, but to mask uncertainty. The result looks polished, but solves nothing.

To master simplicity, you need two things:

A shift in mindset: Clarity is competence.
Deeper problem immersion: Only then can you cut past symptoms to the single lever that moves everything.