Time really flies. In the blink of an eye, YouMind has already shipped version 0.5. We started sketching the very first draft around last July, and it has been roughly a year since then.
A year is not that long, but it is not short either. So I wanted to write down a few things from this past year: some gratitude, some reflections. Partly to encourage ourselves to keep going, and partly to remind myself to keep thinking clearly on this path of building a company.
Luck, and trust
The fundraising environment in 2024 has not been kind to most startups. On one hand, we are in the late stage of the pandemic recovery, and the macro environment has put a lot of pressure on capital. Many funds themselves are struggling to raise new money. You can see it in the numbers: the count and size of newly raised funds dropped by 49.2% and 26.0% year-on-year.
On the other hand, after a few years of “wild growth,” the investment world has started to cool down and become more rational. It is shifting toward a more mature phase, where both technology moats and real business models matter. Investors are more cautious. They care much more about whether you can land in a vertical scenario and whether your business can actually make money.
Many of them are now taking a “small check, test first” approach, investing earlier and writing smaller tickets. Deals under one million RMB already make up 55.96% of the total. In other words, capital prefers to spread bets around, rather than write big checks at the seed stage.
In this environment, YouMind raised a seed round from several top-tier funds in 2024. That is something we feel genuinely lucky about. At the same time, it tells us that investors do believe in what we are trying to build, and they believe in this team.
That belief is also a kind of pressure. People who know us know that we previously built Yuque inside Ant Group. Internally that was called “entrepreneurship,” but building a product inside a large company and building a company in the open market are two very different games. Out here, there is no big-company halo, no existing brand or traffic. Many things start from zero, and a lot of ways of thinking that we got used to in the past need to be consciously unlearned.
Take spending money as an example. Back then we worked inside a big group. You apply for a budget, it gets approved, and you go ahead and launch your campaigns. To be honest, the psychological burden is not that heavy. You do not really feel the cost behind that money. It is a bit like being at home: your parents hand you some money, and you do not really know how hard it was to earn. You just know that when you need more, it will probably still be there.
Now it is very different. Every cent we raise feels precious. We have to think long and hard about how to use it and try our best to spend it where it really matters.
At the same time, we keep reminding ourselves that simply “saving as much as possible and stretching the runway” is not necessarily a good thing. For an early stage team, looking like you can survive for a long time can hide a slower kind of death: your product might be quietly losing its life over that long stretch.
A better way to think about it is this: within a limited time window, how do we maximize the value of what we do? That means deploying capital faster and more deliberately into whatever can truly drive product growth, so we can validate and then scale a business model that users actually recognize and are willing to pay for. In other words, using limited resources to generate real proof and real value.
So this trust from our investors is encouragement, but it also forces us to keep looking at ourselves and at our current situation. What kind of mindset and operations do we really need in order to run this company and this product in a healthier way?
Global, but without ignoring Chinese users
Many teams, when they decide to go global, instinctively try to “hide” the fact that they are from China. There are many reasons for that, and I will not go into all of them here. For a few years, this was, in some ways, the more “realistic” choice.
From a geopolitical perspective, it is true that quite a few AI infrastructure providers in Silicon Valley do not serve Chinese companies at all. To get around that, many teams choose to register in places like Singapore, so that on paper they become “overseas companies.”
But that is not really why we started to rethink this whole strategy.
What really changed our minds is what we have seen in China’s AI scene over the past couple of years. Things are moving very fast. Technology and products are both pushing forward at high speed. There is a large group of early movers who are using their products and experiments to shape, and in some cases reshape, the direction of this wave. A lot of teams here are building products that are very much on the front edge of what is possible.
Chinese users are also trying AI in ways that would have been hard for us to imagine a few years ago.
Let me give a small example from my own family. When search engines took off, my family mostly used them occasionally. It was not a big deal in their daily lives. But this time, with AI, it is very different. My dad, who used to just scroll through Douyin all day, now opens DeepSeek or Doubao whenever he has something on his mind and just chats with it for a while.
If we, in this context, still follow the old playbook by only looking at overseas markets and intentionally downplaying China, we are actually walking away from an incredible testing ground. Here, you have users who are demanding but enthusiastic, and communities that are willing to help you refine a product. These people are very likely to become your earliest true seed users: they care about details, provide blunt feedback, and are willing to speak up for you when you get things right.
For YouMind, one thing has become very clear over the past year: we do want to build for a global audience, but we cannot ignore Chinese users, and we do not need to hide that we are a team from China. On the contrary, we want Chinese users to be important companions on this journey.
Marketing is not shameful
For a long time, we believed in the old saying: “Good wine needs no bush.” In the real market, though, most of the time we are nobody. It is very hard to get noticed naturally. Even if you keep building and polishing your product, if no one sees it, your story does not really exist.
That is how the market works. If I were just an indie developer, maybe I could spend years slowly investing in one product, constantly polishing until it is great and people talk about it. But in today’s commercial environment, that model often does not work. A company needs to survive. A team needs to be paid. Time is not an infinite resource on your side.
If you do nothing and just wait for the wind to blow in your direction, chances are the wind will never come.
So in the past year, we started to be more intentional about spending on marketing. For the first time, we took community seriously as a force, and tried to let more people have a chance to discover YouMind.
Of course, once you do that, you quickly hear comments like, “Look, they are spending money now. This is just paid PR.” On the factual level, that is not entirely wrong. But if you never do any marketing at all, you might not even earn the right to be misunderstood this way, because nobody knows you exist.
So there has been a meaningful mindset shift for us. At the beginning, we were a bit resistant to “marketing,” maybe even slightly disdainful. Over time, we realized we have to step out, and we have to embrace any reasonable way to reach the right people. Spending money on marketing is not something to be ashamed of. It does not take anything away from you.
As long as we keep our energy focused on making the product good and the experience solid, and see marketing as a way to help the right people find us, rather than as a substitute for the product itself, then the money we spend and the attention we gain both have real meaning.
We are also not going to "do marketing for the sake of marketing." We still need to earn it with the product. Only when something is genuinely worth talking about do we feel comfortable promoting it more publicly. For example, we did not start promoting our browser extension until it had over ten thousand users and received plenty of positive feedback.
In the end, all of this is for one simple reason: to give YouMind a bit more time and a bit more distance to run. A few more chances to prove that we deserve to stick around.