There's no wrong road in life
Zero to 1.2M views in 10 weeks, with AI as the production team
人生走彎路 — Weekly Mandarin Video Podcast
Role
Co-founder / Producer / Growth
Company
Wanlu (人生走彎路)
Timeline
Nov 2025 – Jan 2026 (10 weeks)
views across Meta on the final reel — shipped the week I wrapped up, and still climbing after I left.
"I emptied my family's group chat with one sentence — at Lunar New Year"
Context
Two hosts, zero audience, AI as the third teammate
Wanlu (人生走彎路, "Detours") is a weekly Mandarin video podcast built on one idea — there's no wrong road in life — telling the stories young Asians trade over drinks: dating disasters, nightmare neighbors, things you wish you could say in the family group chat. Two hosts, zero audience, zero budget, AI as the third teammate — I ran it like a consumer product: every piece of content shipped with a hypothesis, a metric, and a next iteration.
What I built
01
An AI production pipeline, designed around what 2025 models couldn't do yet
AI generated the topic bank from our personalities, and scaffolded scripts. Since models couldn't cut video, I inverted the workflow: upload footage, let the LLM pick the Reels-worthy moments and write hooks as text, then execute the cuts by hand. AI judgment, human hands.
Script Assistant
topic bank · scripts · hooks
EP09.mp4
Uploaded
This episode needs a Reels cut — help me find the hook and script.
🎬 Cut: "He Listed His Ex as a Personality Trait" — confessional style
00–05s (Hook):on-screen text "the green flag on his profile was actually a red flag"
05–15s (Key moment):cut to "still figuring things out with my ex," said like a fun fact — hold on her reaction
15–20s (Close):jump cut to "Swipe left faster than this," then "New episode out now" title card
Title suggestion: He said it like it was normal. We said it was a red flag. 🚩
Before
After02
Retention-driven iteration
Reading the Reels Retention curve, I rewrote hooks at the exact drop-off timestamps.
Reading the Retention curve — before vs. after hook rewrites
Average watch time (s)
Skip rate (%)
What happened
Instagram views, final reel
views across Meta
Spotify plays lift on that episode
lift on the next three episodes
My final reel — I emptied my family's group chat with one sentence at Lunar New Year — shipped the week I wrapped up. Engineered on a seasonal pain point, not luck. I kept tracking the data after I left; the system outlived its builder.
The viral reel — 0 to 700K in 4 days (cumulative views)
Every reel, in posting order — iteration compounds (log scale)
Why I left a growing product
I shut the channel down
Reels were my lane — and the same retention lens showed me the podcast's ceiling: episode listeners were dropping in the first 15–30 seconds, on the long-form content I didn't own. I shut the channel down. What I kept is the playbook — I now know how to take a content product from zero to a million views, and how to do it again. Happy to go into the details in an interview.
Episodes
Peak reel
1.26M
Watch time
14s → 24.6s
Spotify lift
17×