How to leverage a money-making project from 0 to 1 by 10 times?

### Part 1 Why Write This Article?

Recently, while interviewing applicants for the Xiangcai Co-working Space, I was delighted to discuss many projects that had been successfully executed.

Quite a few community members, through reading high-quality posts, participating in “sailings” (learning programs), or following the “wind vane” (industry trends), identified opportunities, took action, successfully ran projects, and achieved monthly earnings of tens of thousands of yuan.

However, when I asked about their next steps, many of them replied that they were currently looking for or testing a new project, planning to start another one.

For example, one community member successfully ran an AI writing project. They set up several Xianyu accounts, chatted with clients, took orders, and wrote articles. It was a relatively relaxed process, earning them about 10,000 yuan per month.

Then, they felt that the ceiling for writing projects was relatively low, and they personally preferred chatting with clients rather than writing orders. So, their next plan was to research how to operate a crystal private domain project, while maintaining their current project as it was.

Another example is a community member who participated in the “Urban Night School” sailing program. They ran the project for a month and successfully monetized it, earning a few thousand yuan per month.

However, they felt that the income from this project was limited when run by one person, and the daily tasks of creating graphics and chatting with clients in private domains were repetitive and boring. Seeing the current popularity of AI, they wanted to explore AI-related projects instead.

Such examples are countless, and the situations are very similar. The typical scenario is that a community member spends some time running a project from 0 to 1, achieves positive feedback, and roughly gets through the key processes of traffic acquisition, sales conversion, and monetization.

Then, when the project encounters some challenges, big or small, the community member starts to complain about its shortcomings. At the same time, they see other “more appealing” projects in Xiangcai and decide to start over from 0 with a new project, while keeping the old one running at a maintenance level.

In my opinion, this is a great pity. To put it bluntly, it’s “low-level repetition.”

You spend a lot of time, energy, and trial-and-error costs to get a project running from 0 to 1, but then you stop at a shallow level, only earning a little money and achieving minimal returns. Then, you repeat the process of starting from 0 to earning just a few thousand yuan.

It’s like digging a well. After you’ve dug a little and hit a small obstacle, you think the path is blocked and start digging a new well nearby.

In fact, if you just put in a little more effort in the same spot, you could dig up several times more water.

I originally thought that after running a project successfully, the natural next step would be to find ways to scale it up. However, after seeing so many such cases, it seems that some new community members don’t think this way. Therefore, I wrote this article systematically to share my views.

I once read an article with a title that said, “You have to pay twice for everything to truly own it. The first time is the money you spend on purchasing it, and the second time is the time and learning cost you invest in using it.”

I really liked this title, so I borrowed the concept for this article.

I believe that “all projects in Xiangcai are worth doing twice to be truly completed. The first time is the 0-1 MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage, to validate the project and get the process running; the second time is to maximize profits by leveraging various resources to scale up the project.” I hope this will inspire you all.

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### Part 2 Why Can’t Projects Be Scaled Up?

For the first attempt at a project, the 0-1 MVP validation, there are many experts in Xiangcai. They are highly sensitive to new projects, dive into action quickly, complete the loop, get the project running, and achieve varying degrees of success.

At this stage, the core is to test your ability to judge projects and validate them with low-cost MVPs. The key actions include identifying demand, conducting research, finding benchmarks, starting with imitation and then surpassing, and iterating quickly.

I have shared some methods for these points in previous posts, and there are also a large number of practical tutorials on project MVPs in Xiangcai. So, I won’t go into details here today.

However, when it comes to the second attempt at a project, scaling up profits by leveraging resources, the abilities of community members vary greatly.

For the same project, some experts can stick with it for several years and achieve annual revenues of tens of millions of yuan, while newbies may feel that the ceiling is low after earning just a few thousand yuan per month and give up early to look for something new.

At this stage, the core ability is to leverage resources at key points. The key actions include breaking down processes, creating SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), building teams, investing in traffic and buying ads, standardizing delivery, doing financial planning, introducing core resources, and focusing on long-term growth before accelerating.

Many community members have never moved from the first stage of project execution to the second stage. After thinking about it, I believe there are several possible reasons:

**First**, it’s a cognitive issue. Some people simply don’t realize the importance of leveraging resources to scale up. They always look for projects with high ceilings, quick feedback, and low investment. (In fact, such projects hardly exist.)

Their mindset is still based on additive thinking: if you do more things, you can earn more money. So, if they make 10,000 yuan from one project, they think about finding another project that can make 30,000 yuan. Then, they believe they can earn 40,000 yuan in total.

However, in reality, if you don’t leverage resources, most newly validated projects won’t generate much income initially.

So, it’s very likely that Project A earns 10,000 yuan, and even after finally running Project B successfully, it only earns 10,000 yuan at first. After a lot of effort, they end up earning 20,000 yuan per month.

In contrast, experts think in multiplicative or even exponential terms. If they make 10,000 yuan from one project and leverage various resources (human, financial, etc.), multiplying it by 10, they can earn 100,000 yuan per month.

To move from the first stage to the second stage, you need to shift your mindset from additive thinking to multiplicative thinking.

**Second**, it’s an issue of incomplete ability mapping. Entrepreneurship is like a jigsaw puzzle of abilities. Many people have only completed the abilities required for the first stage.

The cognitive and ability requirements for the second stage are almost blank to them. As a result, when they start encountering difficulties in the second stage, they experience strong negative feedback and confusion, completely unsure of how to solve the problems.

Then, they retreat to their comfort zone and start over from 0 with a new project, without gradually mastering the ability mapping required for the second stage during the process of overcoming these difficulties.

The consequence of this is that you may bypass the problems for now, but when you run a second new project, you’ll still encounter the same second-stage problems, which will always limit your project’s ceiling.

**Finally**, it’s a matter of short-term thinking. Many people want quick results and lack patience for solving difficult problems. The issues in the second stage often require some effort to learn and improve before they can be resolved.

For example, when adding human leverage, you need to learn recruitment, interviewing, management, process setting, and system building to make this leverage effective. But when you only want quick results, you won’t be able to build these ability mappings.

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### Part 3 How to Leverage Resources to Scale Up Projects

As mentioned above, the most core ability in the second attempt at a project is leveraging resources at key points. Below, we’ll discuss various methods of leveraging resources, along with some case studies.

#### 01 Matrix Amplification

The easiest part of scaling up a project is traffic amplification. For traffic-side leverage, if you’ve built one successful account (e.g., a WeChat official account, Xianyu account, Xiaohongshu account, Video Account, or YouTube channel) and started generating traffic, the next step is to scale up through matrix accounts.

You can create 10, 50, or even hundreds or thousands of accounts using the same method.

For those who generate income from public account articles, running just one account might only earn you a few hundred yuan in commissions per month. But what if you ran hundreds of accounts? Of course, some may ask, “How can you manage hundreds of accounts?” You can use AI tools for efficiency, hire people, or cooperate with others for content distribution, stacking other levers on top of this.

On Xiaohongshu, there are now many matrix studios that batch-create graphics using standardized SOPs. They don’t aim for viral posts but use quantity to increase the probability of success. They’re not afraid of account bans because their goal is stable traffic acquisition. How can your income compare if you only run one or two accounts?

Recently, many Xiangcai community members have been doing YouTube projects. Do you know how many YouTube accounts Coach Lao Ma has? The answer is thousands. Among them, he has identified hundreds of profitable accounts.

#### 02 Paid Traffic Amplification

Ordinary players rely on organic traffic, while high-level players use paid traffic. If you’ve successfully run a project on one platform and generated traffic, why not directly invest in paid traffic to test its ROI (Return on Investment) and add financial leverage?

Compared to organic traffic, paid traffic has many advantages:
• **Stability**: You pay for the amount of traffic you get, eliminating the need to rely on probabilities.
• **Compliance**: It creates a win-win situation with the platform, so you don’t have to worry about constantly finding ways to avoid platform restrictions.
• **Higher ROI**: If other players in your industry are relying on organic traffic, using paid traffic to target precise audiences can give you a competitive edge and potentially yield a high ROI from the start.

For example, an Xiangcai community member running an AI writing business in the co-working space is now achieving a 15x ROI with paid ads on Jiguang (a popular advertising platform). It’s really impressive!

#### 03 Team Building

In addition to traffic-side leverage, adding human leverage is another crucial method.

Many people are afraid of hiring employees due to fixed costs and don’t want to endure a temporary drop in income after hiring. As a result, they remain stuck in their current state and can’t focus on truly important tasks. This mindset is essentially “small-farmer thinking.”

The essence of hiring is not “growing the business” but “buying back your own time.” Hiring someone won’t automatically grow your business. In fact, if poorly managed, it could even lead to a decline in business performance. So, why hire at all?

The core reason is that by hiring, you outsource low-value tasks in the product-traffic-monetization chain, allowing you to focus your time on the most leveraged tasks.

In a previous post, I mentioned a community member in Beijing running a career coaching business. The model was good, but they were stuck in daily trivial tasks.

After consulting with me, I advised them to spend 80% of their time on Douyin (TikTok) live streaming to acquire leads and build a team to handle sales conversion and delivery tasks using SOPs and team-based approaches.

Once they focused their energy on traffic acquisition, the most leveraged task, the entire business chain improved. Last year, their monthly revenue increased from 300,000 yuan to 1.2 million yuan.

If you observe Douyin influencers, you’ll notice that their most important task is live streaming, while other tasks are handled by a supporting team. The same principle applies.

#### 04 Other Methods of Adding Human Leverage