What this case covers
Lan Ziyu, a community member for seven years, previously sold educational materials on Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Without coding knowledge, they used AI tools to develop mini programs and sell them through a Xiaohongshu store. The article reviews evaluating demand, development, payment integration, promotion and monetization.
Questions it answers
- How can someone with no coding knowledge build a mini program with AI?
- How can you distinguish real demand from imagined demand?
- How do mini programs integrate payments and launch?
- How did the Xiaohongshu store approach promotion and advertising?
- Why is development only a small part of monetization?
Our observations
- Membership revenue depends more on genuine willingness to pay than the platform's advertising-revenue model does.
- Making materials harder to pirate was a practical selling point for packaging them in mini programs.
- For these virtual products, an advertising ROI above 1.2 could cover costs.
From the author
I found that the hardest part of making money through mini programs was not developing them, but finding something users would pay for or keep using.