Lowering the
Barrier to Create.

AcFun was China's second-largest ACG (anime, comics & games) video platform — but the category leader had 30× our DAU. Our structural advantage wasn't traffic; it was engineering. Backed by Kuaishou, one of China's top-tier tech companies, we had access to strong R&D capabilities that most competitors couldn't match.

Our mandate was to turn that engineering strength into content supply growth — without relying on the scale or incentive budgets we didn't have. When I mapped the bottleneck, it was clear: the barrier wasn't creator motivation, it was production capability.

I was the sole PM for A-Cut, a lightweight web-based video editor. Rather than building a generic tool, I ran a content analysis filtering for formats that met three criteria.

Lifestyle vlogs and educational content both required skills or expertise creators didn't have. What remained was entertainment-driven remix content — formats where the "recipe" was extractable.

I translated recurring patterns from trending videos into a reusable asset library of meme templates, BGM, and visual effects, so creators could build on proven formats instead of starting from scratch.

Integrating an externally acquired editing capability into our product required aligning backend teams from two departments with conflicting priorities.

I mapped the development and maintenance cost of each proposed solution before any meeting, which grounded the conversation. When alignment stalled, I recognized the conflict was structural and escalated — the other side ultimately escalated to CEO-minus-one level, confirming this was beyond my scope to resolve alone.

The compromise required extra work from both sides but produced a cleaner, more maintainable integration.