Lately, I've had an increasingly strong feeling: identity in the digital world might be the most leveraged thing coming next. Not something you "should do," but something you "have to do."
Production Itself Is Not Valuable
How much code you wrote, how many commits you made, how many PRs you merged—what does it matter? Is a piece of software with 10 million lines of code automatically valuable?
No.
Did you create value by posting 1,000 articles or making 1,000 videos on Xiaohongshu (RedNote)? Not necessarily. The efficiency of production is too high. The cost of AI-generated video has dropped from roughly \$4,500 per minute for traditional production to around \$400. The production cycle for marketing videos has been compressed from 13 days to 27 minutes. When everyone can make things quickly and cheaply, the act of "making it" itself ceases to be scarce.
All Creation Is Experimentation
So what is valuable?
I think all creation is essentially experimentation. Building software is validating an idea; posting a video is testing a hypothesis. You throw it out into the real world to interact with people and see if it works.
For example, you build a tool that checks all the boxes on paper, but in practice it's inaccurate and inconvenient. The software itself creates little value; its only useful function is telling you: this approach doesn't work. The same goes for posting 1,000 videos that no one watches. The value isn't in those 1,000 videos; it's in the information that "this approach doesn't work."
The "growth mindset" many people talk about is essentially doing exactly this. Eric Ries's Build-Measure-Learn loop in The Lean Startup boils down to the same thing—validating at the lowest cost and highest speed, and even a failed validation is a result.
So what really matters isn't how much you produce, but how fast you can get to the truth.
1,000 People
In 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called "1,000 True Fans," arguing that a creator needs only 1,000 true fans to build a career. In the AI era, this idea has taken on a different meaning.
It's not that 1,000 fans are enough to pay your bills. It's that with 1,000 active followers, every experiment you run gets feedback faster.
You casually ship a product, post a video, or voice an opinion, and someone will help you test it: does this idea work? They'll tell you if your product is good or bad, upvote your content or call it trash. You don't have to wait long to know if you're heading in the right direction before moving to the next iteration.
Without those 1,000 people? You have to go find them, figure it out, depend on others. I've felt this deeply posting content on Xiaohongshu (RedNote) recently—finding that first group of people who connect with you closely is incredibly hard. Platform algorithm controls are aggressive; soft shadowbans happen all the time, and you can't tell whether your content is bad or just throttled. This barrier will only get higher, because attention is finite while content keeps expanding.
If you don't do it, it just sits there waiting. The longer you wait, the harder it gets.
Who Is Doing This
Karpathy, formerly the research lead for Autopilot at Tesla, now lives like an internet celebrity. Nearly 2 million followers on X, over 1 million YouTube subscribers. In March this year, he released AutoResearch: a 630-line Python script that ran 700 ML experiments in two days, found 20 optimization points, and got covered by Fortune. In April, he shared an idea for an LLM Wiki—a GitHub Gist that gained over 5,000 stars in a few days. Every project he puts out is validated by masses of people on whether it works; he gets confirmation quickly and moves to the next one. His feedback loop might be one-tenth of someone else's.
Lei Jun is the same. People call him an entrepreneur and investor, but he's also an internet celebrity. 44.5 million followers on Douyin; 2024 NewRank data ranked him as the top entrepreneur IP on the platform. The SU7 delivered 100,000 units from its April 2024 launch to year-end, with 410,000 units for the full year of 2025. When he develops a new product, he polls people on whether it works, whether the price is too high, whether the looks are good—and gets answers in days. He runs experiments far faster than others. Last year, he also lost 290,000 followers in a single day over an SU7 accident, which itself trended on hot search with 34 million views—showing from both positive and negative sides how tightly personal brand and product are bound.
Musk is even more extreme: 236 million followers on X, number one across all platforms, posting 8 to 12 times a day. Trump has 109 million, third overall, and stock traders watch his X feed closely. At a high level, these people are all doing the same thing: using their digital identity to run experiments, validate ideas, and collect feedback.
It works on a smaller scale too. Some video creators build up their accounts by various means, accumulate traffic, and later pivot to selling agricultural products for their hometowns—ending up with more impact than a village chief or county magistrate. With that digital identity, they have a lever that can move other things.
This is even more obvious with KOLs in the AI industry. From my previous business development work, I learned that current advertising rates for AI KOLs are roughly 1:1 with follower counts—10,000 followers means ¥10,000 per post, 100,000 followers means ¥100,000 per post, roughly speaking for mid-tier accounts. Schedules are often fully booked; even with money in hand, they might not have time to post. Some KOLs in the AI agent space are already being invited by local governments to host conferences.
Once accumulated, this asset can be deployed anywhere; it's not confined to one domain.
By Year-End It Will Be Too Late
My view is fairly radical: by the end of this year, not having a digital identity will become a serious problem.
It used to be hard to build a website, hard to make content, hard to produce videos. But with coding agents becoming widespread, those barriers are disappearing fast. With text-to-image and text-to-video tools, content creation costs keep dropping. Everyone else is doing it; if you don't, the gap only widens.
Here's a scenario from my own work. I once discussed this with a business development colleague on my team: suppose at year-end, the two of us go out to acquire new clients together. I've been maintaining an active online presence—blog, projects, social media—with about 1,000 quality followers who regularly reshare my work. You've done nothing from now until then; searching for you in the digital world turns up nothing.
What's the first thing the other side does after meeting us? They search. Most people are already in the habit of checking someone on DeepSeek or ChatGPT first. Soon, agents will do it for you—"help me research this person, what's their background, their credibility, what opinions have they expressed?"
One search turns up a rich trail: personal website, projects, opinions. The other search turns up nothing. Wouldn't that make you anxious? Would you find the person with no digital footprint trustworthy? The key is that everyone else is gradually becoming active.
If you're a researcher or AI practitioner, not having a personal website with projects listed might already be hurting your job search—because others do.
Quan Hongchan
Of course, digital identity has its headaches.
The recent situation with Quan Hongchan is quite sad. She didn't set out to build a digital identity; she was thrust into the spotlight because she's so exceptionally good. After winning three gold medals in Tokyo and Paris, she naturally grew 10 centimeters and gained 8 kilograms, and online commentators repeatedly called her "fat." She herself said she felt anxious, suffered insomnia, had recurring nightmares, and seriously considered retiring. In early April, the General Administration of Sport (of China) stepped in to investigate cyberbullying, and on April 12, Guangdong police detained a man who had persistently insulted her.
This illustrates the point well. If you don't actively build and manage your digital identity, its reach can far exceed your expectations. In real life, you might interact with only a handful of people; in the digital world, tens of millions might be watching you. Suddenly, without you noticing, it can collapse.
Privacy is a real concern too. Once you're active, you have a social presence; you can't just say whatever you want. But this is no different from real-world social interaction—when you enter the workforce, you follow basic norms. As long as your identity is active, you have to manage it.
That said, if you don't build it proactively, others will still search for you and talk about you. Passive is worse than active.
The Biggest Leverage
Back to the beginning.
I believe the biggest personal leverage available right now is this: building your identity in the digital world. It has nothing to do with industry or direction. It accelerates the entire process of running experiments and getting to the truth. From 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000, the snowball gets faster and faster.
AI has lowered the barrier to doing this more than ever before. The rest is up to you.
Originally published at https://guanjiawei.ai/en/blog/digital-identity-biggest-leverage
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