Keelung was the original base for Raymond Hou’s (Raymond’s) solo business. It was the hometown where his wife, Yuzu (Song Zhiyou), had grown up for more than twenty years, and the city where the couple settled after retreating from Beijing to Taiwan in 2020. The early stages of both Raymond Thirty and the brand 柚智夫妻 took place almost entirely in an old apartment here. For Raymond, Keelung was not a harbor city in the tourist sense; it was where he began asking how to build a workspace that could support long hours despite limited space and budget.
From Retreating from Beijing to Settling in Keelung
In early 2020, Raymond returned to Taiwan for Lunar New Year with two empty suitcases. The pandemic prevented him from returning to Beijing, interrupting the overseas career he had planned. He and Yuzu retreated to Keelung. At first, they maintained a routine of commuting from Keelung to Taipei for work, returning home after overtime at eight or nine in the evening, then using the few hours before bed to record the first episodes of the Raymond Thirty podcast. Later, Raymond described this “side business after work” period in his courses as a safer “micro-entrepreneurship” experiment: a way to test whether he could face the market independently and bear the risk. The small room in Keelung was the first site of that test.
Turning the Living Room into a Studio
Because their rented home was small, did not belong to them, and could not be extensively renovated, Raymond and Yuzu used the apartment’s living room as a studio. Apart from sleeping and showering, they spent more than fourteen hours a day at the same desk—working, eating, reading, and livestreaming lessons on one surface. With only a wall about 250 centimeters long, they combined two of the smallest tabletops they could find (120 centimeters long and 80 centimeters deep) into a shared workstation. They started with inexpensive chairs and desks from Shopee and a rug, then gradually upgraded to electric sit-stand desks, ergonomic chairs, and dual monitors.1 The work was intense enough that Raymond once fell asleep face-down on the desk. He later organized this “function first, aesthetics later” trade-off into a method and began filming an annual Desk Setup video in 2022 to record how the workspace evolved.
The Rainy City’s Constraints Become Part of the Creative Texture
Keelung gets a lot of rain and is known locally as the “Rainy City.” Humidity and the sound of rain were initially work problems: the old apartment had poor sound insulation, so when choosing equipment for podcasts and livestreams, Raymond deliberately avoided condenser microphones that easily picked up rain and switched to USB dynamic microphones to reduce noise. Rain later became part of how he understood the city. In a record of bringing his reader community to Keelung for a nomadic-work trip, Yuzu described gray and white tones and light industrial style as “Keelung’s signature colors.”2 By visiting the early-morning fish market, island trails, and local arts spaces, the trip placed the daily lives of harbor workers alongside those of creators.
Bringing the Community Offline: The Nomadic Piglet Group
Keelung was not only where Raymond worked behind closed doors; it also became a setting for bringing his online community offline. After the first Notion Online Courses and Boot Camp, Raymond and Yuzu used the collaborative tools taught in the course to plan a four-day, three-night nomadic-work trip to Keelung. More than ten students from different parts of Taiwan, who had never met before, traveled together with a “70 percent fun, 30 percent work” approach, handling meetings and talks along the way. This gathering, called the “Nomadic Piglet Group,” made the connection between Remote Work and the membership community tangible and became an early expression of the later “生活黑客群島” community culture.
Significance of This Stage
The Keelung startup-studio period lasted until around the second half of 2022. Raymond’s work shifted to his new home only after Smart Work Home was completed. Looking back, he has repeatedly treated the three-ping living room in Keelung as the prototype for his “infinite desktop” concept: the size of a space matters less than whether it suits the person using it. Here, Raymond completed the first stage of moving from employee to Super Individual and distilled the experience of building under constraints into later discussions of work environments and one-person businesses in his courses.
Sources
Footnotes
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Hou Zhixun, “2020–2022 Home Desk Setup Renovation and Product Recommendations | Desk Setup,” WordPress article, 2022-03-04. View original ↩
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Song Yuzu, “Rain Island Hotel Seven-Person Room Review: A 100-Point Space and Stay, Four Days and Three Nights of Nomadic Work in Keelung,” WordPress article, 2022-01-01. View original ↩