Raymond's User Manual

From Raymond Hou to Raymond Thirty

5 min read

This transition took place between 2019 and 2020: his employed career and Beijing digital-nomad plan were interrupted, and Raymond’s public identity gradually shifted from “Raymond Hou” to the “Raymond Thirty” brand. The external cause was the pandemic interrupting a planned five-year program. The internal cause was a tendency Raymond had always had, but that was temporarily suppressed during his career’s upward phase: “I still liked assigning work to myself.”

Ending: The Beijing Plan and Employee Identity

In 2019, Raymond and Yuzu (Song Zhiyou) set a five-year plan to go overseas and search for meaning in their work, until age thirty. In August 2019, Raymond joined the Beijing fitness app Keep in product operations. At the time, it was one of the leaders in the sports-internet sector. At this stage, his public identity was mainly “Raymond Hou”—an employee at a large internet company, moving between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. In early 2020, after wrapping up a trip to Shenzhen for a large livestream of the Get App “Knowledge Spring Festival Gala,” he returned to Taiwan for Lunar New Year. The pandemic broke out soon after, and he was forced to abandon the plan to return to Beijing. Raymond later described this as “the original five-year plan being turned onto a different path by fate.”1

Drift: Half a Year Forced to Stay in Taiwan

The period when he could not return to Beijing was a transition in which his identity had not yet settled. In March 2020, Raymond joined a Taiwanese brand group that had been operating for more than thirty years as a digital-transformation consultant, responsible for making its digital business model work. The job paid better than the choice he made later and aligned more closely with the mainstream expectation of “stability.” But after completing a six-month engagement, he concluded that this was not where his value lay: his strength was helping individuals accelerate, not serving organizations. This judgment brought the old question—“should I keep being an employee or work for myself?”—back to the foreground and became the dividing line in this transition.

Emergence: The Raymond Thirty Brand Takes Shape Month by Month

The identity shift was not a single leap like quitting without a plan. It accumulated month by month during 2020:

  • Brand name and launch message: The first-season introduction for the Raymond Thirty podcast came out in late February 2020. “Raymond” came from his English name; “Thirty” referred to “standing firm at thirty.” Raymond was twenty-five at the time and intended to document “what we could accomplish before turning thirty” over five years.
  • Taking ownership of content assets: In May, he built his own personal website and moved previously scattered content to his own platform. The reason was that an individual business needs a long-term view and must control its data, CMS, and user list.
  • Community and season two: Starting in June, he built a community for podcast listeners and interviewed people with unconventional careers as “Thirty Figures.” Season two began in October, focusing on real stories of running a company of one with Yuzu.
  • Subscriptions and newsletter: At year’s end, his personal content subscription service, Lifehacker Journey, began beta testing, and Raymond Weekly also launched that year.

By the end of 2020, “Raymond Thirty” was no longer only a podcast title; it had become a brand spanning content, community, and subscriptions, alongside the 柚智夫妻 brand. Raymond and Yuzu clearly defined their intention at the time: they wanted to build a bounded company that did not expand infinitely, in order to regain control over their lives.

Significance of the Transition

This transition matters because it turned an external interruption into an identity reset. The pandemic closed the Beijing path, but in doing so stopped Raymond from accelerating someone else’s organization and led him to gather years of experience in writing, remote work, and independent business into a brand he could build over the long term. A line from the launch message that he regarded as central—“A progressive society is one in which we no longer look down on every person around us”2—later became a shared starting point for Raymond Weekly, online courses, and the broader Super Individual direction. The move from employed “Raymond Hou” to self-employed “Raymond Thirty” does not mark an impulsive resignation; it marks the ability to absorb an external disruption and turn it into a choice of direction.

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Raymond Hou, “[Goodbye Beijing; See You Next Year] Where Can You Find Us?” WeChat public-account article, 2020-12-08. View original ↩

  2. Raymond Hou, “EP00: Raymond Thirty Season One Launch Message (What Can We Accomplish Before Age Thirty?),” podcast, 2020-02-27. View original ↩

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