Ye Hongxin and Luo Yonghao on Building Aircraft, Scooters and Laifen

Luo Yonghao introduces Laifen founder Ye Hongxin, whose path led from e-commerce to aircraft, scooters and high-speed hair dryers. The show’s sales and price comparisons are its own claims; the conversation focuses on Ye’s experience and product thinking.

Ye says he moved from Lishui, Zhejiang, to Huizhou, Guangdong, with his parents at five. His family raised fish and ducks; collecting eggs and neighbors helping one another harvest fish were part of his childhood.

The family’s fortunes fluctuated and his father later went into debt and worked in recycling. During primary-school holidays Ye helped his parents; he stresses that it was not a formal company with employees, but work the family did themselves.

Ye started first grade at nine and found it hard to fit in as an outsider speaking a different language; older pupils sometimes blocked his way. He recalls the experience as unpleasant, but says poor grades troubled him more.

In Huizhou, classes were taught in Mandarin but classmates often spoke Hakka among themselves. Being older and from another province made it hard to fit in. He later returned to Zhejiang for family reasons that included his sister’s schooling.

He returned to Zhejiang during primary school to live with his grandmother, then went back to Guangdong after junior high without attending high school or vocational college. Luo says education can make many things easier, but an imperfect academic record is not the end of the road.

Ye remembers seeing Yahoo’s home page at an internet café and being astonished by the information available. After about six months helping at an internet company, he attended computer training for over a year, with tuition paid by his father despite the family’s tight finances.

After years of struggling at school, his prior computer experience gave him confidence in the training class and he even ran for class monitor. Previously, he says, he was so shy that while delivering goods he might wait hours rather than ask where a warehouse manager was.

He illustrates his shyness through a delivery job: his father sent him to factories with cloth scraps for cleaning machinery, but even greeting a guard made him nervous, let alone asking where to find someone to sign for the goods.

Luo recalls being afraid to enter a shop and ask questions as a child, and says public speaking later required deliberate effort. They discuss the importance of positive feedback while growing up.

Ye could already assemble computers from components and helped classmates choose parts. Luo did similar work; both remember a time when home computers were spreading and someone familiar with hardware could help buyers avoid mistakes.

Ye corrects accounts that said he worked in a factory: he helped his parents’ business and worked at his sister’s friend’s internet company. He thanks his father for paying tuition when the family lived in a metal-sheet shelter.

After training, Ye built websites for small businesses and sold domains and hosting. Clients kept asking for updates, but he had not separated ongoing support into a paid service, so he eventually stopped because the workload was unmanageable.

His website business grew to over twenty clients, often through referrals. Some did not own computers and asked him to upload products afterward, gradually extending the work beyond building the original site.

His sister opened a Taobao shop early on, and Ye initially helped mail her orders. He later opened his own shop in Humen, Dongguan, drawing on local bag and clothing suppliers and doing most of the photography, ordering and shipping himself.

His sister’s shop was early enough that postal staff questioned why they had so many packages and sometimes made posting difficult. Ye says he had to explain and negotiate repeatedly to get them sent.

As the business grew he hired customer-service and design staff. Ye says it was profitable early, initially selling bags and later women’s clothes with a team of roughly a dozen. The pair also compare returns in different periods of online apparel retail.

Asked about startup capital, Ye says he did not need to stock large quantities and could source items as they sold. As Taobao Mall emerged he formalized the business, but ultimately still felt little interest in the category.

After six or seven years, Ye felt that bags and clothing were not what he loved. With some financial breathing room he passed the shop to his sister and pursued a project that interested him: a crewed multirotor aircraft.

Ye says modest financial breathing room let him reconsider what he wanted to do; it did not mean he had made unlimited money. Luo observes that not everyone has a clear career plan from an early age.

He started with model aircraft, building small and scaling up. Lacking a strong technical foundation, he recruited through online forums and supported a graduate student’s work; in retrospect, he says, he underestimated the challenge.

The early team sought help on technical forums and even provided funding to a graduate student. Ye recalls that testing locations were hard to find, forcing them to avoid busy periods and places where they would be turned away.

The aircraft reached six or seven meters in diameter and had to be tested away from people. Ye says propellers, motors and controllers all presented problems and flight was unstable; on one occupied test the craft was tethered and rose only a few meters.

A bold colleague once rode the test aircraft, but Ye did not: he was operating the controls and knew the machine was not stable enough. The team tethered it and kept the flight low.

He says endurance was under twenty minutes, reliability and supply problems remained, and the project consumed several million yuan of savings. Business plans sent to investors brought no response, and the team stopped the aircraft project.

The team turned to a simpler electric scooter with only roughly 100,000–200,000 yuan left. They used off-the-shelf motors and batteries and concentrated on low weight, a carbon-fiber deck and CNC-machined structural parts.

Unable to afford molds, the team CNC-machined some first-generation scooter parts. Carbon fiber reduced the weight to about 5.5 kilograms, Ye says, making the product look refined while also raising costs.

The first model raised about 500,000 yuan through Taobao crowdfunding and sold for around 2,500 yuan. Without a factory, the team recruited local help to assemble it; customers liked the design but quality problems emerged after delivery.

Ye says the first scooter cost slightly less than comparable carbon-fiber products, but machining and small-scale purchasing made costs hard to control. The team also lacked complete manufacturing and quality-management experience.

Despite returns, praise for the design gave Ye confidence. He decided to develop a second generation, redesigning many parts from tires to display in an effort to address complaints about the first model.

To fund it, Ye says he borrowed money, sold his home and pledged his car, with cumulative borrowing of roughly three million yuan. A planned one-year development took two, and integrated cast parts fractured in impact tests.

To realize the second model, Ye invested nearly everything he could borrow. Hearing the scope of customization, Luo notes that developing even the tires was exceptionally ambitious for a small, cash-constrained team.

Crowdfunding for the second model disappointed, but at a Hong Kong electronics show the team displayed disassembled parts in a nine-square-meter booth and demonstrated the scooter, attracting many inquiries. Their workshop lacked the capacity to fulfill large orders.

At the trade show, they opened up the scooter to explain details such as the hidden brake, lights and tires. With a booth in a remote location, Ye also rode in the demonstration area; visitors asked where to find them and quickly took all the brochures.

Afterward inquiries for exclusive distribution arrived from several countries, including extremely large proposed orders. The bottleneck, Ye says, was not the quoted price but the absence of a factory and fulfillment capacity.

An American customer offered advance payment in exchange for global exclusivity, and Ye agreed. He says the customer later established a company and sold the scooter in the US; although exclusivity limited other customers, Ye did not then have the capability to build an overseas brand alone.

The US customer later raised financing, organized sales and sent engineers to help improve the product. Ye does not reduce the deal to someone taking advantage of him: the advance payment and sales capability were essential to the team at the time.

The partnership later improved engineering, testing and product reliability. Ye says known problems do not frighten him as much as problems whose causes and solutions remain unclear.

When he started Laifen in 2019, interest in products still drove him. Aircraft and scooters had been difficult but rewarding learning experiences, and he began looking for everyday hardware categories that could be improved.

The hair-dryer idea came from feeling the strong airflow of a drone and considering a high-power-density brushless motor for drying hair. Ye says he initially did not know about Dyson’s product and later partnered with a manufacturing-business owner to form the company.

In the initial partnership Ye handled technology and product, while his partner supplied funding and manufacturing experience. They did not conduct comprehensive market research, he recalls, and started largely on their judgment of the technology and market opportunity.

The motor was the hardest part. Ye says the first prototype borrowed an outer-rotor approach from aircraft before the team reconsidered the high-speed design; after speaking with many factories that could not meet its speed, noise and power requirements, it developed the motor itself.

Ye describes himself as the technical lead and recalls taking motors and parts apart from childhood. Luo adds a management lesson: whether an engineer performs well can depend on whether a leader provides clear direction.

Development took about two years, longer than planned. Ye estimates pre-launch R&D spending at three to four million yuan. The team later dismantled a Dyson dryer, admired its details and sought a different design in light of patent constraints.

On dryer noise, Ye says decibels are only one measure: frequency also affects how comfortable a sound feels. Motor design simultaneously had to accommodate high speed, fine wire and operating voltage.

Bearings were another obstacle. Ye says an exclusivity arrangement prevented access to a preferred existing model, but the supplier eventually adapted another model to their requirements. High-speed durable bearings, he says, depend on difficult material and manufacturing capabilities.

The dryer launched at the end of 2020 but sales fell short, and Ye and his funding partner separated amid financial pressure and differing approaches. He recalls selling only two or three units a day online at first.

Weak sales lead them to distinguish product skill from business skill. Luo reflects that he too was initially stronger on product and argues that founders still have to address gaps in operations, financing and marketing.

One turning point came when an influencer explained the product in detail, producing a sales bump. The team also staged a low-budget launch filmed by a wedding company and posted it to Bilibili; Ye says it later received around ten million views.

The team’s early launch used a modest venue and production setup with a budget of about 200,000 yuan. The immediate response was limited, but the subsequent online spread showed Ye that explaining the product clearly could draw customers’ attention.

Before that breakthrough, weak sales lasted four or five months. The team tried pitching salons, but a multilevel distributor structure required margins and proved difficult to scale, so it returned to online sales.

Fundraising remained difficult. Ye says some intermediaries demanded fees upfront; at one point he met someone he already suspected was a fraud because he was desperate for funding, and that person did indeed ask for money first.

To meet investors, Ye also attended a business program, met teachers and classmates, and gave some of them products. He feels his background made fundraising harder, although that perception cannot establish any individual investor’s motives.

Ye met investor Wang Cen at a class in the hope of raising money. A video of their exchange about the dryer unexpectedly spread; Ye says he did not know he was being filmed and the team promoted clips after the initial organic success.

Ye sees an accidental comic element in the exchange with Wang: two bald men were discussing hair dryers and a small company’s challenge to a prominent brand. Different accounts clipped the discussion and the team began promoting it.

Ye says the clip did not directly identify the brand, but viewers recognized him in the comments and orders rose. Asked about Wang’s advice that an infrequently purchased product needs a higher price, Ye instead emphasizes earning trust across multiple products.

Wang’s point was that a durable product bought infrequently may need a higher ticket price. Ye responds that he would rather earn recognition through several products so customers return for different needs.

They place different weight on brand and value. Luo worries that customers attracted only by price can leave for a cheaper rival; Ye stresses product experience, while acknowledging that lasting trust takes time.

Ye says competition in high-speed dryers was already substantial, requiring improvements in quality, cost, capacity and price alongside marketing. He acknowledges that the team lacked marketing experience and initially concentrated spending on only a few methods.

Ye rejects the theory that his success came from specializing in women’s products. He says early dryer buyers were mostly men and women’s share later increased; Luo suggests differences in marketing reach could also play a part.

Ye says molds for a vacuum under development already exist and emphasizes handheld weight and practical use. Describing favorable tests at home, he volunteers that the sample is very small; the discussion concerns a product not yet launched.

Luo presses Ye on Laifen’s moat: good products can be copied and cheaper rivals can gain sales. In his view, durable advantage may come from hard-to-circumvent technology or a brand consumers trust.

Ye recognizes that building trust one experience at a time is slow. The company hopes to increase the pace of product development so categories reinforce one another; he says more than ten projects were then underway.

Ye argues that a brand is built through repeated product and after-sales experiences, not a slogan. He cites a two-year replacement rather than repair policy for a toothbrush as part of how customers judge reliability.

The pair discuss responding to criticism and controversy. Luo favors promptly presenting evidence against inaccurate claims; Ye says companies must withstand pressure while deciding when to respond. Their judgments on particular disputes are their own.

Laifen had begun an electric-toothbrush project before launching the dryer. Ye wanted the brush head to sweep as well as vibrate and says the team redesigned its motor to achieve this; development took more than three years.

He explains an inertia problem: a motor reversing rapidly is harder to control when its rotor is large, but making it long and thin creates new challenges for the shaft, magnets and drop reliability.

The first toothbrush allowed app-based adjustment of sweeping and vibration. Ye later found that most customers kept the defaults and fewer than one in ten opened the app; Luo emphasizes the importance of default settings.

Luo describes his and friends’ experiences with different toothbrushes to illustrate that users may not know alternatives. They discuss this as a question of perception and defaults, not as clinical evidence of effectiveness.

Different brush heads and individual preferences illustrate another problem: a company may have a solution that customers do not know exists. Luo says improvements are not always immediately apparent without a comparison.

Ye says the team filed multiple toothbrush patents, but servo motors are a general technology and rivals may use different implementations. They also discuss intellectual-property disputes abroad, presenting their own accounts of those cases.

Luo asks how Laifen responds when cheaper brands market themselves as alternatives to it. Ye believes different price points and needs serve different customer groups, and each brand must understand the value it offers its audience.

When rivals claim a better experience, Ye says his team uses teardowns and demonstrations to show product details. He acknowledges that such outreach reaches only some people and customers cannot buy every product for comparison.

They discuss R&D costs and explaining products to the market. Ye cites toothbrush-head production and pricing as areas where details invisible to consumers still require investment; his figures about rivals and industry costs are his own account.

Asked about R&D and marketing spending, Ye disputes some circulating ratios and says the recent share spent on R&D has risen. The conversation does not provide complete financial statements to independently verify the figures.

He says online sales dominate these categories, though Laifen has begun opening physical stores. In person, customers can see and handle products, producing a different sales mix; he says the roughly twenty stores then open performed better than expected.

Ye says in physical stores customers can try toothbrushes and razors even without seeing the company’s online content. As a result, the in-store product mix differs from online sales, where dryers have a larger share.

Luo advises publicizing the company’s claimed high-speed hair-dryer sales ranking, pointing to other brands’ international marketing. The ranking is a claim made in the interview, not an independently verified conclusion here.

Ye describes a product boundary: everyday goods that small firms may lack the capability to make well and large companies may overlook. He sees room for improvement in some overseas categories and says prices and margins differ by market.

On a razor-design controversy, Ye says the team has earlier design and patent records and denies copying. He also acknowledges having no evidence identifying which company, if any, initiated online discussion. His account alone cannot establish the parties’ conduct.

He recalls the team deciding against a public response because it feared amplifying the dispute. Luo thinks evidence should be presented early; Ye says he may respond more proactively to similar situations in the future.

They discuss the fit between product, price and market. Ye observes that customers may not perceive expensive technical improvements; Luo argues that overseas markets can sometimes offer a different price point for innovative goods.

Ye says Laifen has entered Costco in some countries, not every country or store. Luo suggests communicating its overseas distribution and customer reception more clearly.

As the company grew, Ye had to spend more time on organization, hiring, incentives and operations. He prefers product and customer work, but says he has learned that isolated fixes are not enough without understanding the broader system and causes.

Ye says executives can disagree openly and he sometimes changes his mind after discussion. He recalls initially doubting a collaboration that its product owner championed; it later sold well, showing that his own judgment can be wrong.

Employees can say an idea is poor and then discuss their reasons, Ye says. He is willing to adjust when a criticism holds, while often continuing to debate product details because he has spent more time on them.

Ye estimates that he still spends about half his time on product R&D, with three teams reporting to him. They also discuss AI’s potential in research and decisions; their enthusiastic assessment is opinion, not a guarantee of accurate AI answers.

Ye says some future hardware may support AI control, but he wants the feature to improve actual use. He says assembly and motors are mainly handled by company-owned factories, while a small number of components are outsourced.

International expansion brought different voltage requirements, safety certifications and IP issues. Ye admits the team focused on selling products abroad rather than systematically building an overseas brand, and that his own attention was limited.

Physical stores were explored by an internal team that had worked online. Ye prefers improving fit-out costs and locations using store-level results instead of rushing; Luo notes tradeoffs between external executives and developing internal teams.

On overseas growth rates, Ye cautions that a small starting base can make multiples look large. He wants to devote more attention abroad while continuing to oversee the highly competitive domestic business.

Some observers describe his career as looking for markets for motors. Ye partly agrees because the team has motor expertise, but prefers to call himself a product manager and says future products will not all contain motors.

Luo questions the choice of mature, intensely competitive categories such as toothbrushes and razors, where the entry point may be less dramatic than high-speed dryers. Ye acknowledges that major breakthroughs are hard to find and sometimes progress comes through details and a portfolio.

Returning to the moat question, Ye says a single technology is difficult to defend indefinitely in small appliances. He hopes repeated experiences of useful, attractive products, acceptable prices and reliable service will build trust in the brand.

The company is considering environmental appliances, kitchen products and digital accessories. Ye says projects require different resources: a small category can merit careful work, while a heavily funded one must deliver results.

Ye expects the portfolio could grow to twenty or thirty categories in coming years, including both major growth bets and smaller products he considers worth doing well.

Ye has no formal design education, but remembers a teacher praising his childhood drawing. He later studied Braun, Sony and everyday products repeatedly, gradually developing his own judgments about appearance and use.

He repeatedly studies other companies’ designs and asks why they chose a particular shape or structure. Finished hardware products themselves become learning material for him.

His interest in design extends to small objects such as speakers, keyboards and lamps. The pair then discuss how beauty and practical usefulness shape their own product choices.

Both admire some beautiful, playful design objects that have limited practical use for them. Ye says he may buy such things for pleasure but prefers to make products used by large numbers of people, a personal choice rather than a universal rule.

Ye still feels anxious at launch, particularly when feedback shows that his judgment was wrong. In-house development can solve problems suppliers have not addressed, but it costs more and takes time; high component standards, he says, do not automatically reduce costs.

Luo asks whether scaling in-house development should remove a supplier’s margin. Ye says the answer depends on specifications: he considers his razor motor’s durability and power requirements higher than cheaper off-the-shelf parts can meet.

They close by discussing the limits of a founder personally directing every product. As categories multiply, a company must develop teams and document design methods; Ye says building those capabilities and finding the right people takes time.