✍️ Last Updated: October 21, 2025

Hey there! I'm Xiaochang 🌭
It's time for my weekly letter to grow a little together with you!

This post shares my offline Xiamen trip insights & my experience creating the 《7-Day Heptabase Workshop! Build Your Knowledge Base from Zero》. I also discovered my best friend is actually a Gut Talk Newsletter subscriber—haha, it motivates me to deliver great content (being followed by people who care truly activates 'intrinsic motivation').

🌴 A Little Offline Living Experiment: Days in Kinmen and Xiamen

In early June, I went to Kinmen and Xiamen with my friend. This time I deliberately didn't buy an internet card, wanting to experience offline life. I only borrowed 30 minutes of internet from her in the evenings to check messages.

While experiencing offline living, I discovered my 'awareness' had increased! I was constantly feeling and thinking. For instance, when taking transportation in unfamiliar places, entering restaurants, walking through shopping malls, or strolling by the seaside, my mind would always be thinking, 'If danger happened right now, what solutions would there be?' That's when I realized I couldn't really empty my mind at all. My brain's energy consumption is probably much higher than average.

Xiamen Traffic Hellish Mode

I discovered that Xiamen's traffic is somewhat scary. Their electric scooters have no license plates—they're just like bicycles and compete for sidewalk space. So walking on the streets, you're constantly hearing 'honk honk honk honk honk!' Many cars on the road also change lanes without using turn signals. Walking around locally isn't very comfortable overall (I even found myself thinking Taiwan's traffic is somewhat better 😂).

During the trip, I encountered a small incident with a very rude driver (bad attitude from the moment we got in). He wanted our order number, but we'd been taking rides for two or three days and no driver had asked for this before. We couldn't find any order number in the ride app. The driver drove for a bit, then said he wouldn't take the order and asked us to privately pay him for gas via WeChat. Very strange—we were using an official ride-sharing platform for the transaction, so why should we privately pay him? Super weird!

I immediately knocked her hand away XD Really knocked it away, immediately had her stand behind me, argued with the driver for quite a while, and even stopped passersby to ask what to do (the Xiamen people I met were truly indifferent, quickly escaping the scene). The solution turned out absurd—the driver didn't need an order number (the app didn't even provide that) but my phone number. The whole farce finally ended.

In this emergency situation, I discovered I'm not the type to buy peace at any cost or let people push me around. I'm the kind of person who makes everyone stand behind me and takes the bullets myself—very courageous, but usually the first to get wiped out when things go wrong haha. This is truly how my subconscious guides my behavior. If anyone who matters to me is involved, I'd probably protect them the same way.

Being offline still can't last too long XD

One evening when I finally connected to the internet, I discovered I'd received 500 emails in just half a day XDD These emails said my website had 'a bunch of people registering'!? I was really nervous! But it turned out to be a spam attack. Really scary—it felt like my website had been hacked.

At that moment, I immediately called my engineer friend to help check the problem. If I'd discovered it any later, my website could have suffered huge losses. This is the downside of being offline—really quite scary, haha! So if anyone tries offline living in the future, I think you should allocate at least 30 minutes each evening to reply to messages, check in with people, or see if there are any issues with your work.

But the benefits of being offline are also very powerful—more time and attention to deeply get to know the people around you, geography, environmental information, and so on. The real-life information right in front of us is actually quite rich. Why do signs use that color? Why is the menu designed that way? Why is the payment flow arranged like this? ... It feels like going back to childhood with a million whys.

When I returned to Kinmen Tourist Area for a stroll, with internet access, my million-questions mode transformed into using GPT's image & voice capabilities, asking it where this place was, why the mineral color in this cave differed from the adjacent one, and what the plaque meant. It's another kind of digital travel insight—both offline and online have their merits and drawbacks.

🎯 7-Day Heptabase Workshop Production Insights

Those of you following me in LINE groups or on Threads should know I've been working hard on creating a workshop. I actually started with just three major steps:

• 1️⃣【Free 30-minute Heptabase Quick Start Tutorial Video】
  (I originally planned to place the video on course platforms, offering discount codes to give readers the feeling they'd already purchased my course. Later I felt 30 minutes was too long and platform learners wouldn't watch it)
• + 2️⃣【7-Day Case Study Challenge】
  (Want to give beginners one hands-on task daily to quickly get up to speed with Heptabase)
• + 3️⃣【Have Readers Submit Work to a Public Notion Page】
  (Achieving social exposure & mutual learning as a bonus)

Surprisingly, the third point "submit assignments" turned out to be an entirely new system! I initially thought it was just a simple form, but researching and building this system took significant time, turning the 7-day workshop into one of my major projects of the year!

I also hope to translate this course into English or add English subtitles to help more Heptabase users.

This whiteboard is the workspace I used for the 7-day workshop, where I completed all copywriting, email titles, subtitles, content, and automation logic—all thought structuring & writing happened on this board. I honestly don't know if my life would lack structure and efficiency without Heptabase.

I'm truly grateful for this software that coexists with me, accompanying me through this chapter of my educational life.

I'm also truly grateful for my own effort. After completing this workshop, I'll offer it to you for free! You'll then receive a new welcome email, my life story (~2,500 words), seven days of lessons, and follow-up marketing emails.

Then I'd ask you all to help me "debug"—find typos or broken links. Currently I have no outsourcing or collaborations, but I quite enjoy this artisan-spirited lifestyle.

Asking Felo 'Who is KnowledgeGut' revealed that even LINE community information gets indexed!

Sometimes I randomly experiment with AI, and it's surprising! Felo even indexes LINE community data. In the future, I really need a multimodal content strategy, not just specializing in one platform. I recommend setting your LINE community to "public" so AI can discover it! Also include keywords in your title to increase discovery by potential customers.

📣 This Week's Heart-Warming Share

📌 Xiaochang's Self-Made SEO Article Optimization Bot

Following the six Google documents provided by Teacher Lian Qiyou, I created a GPT bot for my 100 classmates to use together! Since the content is publicly available from Google, I felt comfortable sharing it with more people—another free resource giveaway XD Conclusion: Xiaochang hasn't made money yet, so don't learn monetization from me...(lol) I'm currently immersed in the joy of sharing.

📌 Octafacts Game Framework Theory Tool

Last week I attended the【Fresh Time Books x Zhou Yukai Gamification Marketing】in-person course experience session, featuring the author of 《The Gamification Execution Bible》—so exhilarating!

💬 One sentence per week #Gut Talk Wisdom

I hope this newsletter helps you learn something, feel more connected to the world, and grow a little!
If you have any feedback, suggestions, thoughts to share, or recommendations for me, please reply to this email. I'll respond to you thoughtfully.

See you next week in "Gut Talk Newsletter" again~ 😘
by KnowledgeGutfounder Xiaochang

---

Xiaochang is meticulous about typography; if you spot typos or formatting issues, please reach out to Xiaochang's IG Contact! All articles come from Heptabase Xiaochang's Second Brain🧠 Content is purely human-written, never AI-generated.

If you have any questions about the article content, or if there are any parts you'd like me to elaborate on, feel free to leave a comment below and let me know～
Some links in the article are "Affiliate Marketing" links. If you click through and make a purchase, Xiaochang receives a tiny little bit of commission (it won't affect the price).




by Knowledge Management Mentor Xiaochang🌭