Hubei Post-90s Seller Turns AI Artifact Cards into $28M Annual Income
A business sparked by a wayward postcard. Luo Bi, a post-90s entrepreneur in Hubei who founded Shuming Tech, posted $20 million in revenue last year with a team of just 30. They don't sell software. They sell physical cards printed with high-resolution images of cultural relics, priced at $30 each. American high schoolers treat them like yearbooks: one card per month to mark milestones, with 90% of users buying all 12 at once. Total sales have passed 1 million copies, 95% of them from the United States.
The business started with a pain point at museums. Visitors scanned codes to hear AI narration, but it stopped working whenever the Wi-Fi dropped. The team sent postcards with QR codes as a workaround, and visitors started collecting them on their own. A limited run of gold-foil-themed cards—just over 300 sets—sold out in two days, with a girl from another province taking a taxi just to get some. On the back, an AI digital avatar can speak in 143 languages, record the user's story, and tell it to everyone else around the world who holds the same card. That emotional ritual of "leaving a mark" resonates with overseas buyers far more than the relic itself.
Even more counterintuitive is the efficiency per person. This year the team was slimmed to 17 people, with plans to cut further down to 12. Most execution work now goes to AI; employees focus on thinking, judgment, and creativity. Topic selection, scripting, storyboarding, and editing run in parallel through agents, producing one video every seven minutes on average. The company moved out of its office in Optics Valley. Eleven domestic employees work remotely, and they meet in person only twice a week for team-building.
A quick note: this case reveals a structural opportunity in cultural exports—shifting from "cultural output" to "emotional utility." Traditional cultural products lean on Eastern exoticism, but the American market responds better to personalized memory carriers. AI has slashed content production costs, letting small teams validate global demand at minimal expense. The core barrier in a model like "physical card + AI avatar + social memory" isn't technology (generating content is now extremely cheap). It's the precise grasp of a specific group's emotional needs and control over the supply chain. If this model can be adapted to other high-emotional-value objects—vinyl records, collectible figurines—it could spawn a new generation of small cultural exporters.
Original: Selling AI Artifact Cards to Americans: A Post-90s Founder in Hubei Hits $20 Million Annually