Around 2020, Raymond Hou (Raymond) moved the home base for his personal writing from the publishing platform Medium to self-hosted WordPress websites (lifehacker.tw and raymondhouch.com), and completed the site integration in 2021. This was an infrastructure decision made during the same period in which he left traditional employment and began a company of one. In retrospect, the move was not merely a change of tools; it shifted his content from “living on someone else’s platform” to “running on a foundation he owned.”
Background: Medium Brought Visibility and Constraints
Raymond began writing on Medium in 2017. He attracted readers with topics such as digital tools and productivity, became a Top Writer in the category, and ranked among the leading Medium writers in Taiwan by follower count (see Writing Takes Off (2017–2018)). Medium’s value to him was clear: it had a low barrier to entry and built-in traffic, and accumulated keywords that helped potential collaborators find him. Speaking, collaboration, and consulting opportunities often came through the platform.
As his writing volume and commercial goals grew, however, the platform’s limitations emerged. In later articles, Raymond identified two concrete pain points. First was Chinese-language layout: he said overseas platforms such as Medium rarely optimize quotation and page styles for Chinese-language users. Second was control over features and data. He liked Medium’s highlighting and commenting features, but they were tied to the platform and could not be extended by authors. He says he had already been maintaining a “Medium article data database” in Airtable in 2018, showing that he had recognized early on that to run this work he needed to control the content’s metadata rather than leave it to the platform.1
The Decision: Move the Foundation to His Own Site
When he left employment and started a business in 2020, Raymond moved his writing base to self-hosted WordPress. The central reasons were ownership and control: bring traffic, domains, content assets, and reader relationships back from the platform and under his own name. On a self-hosted site, he could customize a Chinese-friendly layout, use plugins to restore highlighting and commenting features that had been available on Medium, and turn the site into a searchable personal sales kit that he could proactively send to people. At the same time, he judged that content on Facebook and other social platforms was fleeting and difficult to preserve or build upon. He therefore separated “long-form writing that accumulates over time” from “social posts that spread immediately,” letting in-depth content settle on his own sites.
This choice was consistent with what many Chinese-language solo creators of the same period were doing. Raymond saw the same milestones—“build a site with WordPress and move over from Medium,” “write a newsletter and launch a podcast,” and “create online courses”—as a shared path for a generation of independent creators. He used Waki of Reading Vanguard as a point of comparison and someone from whom to learn.2 In other words, the move was not an isolated technical preference but a tested infrastructure path for an independent business.
Consequences: An Owned Foundation Supports Multiple Product Lines
After the move, WordPress became the hub of Raymond’s content ecosystem. More than three hundred long-form blog posts had accumulated there by 2025. The websites also hosted the Raymond Weekly newsletter subscription entry point, routed people to online courses, and served as the public face of his personal brand. Because he owned the content and reader list, he could direct traffic along a conversion path of his choosing without being governed by a single platform’s algorithm. This point recurred in later discussions about “escaping algorithmic control” and “readers across platforms.”
The move also reflected his higher-level work philosophy: turning tacit knowledge into digital assets that can accumulate and be reused (see Writing and Second Brain). If content lives on someone else’s platform, ownership and control of the asset remain incomplete. Moving to self-hosted WordPress provided a stable foundation for the logic of “selling the same unit of time many times.” It is a key point for understanding the infrastructure thinking of Raymond as a Super Individual, and a preparatory step in his transition from writer to operator of a company of one (see The Self-Employed Era (2020–) and Three Seasons of the Raymond Thirty Brand (2020–2023)).
Note on Timing
Sources differ slightly in how they record the year of the move. Personal profiles and interviews often use his 2020 departure from employment and startup as the narrative starting point, while the life timeline dates “moving from Medium to self-hosted WordPress” and site integration to 2021. A consistent interpretation is that the decision and main migration took place around his departure and startup in 2020, while integration of lifehacker.tw and raymondhouch.com was completed in stages in 2021.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “[Chinese Introduction] Airtable, the Most Powerful Cloud Database: More Than a Spreadsheet—Project Management, CRM, and Product Development,” WordPress article, 2020-09-30. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Don’t Turn a Hobby into Work; Creation and Practice Bring Commercial Value | Digital Life Atlas,” WordPress article, 2023-02-14. View original ↩