Traveler set to be on top of the world

Her team recorded her stay with a local family in a cave dwelling on top of a mountain. A big tree made a natural canopy over them, and the precipice was close to the living area.

"It was fun moving around, looking for photo opportunities and picking corn in the fields," she recalls.

When she shared her moments online, one of her juniors commented that Zheng lived one of the 100 lives most people wanted. It inspired her to come up with the One Hundred Lives documentary.

Zheng kept exploring grasslands, deserts and oceans that brought her joy, challenge and surprise. In 2019, she lived on a boat for a week in the ocean off Phuket Island, Thailand, and experienced nighttime scuba diving. "It's a nervous yet exciting feeling to sleep under the starry night in the middle of the ocean," she recalls.

Those experiences off the beaten track have drawn many to follow her online. When Zheng edited about 18 experiences, notably her immersive interactions with locals, into the first season of her documentary and put it online in early 2020, she got over 20,000 views the first day.

In spite of the initial success, Zheng soon found that short video production was beset with the inevitable problems of long production cycle, high costs and low returns. Funding and manpower problems then came her way.

Being a fledgling player in the market, Zheng didn't have a firm grasp on her business model. "The team's work wasn't planned well enough and I incurred greater than anticipated costs during filming," she explains.