Chi-Wei Lin: From an Internationally Awarded Physical Board Game Brand to a Software Platform for 200,000 Creators

30-Second Overview: Chi-Wei Lin (English name Chi-Wei Lin, commonly known online as CW or CW Lin) is a Taiwanese entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Portaly. He graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU) and earned a master's in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. From traditional industry to software to AI, every transition meant starting from scratch. His first venture was the children's educational board game brand "Shepherd Kit," which won a Silver Award at the US Parents' Choice Awards in 2014 — setting Taiwan's best-ever record — and raised over US$1 million in cumulative crowdfunding. It was acquired by CommonWealth Magazine Group in 2021. In 2022, he built Portaly (company name: Real Engine), which became Taiwan's largest creator commerce platform within four years. Profitable since 2025 with no paid marketing throughout, it grew via organic product-led growth (PLG). He is also an entrepreneur in the 13th cohort of the AAMA Taipei Incubator Program, and a columnist for Manager Today and Meet, continuously sharing AI and startup growth methods through build in public. The donation payment processing for this knowledge base you're reading runs on his platform.

In 2014, at the US Parents' Choice Awards toy design competition — known as the Oscars of the toy world — nearly 400 entries competed. A small Taipei company walked away with two Silver Awards, beating LEGO and tying for second place with a remote-controlled car backed by Apple, setting Taiwan's best-ever record in the competition. ¹ The company was called Shepherd Kit. It didn't make light-up plastic toys, but physical board games that taught children aged 4 to 10 to love mathematics, archaeology, and ecology. The founder was Chi-Wei Lin, an NTU Electrical Engineering graduate who, after earning his master's at UCLA, gave up his PhD admission, declined a chip-design career in Silicon Valley, and returned to Taiwan to make educational tools for children. ¹²

He took his board games to crowdfunding platforms one by one, from Taiwan's zeczec to Kickstarter in the US. Lin says cumulative crowdfunding exceeded US$1 million, products shipped to 20+ countries, and they were invited to collaborate with the British Museum. ³ In 2021, Shepherd Kit was sold to CommonWealth Magazine. ³

The Person Who Turned Knowledge into Games

Archaeology, forests, mathematics. Every Shepherd Kit game essentially did the same thing: take a piece of hard-to-grasp real-world knowledge, break it down into rules children would willingly play with. "Taiwanese kids are good at math, but they hate math," he described the problem he wanted to solve in an interview with The Reporter (Crossing). ⁴

In 2017, he did something no one in the industry had done: he persuaded the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung to license its IP — the Changbin and Beinan cultural artifacts — to a startup of fewer than 10 people, turning them into the board game Prehistoric Adventure. This was Taiwan's first board game co-developed by a private startup and a public museum. Two years of back-and-forth communication, ten full revisions, and the crowdfunding campaign raised over six times its target. "Can we make the knowledge inside museums, make Taiwan's history, easier for people to actively approach?" he said. He wanted to be the museum's "translator konjac" (a metaphor for a transparent, neutral medium that faithfully transmits without distortion). ²

This habit later became his company's name. Portaly's parent company is called "Real Engine" (真實引擎). ⁵

📝 Curator's Note
Looking at Lin's two entrepreneurial chapters, a hidden thread emerges: his work has always been about "conversion." Converting knowledge into games, influence into revenue, traffic into business. But the biggest conversion is himself: jumping from woodworking tools in traditional industry into software, then into AI — each time starting from zero, each time reaching the frontier of that field. In toys, he set Taiwan's best record at US toy awards; in software, he built Taiwan's largest creator platform; in the AI era, his method documents were republished by media and adopted by thousands. The product changed three times; the capacity to learn and adapt never did.

Portaly Portal Goes Live

After selling Shepherd Kit in 2021, the track reset to zero. He later reflected on this transition on Medium: ten years ago he started a business for "self-actualization"; ten years later the reason became "I want to understand the world more." "In the world of entrepreneurship, I became an explorer." ⁶

In 2022, Lin noticed something: the influencers and KOLs he had worked with had content scattered across Instagram, YouTube, official websites, and e-commerce pages, but no single place to bring it all together. Tools like Linktree already existed abroad, but their templates were fixed, text-only, and couldn't express personal brand differentiation.

Enter Portaly. Its modular blocks let creators assemble their own pages. "Creators can build a unique, dedicated page in under half an hour, breaking free from the traditional 'templated' Link-in-Bio impression," Lin said in an early 2023 interview with Meet. ⁵

In September 2022, Portaly had only 6,000 registered users. By February 2023, it closed a US$350,000 seed round led by AVA Angel Fund. ⁵ Users included individual creators like Blue Pigeon and Useless Girlfriend, alongside brands like Eslite, CommonWealth Magazine, and the P.LEAGUE+ professional basketball league. ⁵

The problems in the Taiwan market and overseas markets differed. Lin gave a very down-to-earth example in the same interview:

Taiwan users ask: "Do you have a dou-nei (donate/tip) feature?"
Overseas users ask: "Can you embed this dou-nei platform?"

One wants the feature built in; the other wants integration out. "How to 'connect' these platforms will be our top priority," he said. ⁵

From 0 to 200,000+ Users, Zero Marketing Spend

On June 5, 2023, Portaly launched a new feature on Product Hunt: enter a URL, and AI generates your personal page in one click. The team positioned it as the world's first AI-driven Link-in-Bio tool, hitting #2 Product of the Day within 24 hours. ⁷ That same year, Portaly was selected for Meet Taipei's "Neo Star" — 30 startups chosen from roughly 250 teams annually ⁸ — and Lin himself joined the 13th cohort of the AAMA Taipei Incubator Program, a long-term mentorship program led by seasoned entrepreneurs. ⁹

According to AAMA's introduction, Portaly is Taiwan's largest creator/KOC platform, with overseas traffic accounting for about 30%. ⁹ Per Lin's public data, by 2025 the platform had accumulated over 200,000 creators, the company became profitable starting in 2025, revenue grew over 20x from 2023 to 2025, and throughout there was no marketing team, no paid acquisition — growth came purely from the product itself, i.e., organic PLG (product-led growth). ¹⁰

📝 Curator's Note
"No marketing team" sounds like a weakness in VC circles. But for Portaly it's the argument: if a tool is good enough that creators bring their peers in organically, it doesn't need ads. Profitability, zero marketing, and PLG all holding true simultaneously — that's the genuinely hard-to-replicate part.

Build in Public Practitioner

In recent years, Lin added another identity: build in public practitioner. He's done this for years: in Portaly's early days, he publicly shared the team's method for interviewing 100 super-influencer clients in six weeks ¹¹; in 2024, he grew a Threads account from 120 followers to 10,000 in two months, then wrote up the algorithm logic and growth strategy in full, which Business Next licensed for republication ¹²; in 2026, expanding to Silicon Valley, he documented the situation of Taiwanese founders in the AI gold rush and published it in Meet. ¹³ He simultaneously writes columns for Manager Today and Meet, covering not success theology but what he's actually using: full AI product development workflows, AI culture checklists for managers, the AI Vault knowledge management system. ¹⁴¹⁵ He open-sourced his AI knowledge base architecture as Vault for Founders, and wrote a beginner's guide to OpenClaw for non-engineers called the "Lobster Manual"; per his public data, these AI documents have been adopted and shared by over a thousand people. ¹⁰ In 2026 he was invited to Stripe Sessions (per his public data, as an Asia-Pacific founder representative), and his first act after returning was writing a retrospective reminding Taiwanese startups: does your business model have a place for AI agents? ¹⁵¹⁰

This habit runs through both ventures: the crowdfunding and museum licensing experience from the Shepherd Kit era, the PLG and AI adoption methods from the Portaly era — he organized all of it into things others can directly use. From physical board games to creator pages to AI operating methods, the product's form changed three times, but the underlying line didn't: find where someone is stuck, build a machine to help them convert what's stuck, then share the method with the next stuck person.

This also explains a small coincidence. The knowledge base you're reading now, Taiwan.md, states on its sponsorship page "Payment processed by Portaly," with the donation link pointing to portaly.cc/taiwanmd/support. ¹⁶ When a Taiwanese person wants to speak for Taiwan and raise funds globally, the payment layer happens to be built by another Taiwanese person.

Transparency Disclosure: The initial draft of this article was written and submitted by the subject himself (CW Lin). Content is primarily based on third-party public reporting; only items marked "per Lin Chi-wei's public data" are sourced from his official website or social media posts.

Further Reading:

• AAMA Taipei Incubator Program: Lin Chi-wei is a Cohort 13 entrepreneur in this two-year, one-on-one mentorship program — a Taiwan startup support model that neither invests nor takes equity.

References