DEV Community: Văn Tuấn Lê

AI and I Came Up With a New Website Idea. Then I Asked: Are We Selling Combs to Monks?

Văn Tuấn Lê — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 04:10:16 +0000

When you are a solo creator experimenting with AI, it is dangerously easy to generate elaborate project ideas. Give an LLM a tiny spark, and within minutes you have a brand, a database, a tool, a premium version, a marketing strategy, and a five-year roadmap.

I recently went through this cycle while looking for a project to host on a new, inexpensive VPS. AI and I brainstormed everything from Chinese grocery ingredient guides to specialized condiment databases and personalized Chinese stone seals.

Every time, the AI made the business model sound brilliant. But it reminded me of the classic business parable about selling combs to monks: sometimes, being clever enough to invent a use for a product doesn't mean anyone actually wants it.

The Danger of AI-Generated Validation

The more detailed an imagined business becomes, the more real it feels. When exploring a niche for Chinese seasonings, we mapped out comparisons for soy sauces, vinegars, and pastes. It looked like a classic SEO playbook: focused databases, comparison tools, and substitution guides.

Then I asked a sobering question: How does this website actually make money?

A user lands on the site, reads about light versus dark soy sauce, and then buys a $4 bottle at their local Asian supermarket. The website makes $0. There is a vast difference between "this person needs information" and "this person is about to spend money."

Pivoting to a Transactional Niche

We shifted to another idea: custom Chinese stone seals derived from my existing project, ChineseNameCraft. Instead of just reading an article, users could design their own seal glyphs online and order a physical carved stone.

The commercial path was tighter, but a core question remained: Does anyone in Europe or America wake up needing a traditional Chinese seal?

Low competition can mean opportunity, but it can also mean nobody cares.

Testing Without Building a Monolith

Rather than spending months building a standalone seal website from scratch, I decided to test the demand directly inside an existing workflow. Users who generate a Chinese name will see an option to view it as a seal. If thousands of relevant users see the feature and nobody clicks "buy," the market has spoken. If they do, a tiny business is validated.

Having a normal day job and a low-fixed-cost server means I can treat these websites as long-term experiments rather than overnight rental payments. You can read the full breakdown of how I evaluate these projects on my personal blog: AI and I Came Up With a New Website Idea. Then I Asked: Are We Selling Combs to Monks?

17 Surprising Ways to Use GitHub for a One-Person Website Business

Văn Tuấn Lê — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:10:17 +0000

For a long time, I thought GitHub was basically Dropbox for programmers. You write code, you upload it, other developers look at it. That was about it. Then I started building small experimental websites like ChineseFortuneTools.online.

While building it, I slowly realized something: GitHub is much more than a code repository. For a solo website owner, GitHub can become part hosting platform, part database, part automation server, part analytics pipeline, part monitoring service, part API server, and even part product-management system. And most of this can be done for little or no cost.

Here are 17 ways I now use — or plan to use — GitHub to run a one-person website business.

1. GitHub Pages Can Be a Free Website Host

The most obvious feature is still surprisingly useful. GitHub Pages can publish a static website directly from a repository. That means HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and JSON files can become a real website without renting another server.

2. GitHub Actions Can Become a Free Robot Employee

This was the feature that changed how I looked at GitHub. GitHub Actions lets code run automatically on a schedule, when code changes, or via manual triggers. My robots can check SEO, collect analytics, monitor pages, generate files, and update data automatically.

3. GitHub Can Automatically Pull My GA4 Traffic Data

Instead of checking multiple Google Analytics dashboards manually, I connected GA4 to GitHub Actions. Every day, a script collects active users, sessions, and tool usage so my site can track what people actually use.

4. GitHub Can Pull Google Search Console Data Too

By connecting Search Console to GitHub Actions, a robot collects impressions, clicks, CTR, and search queries across experimental properties.

5. JSON Files Can Work Like a Tiny Free Database

Not every website needs MySQL or Supabase. For public, read-heavy data that doesn't need complex user accounts, simple static JSON files (like tools.json or metrics.json) fetch directly into the site interface.

6. A JSON File Can Also Become a Free API

An API doesn't always need a complicated backend. If a public JSON file lives at a predictable URL, another application can easily fetch it.

7. GitHub Issues Can Become a Lightweight Product Database

An Issue is a structured object with a title, description, labels, comments, and status. On an experimental site, a new tool idea simply becomes an Issue with an "idea" label.

8. GitHub Reactions Can Become a Voting System

A 👍 on an Issue becomes a vote. An Action can periodically read the Issues, count reactions, rank ideas, and generate a JSON file to display community favorites.

9. GitHub Can Be a Gold Mine for Product Research

Instead of inventing every feature from scratch, I can study successful open-source projects to see what features users request, what they complain about, and which Issues keep appearing.

10. GitHub Is Also a Huge Open Data Warehouse

Thousands of projects publish useful data as JSON, CSV, YAML, or SQLite databases. If licensing permits, this can dramatically reduce the cost of building tools.

11. GitHub Secrets Can Safely Store API Keys

Instead of putting secret API keys in browser JavaScript, GitHub Secrets let private GitHub Actions handle sensitive environment variables safely.

12. GitHub Actions Can Call AI in the Background

Instead of making real-time AI API calls on every user request, GitHub Actions can run weekly to pre-generate cultural tips, summaries, or structured FAQs and save them as JSON.

13. GitHub Can Run Automatic SEO Audits

An SEO robot can check page titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, canonicals, and broken links, creating an Issue if something important disappears.

14. GitHub Can Take Automated Screenshots of My Websites

A GitHub Action can open selected pages and capture desktop and mobile screenshots to maintain a visual history and catch layout breaks early.

15. GitHub Can Become a Remote Control for Multiple Websites

By maintaining a central configuration file (site-config/config.json), multiple websites can read feature flags or kill switches instantly from one repository.

16. GitHub Can Manage the Entire Life Cycle of an Experiment

Tools can move through strict stages—Lab, Beta, Stable, Graduate, or Retire—tracked by automated metrics to ensure ideas are backed by real traffic before investing further.

17. GitHub Can Become a One-Person Business Dashboard

By piping data from GA4, Search Console, and custom scripts into metrics JSON files, GitHub acts as the central machinery behind a tiny internet business.

Note: This article was originally published on Ordinary Man Trying, where I document experiments in building small internet projects.

I Bought a Domain for $1 — Here’s What I Built With AI and GitHub

Văn Tuấn Lê — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:10:43 +0000

I bought a domain for about one dollar. That sentence usually kicks off an internet story where the writer pivots three paragraphs later into how they turned that single dollar into ten thousand dollars.

My internet revenue is still: $0. I haven’t made my first dollar online yet.

What I do have, however, is a real website, working tools, an automated analytics dashboard, and a reusable system for building tiny web assets. This is the story of what happened when I stopped chasing grand startup ideas and decided to see how far one ordinary person could take a $1 domain using AI, GitHub, and mostly free infrastructure.

The $1 Domain Experiment

The domain is ChineseFortuneTools.online. It cost roughly a dollar for the first year. Instead of letting it sit unused, I asked a simple question: What is the most I can learn from a $1 domain?

I didn't want to fake a million-dollar startup or generate thousands of low-quality AI articles. I wanted to build small, useful web utilities. I set up a Chinese Culture Lab featuring tools like:

A Chinese gift taboo checker
A red envelope calculator
An exact Chinese zodiac calculator
Festival countdowns
A 2027 Chinese New Year greeting generator

You can explore the live experiment at ChineseFortuneTools.online.

AI Made Building Easy, But Created a New Problem

A few years ago, building several interactive web tools would have required substantial technical knowledge and time. Today, working with tools like ChatGPT and Claude changes the economics completely. I describe the product, AI helps draft the architecture, writes and reviews the code, and helps debug when things break.

This gives you a dangerous superpower: you can have a new idea every five minutes. A calculator, a quiz, a new domain, a new niche. Soon you have dozens of things under construction and no idea if anyone wants them.

Building is no longer the hard part. Deciding what deserves to be built further is.

Turning GitHub Into a Swiss Army Knife

Before this project, I thought of GitHub purely as a place to store code. For a tiny one-person operation, I discovered it can replace a mountain of paid services, acting as:

Static website hosting
A scheduled computer (via GitHub Actions)
A simple JSON database
An AI job scheduler
A monitoring and SEO check system

A website can read data directly from a tools.json file. A scheduled GitHub Action updates public metrics automatically. Suddenly, GitHub does job routing, data storage, deployment, and monitoring for close to zero infrastructure cost.

Building the Factory

After building a few sites, I realized I was asking AI to rebuild the same boring boilerplate every time: sitemaps, robots.txt, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, structured data, and analytics wiring.

So I built a private, reusable system I call the One-Person Site Starter. The stack is intentionally simple: Python, Jinja2, Markdown, plain CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. No React, no heavy frameworks, no database by default. A configuration file defines the site, and the system handles the infrastructure automatically.

The first real site created from this system is ChinaTea101.com.

The Reality Check

Cheap technology does not equal easy money. AI can write code, but it cannot force people to visit your site. GitHub can host your project, but it cannot make people care.

Distribution, trust, brand, and patience still matter. That is why I am documenting the journey openly while my revenue remains at zero. My first goal isn't a massive monthly income; it is to earn a single dollar from someone I don't personally know, proving the machine works.

Note: This article was originally published as I Bought a Domain for $1 — Here’s What I Built With AI + GitHub on Ordinary Man Trying.

Why I Finally Fixed the WWW Redirect on My Indie Project

Văn Tuấn Lê — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 22:10:13 +0000

Why I Finally Fixed the WWW Redirect on My Indie Project

Today I fixed a very small problem on CutDone. It was not a new feature. It did not make the site look better. And it probably will not bring me any traffic tomorrow.

I simply made sure that www.cutdone.com permanently redirects to cutdone.com.

It sounds tiny. Maybe even boring. But this is exactly the kind of thing I want to start recording. A few years ago, I probably would not have written about something this small. But when an ordinary person builds websites and products with AI, most days are not big launches or exciting milestones. A lot of the time, it is just small fixes, small mistakes, small discoveries, and slowly figuring things out.

The Problem and the Fix

I spent some time inside Cloudflare trying to understand how the redirect should work. At first, I thought I might need to build the rule manually. Then I noticed there was already a template called "Redirect from WWW to root".

That was exactly what I needed. I used that template, checked the settings, saved it, and tested the result. It worked. Now the WWW version correctly redirects to the main domain.

That is it. A very small task.

Why Document the Boring Stuff?

If I keep recording these little things for five years, maybe they will eventually become the most interesting part of the story. Not just the successful launches. Not just the traffic numbers. But all the small moments where I did not quite know what I was doing, tried something, fixed something, learned something, and moved one step forward.

Today, it was a 301 redirect. Tomorrow, it will probably be something else.

This article was originally published on Ordinary Man Trying.

Why the Ordinary Photos You Delete Today Will Be Priceless in Ten Years

Văn Tuấn Lê — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:10:46 +0000

Recently, I set up a private home photo system using Docker and PhotoPrism. I originally viewed it as a simple technical project: install the software, import years of scattered folders, and let the system map out dates and locations. But after uploading more than 4,000 old photographs and opening the map view, something unexpected happened. I stopped seeing data files and started seeing my life.

There were circles scattered across maps of places I had almost forgotten. A meal, a hotel, a street, a family gathering. And suddenly, I became strangely nervous about losing them. Many of these photographs had spent years sitting quietly on hard drives, untouched. Some were blurry, badly framed, or seemingly mundane. At the time they were taken, I barely thought about them.

Why does an ordinary photograph become more valuable as time passes?

The Photo Has Not Changed

The strange part is that the photograph itself is identical. The pixels haven't improved, and the composition hasn't magically gotten better. A mediocre photo taken ten years ago remains a mediocre photo technically. Yet emotionally, its value skyrockets because the world inside it has changed.

The child is older. The parents have aged. The restaurant no longer exists. The street has been rebuilt. Time quietly transforms photographs from a record of the ordinary into evidence of a world that has vanished.

We Photograph the Present, But We Are Saving the Past

When we take photos, we usually think we are capturing the immediate present—a lunch, a train ride, a messy desk, someone cooking dinner. None of these feel historic while they are happening. That is precisely why we delete so many of them.

We think:

"This one isn't very good."
"We already have three similar ones."
"My phone storage is running out."

These are entirely reasonable thoughts, but they miss a core truth: we do not yet know what our future self will miss. The famous landmark photo might end up sitting quietly in a folder, while the picture you treasure decades from now is your father sitting in an old chair, an ordinary neighborhood grocery store, or a dog sleeping beside the door.

Nobody announces when a chapter of life is quietly closing. Nobody tells you that this is the last year your child will sit at a specific table every single night.

Technology and the Economics of Memory

Digital photography has made images overwhelmingly abundant. When film was limited, every frame felt precious. Today, we can take 300 photos before lunch, which naturally lowers our perceived value of individual files.

However, time reverses the equation entirely. Twenty years down the line, even a technically poor photograph becomes completely irreplaceable. There is no camera you can buy in the future that can return to today, and no AI model can truly recreate the exact expression on a loved one's face. The cost of creating an image approaches zero, but the cost of losing it approaches infinity.

Photographing the Normal

This realization has slightly changed how I view photography. I don't want tens of thousands of meaningless duplicates, but I've started appreciating the normal.

Take pictures of your parents' home, your desk, the view outside your window, your local supermarket, or dinner before everyone digs in. The purpose of these photos shouldn't just be "look how beautiful this is," but rather: "this is what our life looked like."

Storage is cheap; the past is not. If you want to read more about my thoughts on digital preservation and managing memories, check out the original post on Ordinary Man Trying.

Take the photograph. Not endlessly, but occasionally when nothing special is happening—because that's when life is actually taking place.

Should I Build One Big Website or Many Small Ones? Lessons from a Subway Exit

Văn Tuấn Lê — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 10:10:22 +0000

One evening after work, walking out of a subway station, I noticed something I had seen countless times: dozens of shared bicycles parked neatly near the exit, right alongside several motorcycle taxi drivers waiting for passengers.

The shared bicycles are cheap, quick, and ideal for short hops. The motorcycle taxis are more expensive, depend on local experience, trust, and regular riders, and offer a completely different type of service. Yet, they are directly competing for the same commuter.

Watching them made me think about a very practical question that applies directly to indie hacking and content creation: If I am starting out, should I build many small websites (like placing shared bikes across the city) or focus entirely on one big website (like becoming an established motorcycle driver at one station)?

The Motorcycle Drivers Are the Established Websites

Imagine building a niche site—say, around traditional topics like Chinese Feng Shui. Large, established websites in that niche are the motorcycle taxi drivers.

They have been operating for years. They have old domains, historical backlinks, comprehensive databases, newsletters, and direct brand search traffic. They know their station inside and out.

As a newcomer launching a fresh site, you arrive with none of that history. You are standing at the same subway exit with zero authority, trying to capture attention while massive competitors sit right beside you.

A Small Website Is Like a Shared Bicycle

Because competing head-to-head with established giants is brutal, many creators lean toward building small websites instead.

A shared bicycle doesn't need to be the dominant transportation system of a city. It just needs to be useful to someone at the right place and the right moment.

Similarly, a small website doesn't need thousands of pages or an enormous brand. It might consist of:

One useful calculator
A single niche generator
A concise set of guides
A very specific utility

The cost is low. Domains are cheap, hosting is inexpensive, and modern tooling lets you build quickly without a team. You can place one small site here, another there, and explore different markets.

Ten Bicycles Are Still Only Ten Bicycles

However, diversification has a hidden trap. Suppose you spread ten small websites across ten different niches.

It sounds productive, but ask yourself:

Does each project have enough good content?
Is it updated?
Does it have proper analytics and a clear purpose?

Often, managing twenty projects just means owning twenty half-finished experiments. Sometimes diversification isn't brilliant strategy; it's simply a lack of focus.

What If I Choose the Wrong Station?

Conversely, the classic advice is to "focus on one thing for ten years." But that advice assumes the station you chose is actually worth your decade.

What if you spend years building the world's best niche site, only to find that search intent has shifted, monetization is weak, or larger competitors dominate every viable keyword? Five years of misplaced focus isn't discipline—it's just time spent in the wrong place.

Explore First, Then Concentrate

The solution isn't a permanent binary choice between one monolithic site and twenty scattered micro-sites. Instead, treat them as sequential stages:

Explore cheaply: Build several small things with low overhead. Try different markets. Do not become emotionally attached too early. Let real data show you where demand actually exists.
Concentrate when proven: When one project clearly outperforms the others—showing real visitor traction, return usage, or revenue—stop treating every project equally. Give the winner your time, better tools, and deeper content.

The danger isn't failure; the danger is keeping a weak website alive for years with just enough trickle traffic to drain your focus.

Final Thoughts

The goal shouldn't be accumulating a massive portfolio of neglected sites. The goal is running experiments to discover where people actually want to go—and then deciding whether to place another bicycle there, or stay and build a lasting vehicle.

(This thought originally appeared on Ordinary Man Trying.)

How Much Should a Digital Product Cost? I Asked AI, Studied the Market, and Changed How I Think About Pricing

Văn Tuấn Lê — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:10:17 +0000

When I recently finished building a paid version of my small product, CutDone (where users create and customize printable goal lists), I ran into a question that looked simple at first: How much should I charge?

Should it be $2.99? $3.99? $4.99? $5.99?

I originally thought pricing was mostly a matter of intuition. Pick a number that feels reasonable and move on. But after discussing it with AI and looking at similar products across the web, I realized that pricing is much deeper than I had thought. And surprisingly mathematical.

CutDone Is Not a Zero-Cost Product

It would be wrong to say a digital product costs nothing. There are real fixed costs: time spent developing it, domain costs, infrastructure, maintenance, testing, and future customer support. Most importantly, there is my own time.

However, once the product is built, the economics change. The cost of serving one additional customer becomes very small. Whether 10 people use it or 10,000, the server cost doesn't scale linearly the way it would for a physical product.

So there are two different costs:

Fixed cost: building and maintaining the product.
Marginal cost: the cost of serving one more customer (close to zero for digital goods).

For digital products, pricing isn't about covering ingredient costs like a restaurant. It is about behavior.

The Formula Is Simple

The basic formula is straightforward:
$$\text{Revenue} = \text{Price} \times \text{Number of Buyers}$$

The difficult part is that the number of buyers changes when the price changes. Lower the price, and more people may buy. Raise it, and fewer people will buy. The real goal is not to maximize price, nor is it to maximize the number of buyers. It is to maximize Price × Buyers.

A Simple Example

Imagine 1,000 people reach the payment screen. Depending on customer sensitivity, the optimal revenue point shifts. If a price of $4.99 yields a 3.0% conversion rate, it generates $149.70. If lowering it to $3.99 pushes conversion to 3.5%, it generates $139.65. Same product, different revenue.

One calculation became immediately useful to me: Suppose I am charging $4.99 and consider lowering it to $3.99. How many more customers do I need just to make the same revenue?

The answer is about 25%. If 100 people buy at $4.99, I need roughly 125 people to buy at $3.99 just to stay even. This changes how you think about discounts. Cheap does not automatically mean smart; sometimes you are simply giving away revenue.

Looking at the Market

I checked comparable products across Etsy and Gumroad. Simple printable trackers often sell around $2.99 to $3.99, while more polished planners sit around $4.99 to $5.99. However, many products listed higher are almost permanently discounted into the lower range due to fierce competition.

CutDone is slightly different because the user doesn't just buy a static PDF. They type their own goals, choose styles, preview the result, and see their finished design before deciding to pay. That creates a much stronger moment of purchase.

Why $4.99 Made Sense for Me

$4.99 landed in a sweet spot:

It stays within the normal range for digital printables.
It remains low enough to be an impulse purchase.
It is high enough that the product doesn't feel cheap.
It leaves room to experiment. If conversion is poor, I can always test $3.99 later. Starting low means I might never know if people would have happily paid $4.99.

Can AI Help Find the Best Price?

AI can help calculate an optimal price, but only after real users generate real data. If you test a few price points and track paywall views, checkout starts, and completed purchases, AI can model the demand curve and estimate the revenue-maximizing price. Without data, asking AI for the "perfect price" is just guesswork.

Price Competition Is a Trap

If your only advantage is being cheaper, someone else can always undercut you. $4.99 becomes $3.99, then $2.99, then $1.99. Eventually, everyone fights over nothing.

I'd rather improve the product—make the design better, the experience simpler, and the result worth keeping. If users genuinely like it, I don't need to win a race to the bottom.

This article was originally published on Ordinary Man Trying.

Maybe I’m Just Not Meant to Make Money (Reflections on Building a Product)

Văn Tuấn Lê — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 22:10:20 +0000

I opened Google Analytics to check the traffic to a website I’d been working on. Here’s what I saw:

Active users: 0. New users: 0. Average engagement time: 0 seconds. Event count: 0.

Four zeros. I stared at the screen for a while. There was nothing technically wrong with the dashboard. It was simply showing me what had happened. And somehow, that felt worse, because behind those zeros were many hours of work that the dashboard knew absolutely nothing about.

The Website Nobody Asked Me to Build

A few weeks earlier, I had started building a website called CutDone. Most productivity apps help people add tasks, organize them, and track them. I wanted to build something that helped people make tasks disappear. With CutDone, you create a checklist, print it on paper, and physically cut off each task after completing it.

It wasn't a revolutionary invention. But it was a small idea that I genuinely enjoyed building. I created templates, an AI feature to break down goals, and made the basic tool free. Eventually, I had a functioning product. There was just one small problem: almost nobody knew it existed.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Building a product is satisfying. You have a problem, you fix it, and you see progress. Marketing is entirely different. You can spend an entire afternoon doing things that seem productive and have absolutely nothing to show for them afterward.

I submitted CutDone to software directories, created Pinterest posts, and personally worked through more than 100 outreach emails. I read articles, found contact details, and explained why the tool might be useful. And then I waited. No flood of visitors. Later, I discovered Gmail had stopped dozens of sending attempts because I'd reached a sending limit. My supposedly unsuccessful marketing experiment was messy from the start.

Twenty-Seven Thousand Requests. Almost No People.

At one point, Cloudflare showed 27,040 requests in seven days. For a moment, that number felt wonderful. Then I remembered that server requests are not people. Search engines and automated bots can generate thousands of requests while a website has almost no human audience.

My Google Analytics dashboard showed 163 active users over the previous 28 days—some of which were likely my own testing or automated tools. I still hadn't found a reliable source of people who genuinely wanted to use the product.

Something Someone Said at Dinner

Around this time, I remembered a conversation over dinner. An older friend had said: "Some people just aren’t destined to make money. It doesn’t matter how hard they try."

What if he’s right? What if I’m simply not the kind of person who can make money from a business? I can spend weeks building something and then struggle to convince even ten strangers to try it. Maybe I’m good at building things that nobody needs. Maybe I’m confusing technical progress with business progress.

I'm Old Enough to Know Effort Doesn’t Guarantee Success

I’m 46 years old. I’ve seen enough of life to know that hard work doesn’t automatically lead to financial success. Timing matters. Luck matters. The market matters. And sometimes a product simply isn’t as useful to other people as its creator believes.

There’s also something slightly ridiculous about spending hours discussing button colors and sitemap structures when the website barely has an audience. It’s like carefully arranging the furniture in a restaurant before checking whether anyone wants to eat there.

Maybe I Need a Smaller Definition of Success

Before asking whether CutDone can earn $1,000 a month, maybe I should ask whether ten strangers can find it and genuinely enjoy using it. For the next 30 days, the question doesn’t have to be how much money the website makes. It can simply be whether I can find a repeatable way to bring in real users.

If you want to read more about this journey of building in public without the hype, you can check out the original post on Ordinary Man Trying.

An Ordinary Man, Still Trying

A business can fail without proving that its creator was destined to fail. And a person can be good at creating things without being good at selling them—at least not yet. A Google Analytics dashboard can tell me what happened yesterday. That’s all. Tomorrow is another experiment.

I Found a Better-Looking AI Website. Then I Compared Its Business With Mine.

Văn Tuấn Lê — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:11:09 +0000

A few days ago, I was browsing V2EX, a developer community, when I discovered an independent developer’s project called TextToPoster. It was a simple idea: enter some text, choose a visual direction, and let AI turn it into a poster. The website looked polished. It had an attractive interface, design examples, free trials, user accounts, AI image generation, and subscription plans.

Then I found out the developer had built another website, Designhint, a collection of design prompts combined with an AI image-generation workspace. My immediate reaction was admiration, followed by a slightly uncomfortable comparison.

I had also built a small online product, CutDone.

Mine was less visually impressive. It didn't generate beautiful images on demand. It helped people create printable goal lists, complete tasks, and physically tear or cut off finished items. The products were different, but their businesses had something important in common. Both were small, AI-assisted online tools built by independent developers. Both offered free functionality and paid upgrades. Both needed search traffic, users, and eventually customers.

So I started analyzing both models. Which business had better economics? Which was more likely to attract users? And which would survive as AI became more powerful?

1. Two Different Products, Two Different Business Models

At first glance, TextToPoster has the stronger commercial proposition. Someone who regularly creates marketing images might use it dozens of times a month. A business can justify paying $9.90 monthly if the service saves enough time.

CutDone has a different problem. A person might make a goal list once, print it, and not return for weeks. Even if they love the product, why would they pay $4.99?

That question bothered me more than I expected. A product can be useful without creating a compelling reason to purchase it. And a product that costs almost nothing to operate can still earn almost nothing.

2. The Cost Difference Was Surprising

One of CutDone’s biggest advantages is its low monetary cost. Its domain costs me approximately ¥75 per year. I use Cloudflare for hosting, and some DeepSeek text-generation requests cost approximately ¥0.01 each. The operating model is lightweight, meaning I can afford to keep experimenting.

TextToPoster has different economics. It relies on external AI image services. While public API pricing for standard 1K images might look low (such as around $0.0085 per image), high-resolution outputs and heavy usage add up. When you run unit economic simulations—factoring in free tiers and conversion rates—you realize that a 1% conversion rate might be profitable under one usage pattern and unprofitable under another.

3. The SEO Numbers Were a Reality Check

TextToPoster initially looked like a more successful website than mine. But attractive design and commercial success are two different things. A Semrush organic keyword report for the domain showed minimal estimated organic search traffic at the time of my research.

CutDone has a different SEO strategy, relying on hundreds of ready-made printable lists and specialized landing pages. While it's exciting to see a keyword reach search engine top-ten results temporarily, rankings don't equal paying customers. The real comparison is which website attracts visitors with an actual problem and helps them solve it.

4. What Happens When ChatGPT Can Do It Too?

I found a retail sale poster example on TextToPoster and took the core idea into ChatGPT. I asked for a similar poster, and the result was remarkably close in visual concept.

It raised a question I couldn’t ignore: If ChatGPT can produce a similar result, what happens to specialized AI poster generators in two or three years?

The answer isn't that these tools only exist for people who don't know how to use AI. People pay for convenience all the time. A busy marketer doesn't want to experiment with prompts, manage generations, or manually prepare deliverables. A dedicated tool packages those steps into a faster workflow.

Then I realized CutDone faces exactly the same threat. A user could ask a general-purpose LLM to create a printable goal tracker. My product is not protected simply because it has a special printable layout. It needs to deliver the easiest possible experience of taking a goal from someone's mind and placing it into their physical environment.

5. My Biggest Weakness Might Be Product Presentation

One thing TextToPoster does very well is make its value obvious. You see beautiful poster examples and immediately understand what the website produces.

CutDone is more difficult to explain. A printable strip of paper does not seem particularly exciting on a screen. The interesting part happens afterward: you print the list, put it on your wall, complete a task, and physically remove it.

This made me realize I had been trying to solve a marketing problem with more programming. What I actually needed was simpler: real photographs of my own product being used in ordinary settings.

The Bigger Lesson: AI Has Made Products Cheap, Not Customers Easy

When I first began experimenting with AI-built websites, my attention was almost entirely on what I could create. Could I build a working product? Could I deploy it? Could I add payments?

For CutDone, I have answered many of those questions. Now I face a harder set: Can I attract the right users? Can I help them reach a useful outcome? Can I persuade a small percentage to pay without ruining the free experience?

The cost of building software is approaching zero for many small projects. The cost of finding people who truly value it is not. From now on, I want to spend less time asking what else AI can help me build, and more time finding out what people actually want to use.

Note: This article was originally published on Ordinary Man Trying.

AI Can Build Almost Anything. Today, It Helped Me Decide to Build Nothing.

Văn Tuấn Lê — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:09:31 +0000

Today, I almost built another website. It started with a short video of a wooden calendar puzzle. There were ten oddly shaped pieces and a board filled with months, dates, and weekdays. The challenge was to arrange all ten pieces so that only today's date remained visible.

Simple idea. Beautiful execution. And immediately, my brain went to the dangerous second thought in the age of generative coding: I could probably build this with AI in a day.

A year or two ago, that thought would have stayed a daydream. Drag-and-drop interactions, rotating pieces, solving algorithms, and mobile compatibility would have required serious programming time. But with tools like Codex and Claude Code, the technical barrier feels almost nonexistent. I no longer ask, "Can I build this?" I ask, "How quickly can I build this?" And sometimes, that is a problem.

From a 30-Second Video to a Software Project

I took screenshots of the puzzle and showed them to ChatGPT. We mapped out the architecture: Cloudflare Workers, TypeScript, a puzzle-solving algorithm, and a mobile-friendly interface. I was ready to ask Codex to start writing code.

And that was when I asked another AI a simple question: Does a website like this already exist?

Five minutes of research found several websites offering almost exactly what I had imagined, such as Daydoku and Date Blocker. Instead of giving up immediately, I decided to investigate the numbers using Semrush.

The Numbers Were Surprisingly Small

According to estimates, an established competitor like Daydoku had modest organic search traffic globally, ranking for a few low-volume keywords.

More importantly, I wasn't planning to build this game purely for fun. I wanted to create another website that could attract visitors from Google. And the available evidence suggested that the search opportunity might be quite small. Even an established, functional product wasn't getting massive estimated Google traffic. Would another nearly identical website really be a good use of my time?

AI Has Made Building Cheap. It Hasn't Made Attention Cheap.

This was the most striking realization. The puzzle wasn't too difficult to build anymore. The hosting cost would be tiny. Cloudflare's infrastructure could handle a small game without much expense.

But none of that would guarantee visitors. AI can dramatically reduce the cost of creating a product. It cannot guarantee that anyone wants to use it. And it certainly cannot guarantee that Google will send people to it.

I already operate several small websites. Attracting consistent search traffic remains difficult. This calendar puzzle was a useful reminder: I didn't need another technically successful project with an uncertain audience. I needed to become better at choosing which projects deserve to exist.

The Most Valuable AI Output Today Wasn't Code

Usually, when people discuss AI productivity, they talk about how much work AI can produce. How many lines of code? How many articles? How many websites?

But today, AI helped me accomplish something different. It helped me stop. One AI helped me understand how to build the game. Another helped me find existing competitors. Then I used SEO data to examine whether there was enough search demand to justify creating another website.

By the end of the process, my conclusion was simple: Don't build it. At least not as another SEO-driven website.

A New Rule for My Future Projects

My old process was often: Discover an interesting idea -> Build it with AI -> Launch it -> Hope people find it.

My new process should be: Discover an idea -> Find existing solutions -> Research demand -> Identify what's missing -> Decide whether to build.

AI has made it easier than ever to start. Maybe the next important skill is knowing when not to. Sometimes the best project is the one you decide not to build.

This article was originally published on Ordinary Man Trying.

Chinese Gift Giving: The Complete Foreigner's Guide (What to Bring, What to Never Give)

Văn Tuấn Lê — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:55:39 +0000

Chinese Gift Giving: The Complete Foreigner's Guide

From ChinaRules101.com — free cultural guides for foreigners in China.

Gift-giving in China is a minefield. The rules are specific, the taboos are serious, and getting it wrong can damage a relationship you've spent months building. This is everything you need.

The Golden Rule

Never give a gift that symbolizes death, separation, or bad luck. In Chinese culture, gifts carry symbolic meaning that overrides their monetary value. A ¥5,000 clock is a worse gift than a ¥200 box of tea.

What You Should Never Give

Gift	Why	Chinese
Clocks	"Giving a clock" = attending someone's funeral	送钟 (sòng zhōng) ≈ 送终
Green hats	Implies your partner is unfaithful	戴绿帽子
Pears	Sounds like "parting/leaving"	梨 (lí) ≈ 离
Shoes	Implies you want them to walk away from you	—
Umbrella	Sounds like "scatter/break up"	伞 (sǎn) ≈ 散
Sets of 4	4 sounds like death	四 (sì) ≈ 死
Handkerchiefs	Associated with funerals	—
Mirrors	Associated with ghosts and bad luck	—

Safe Gift Ideas That Actually Work

For a Chinese Home Visit

Premium teas — Tie Guan Yin, Longjing (Dragon Well), Pu-erh in nice packaging
Quality fruit — in a beautiful box (cherries, mangoes, premium apples)
Imported foods — European chocolate, premium nuts, good olive oil
Fine alcohol — quality whisky, imported wine (check if they drink first)

For a Business Meeting

High-quality pens — Montblanc or similar signals class
Your home country's specialty — Scottish whisky, Swiss chocolate, etc.
Premium teas in gift sets — always appropriate

For a Wedding

Cash in a red envelope — always appropriate, amounts should be in auspicious numbers (¥888, ¥1,688, ¥6,666)
Never give odd amounts — even numbers are auspicious
Check the "table cost" at the venue and give at least that much

How to Present a Gift

Use both hands when presenting — single hand is casual/disrespectful in formal settings
Wrap it — presentation matters as much as the gift itself
Red, gold, or pink wrapping — lucky colors
Avoid white or black wrapping — funeral colors
The recipient may not open it immediately — this is normal, not rejection

How to Receive a Gift

Show reluctance first: "Oh, you shouldn't have" (even if you're delighted)
Accept with both hands
Don't rip it open immediately — set it aside politely
Follow up with a thank-you WeChat message that same evening

Regional Differences

Beijing: More formal, status matters — gift quality signals respect
Shanghai: Sophisticated, international brands appreciated
Guangdong: Practical, health-conscious — good health products welcomed
Northeast China: Generous and direct — reciprocity expected quickly

The Budget Question

Under-gifting is worse than over-gifting. General guidance:

Casual colleague: ¥100–300
Business partner: ¥300–800
Senior business partner/host: ¥800–2000
Wedding: ¥500–2000+ (based on relationship closeness)

Never give a cheap branded item — a small gift from a famous brand still looks cheap. Better to give premium generic.

Not sure if your gift is safe? Use the free Gift Risk Scanner at ChinaRules101 — enter any gift idea and get an instant risk assessment.

More gift guides: chinarules101.com/gifts/

Chinese Business Etiquette: 12 Rules That Actually Matter (From Someone Who Got It Wrong)

Văn Tuấn Lê — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:55:07 +0000

Chinese Business Etiquette: 12 Rules That Actually Matter

Source: ChinaRules101.com — a free guide for foreigners working with Chinese colleagues and partners.

Most articles about Chinese business etiquette cover the obvious stuff. This covers what actually trips people up.

1. Face (面子, miànzi) Is Not Just Pride

Face is a social credit system. You can give face, lose face, or cause someone else to lose face. The critical mistake foreigners make: pointing out someone's error directly in front of others.

If your Chinese counterpart gives wrong data in a meeting, don't correct them publicly. Wait for a break. Say it privately. This isn't dishonesty — it's how trust is built.

2. Seniority Determines Everything at the Table

Who sits where, who speaks first, who toasts first — all determined by rank. The most senior person sits facing the door. As a foreign guest, wait to be guided to your seat.

If you sit in the wrong seat accidentally, your host will likely say nothing — but it registers.

3. Business Cards Are a Ceremony

Present and receive with both hands
Study the card for a moment — don't glance and pocket it
Place it on the table in front of you (don't put it in your back pocket)
Bring more than you think you'll need — running out signals disorganization

4. The Dinner IS the Meeting

Chinese business culture separates relationship-building from negotiation. The dinner is for building trust. The contract discussion comes later — often much later than Western timelines expect.

Don't try to close a deal over dinner. That signals impatience.

5. Silence Means They're Thinking, Not Agreeing

Western discomfort with silence often leads to filling it with concessions. In Chinese negotiation, silence after a proposal is normal deliberation. Wait it out. The first person to speak after silence is usually making a concession.

6. "Yes" Often Means "I Heard You"

"是的" (shì de) acknowledges you spoke. It doesn't mean agreement. Watch for these real agreement signals instead:

They suggest a follow-up meeting
They introduce you to another decision-maker
They ask for a contract draft

7. Gifts: What to Bring, What to Never Bring

Safe gifts: Quality teas, premium nuts/dried fruits, fine alcohol (especially moutai or quality whisky), high-end pens

Never give:

Clocks (送钟 = attending a funeral)
Green hats (implies infidelity)
Pears (梨 = li = separation/leaving)
Anything in sets of 4 (四 sounds like 死, death)
Cheap items — it signals disrespect

8. Guanxi (关系) Is Not Corruption

Guanxi means relationship network. Building it through meals, small favors, and genuine interest is expected and respected — it's not bribery. The difference: guanxi is about mutual trust over time; corruption is a transaction.

Foreigners who skip guanxi-building and go straight to business often find doors mysteriously closed.

9. WeChat Is the Real Office

Email is slow. WeChat is where business moves. If you're given a WeChat contact, use it. Response time expectations are different: WeChat messages get replied to within hours; emails might wait days.

10. The Two-Finger Tap

When someone pours tea or baijiu for you, lightly tap two fingers on the table. It's a silent "thank you" from the Qing dynasty. Most foreigners miss this entirely.

11. Never Refuse the First Toast

At a business dinner, the host makes the first toast. Refusing it (even with tea) is a social rupture. If you don't drink alcohol, declare it before sitting: "I can't drink tonight for health reasons, but please count me in for everything else." Then raise your tea cup for every toast.

12. They're Evaluating Whether to Trust You

The entire dinner, the gift exchange, the small talk — it's all due diligence. They're assessing: Is this person reliable? Do they respect our culture? Can we work with them long-term?

The foreigner who understands this doesn't need to be perfect. They just need to show they're trying.

Free Tools for Your China Visit

Before your next China business trip, these free tools might save you:

Gift Risk Scanner — enter any gift idea, get a risk assessment
China Situation Advisor — describe your situation, get a complete action plan
Banquet Seating Guide — who sits where and why

More guides at chinarules101.com