I wasn't planning to build another website.
Honestly, I thought I had enough problems already.
I was already spending most of my spare time building Ordinary Man Trying, writing about AI, building little tools, testing ideas, watching Google Search Console, wondering why Google wasn't indexing half my pages, and generally doing what a perfectly sensible person in his 40s probably shouldn't be doing after work.
Then I bought another hosting plan.
Not because I had a brilliant business idea.
Because it was cheap.
That may be the most honest way to explain how ChineseFortuneTools started.
The original idea was almost embarrassingly simple
I had been thinking about my hosting costs. I already had websites. The marginal cost of having another site was surprisingly small.
So I started thinking:
What if I just build another website?
Not a startup. Not something requiring investors. Not something that needs a team. Just a small internet experiment.
Give it a domain. Give it some useful tools. Let AI help me build things. Put it on Google. Wait. See what happens.
If it fails, I lose some domain and hosting money. If it works, I learn something. And if I keep doing this for years, maybe one of these strange little experiments eventually becomes something real.
So what is ChineseFortuneTools?
The first version was fairly obvious.
Chinese culture. Chinese Zodiac. BaZi. Feng Shui. The Chinese lunar calendar. Lucky dates. Chinese names. Traditional ideas about fortune and destiny.
The website describes itself as:
Chinese Metaphysics · Explained for the West
Not: "Believe everything Chinese fortune telling says."
Instead:
Here is a traditional Chinese system. Let me explain what it means.
The website itself says: "You don't need to believe it. You just need to understand it."
Because Chinese culture contains thousands of years of ideas that are interesting even when you don't believe the supernatural part.
Then I discovered something much more interesting
While building the site, I started collecting something completely different.
Chinese sayings. Old expressions. Folk wisdom.
Things people say when someone is making a terrible decision. Things people say after a marriage argument. Things people say when someone is too impatient.
And suddenly I realized:
This isn't really fortune telling. It's accumulated human experience.
The strangest part: I want the wisdom to find the person
Instead of: Chinese proverb → English translation
I wanted: Real-life problem → Chinese wisdom → possible action
For example:
You're fighting with your spouse
→ 退一步海阔天空 (Step back, and a wider world opens.)
→ Maybe don't try to win this argument.
→ Send it to them.
Your friend is rushing into everything
→ 欲速则不达 (Haste makes waste.)
→ Slow down before the mistake becomes expensive.
You just failed at something
→ 塞翁失马，焉知非福 (A setback today may become a blessing tomorrow.)
→ Maybe this isn't the end of the story.
That's much more interesting to me than a proverb database.
And then I made the obvious mistake
I asked AI to help me build it. Of course I did.
The first versions were technically fine. They worked. They had cards. They had translations. They looked reasonably nice.
And they were completely wrong.
They felt like a database. The AI had understood the words. It hadn't understood the experience.
That's becoming a recurring theme in my experiments with AI. AI is extremely good at producing things that are technically correct. It is much harder to make it understand:
Why would a human actually want this?
So I kept pushing. Not: "Make this prettier." But: "Why would somebody send this to another person?"
That changed the design.
Now I'm trying to make every piece of wisdom visual
Take: 伸手不打笑脸人 (Even an angry person is reluctant to hit someone who approaches with a smile.)
A generic emoji doesn't explain that.
So I built tiny SVG visual stories — an angry figure, a calm figure approaching, the tension softening. The user should understand the situation before reading the explanation.
Instead of 1,000 images, I built 30 visual metaphors and reuse them intelligently. That's the sort of thing I like about building with AI: sometimes its most useful role is helping me discover a better way to build the product.
I have no idea if this will make money
And I want to be honest about that.
I'm investing: time + a cheap domain + hosting + AI + curiosity.
The downside is limited. The upside is unknown. That's a pretty good experiment.
But there is another reason I'm doing this
My son is growing up in a world that looks very different from the one I grew up in.
I don't want to simply tell him: "Go get a good job."
I want him to see his father actually trying things. Buying a domain. Learning SEO. Using AI. Building products. Watching things fail. Trying again.
Maybe one of these projects works. Maybe none of them do. But he'll have seen the process.
ChineseFortuneTools is now my second experiment
Can ancient Chinese ideas become useful to someone who has never lived in China? Can a proverb become a tool rather than just a translation? Can one sentence actually help somebody handle a difficult day?
I don't know. That's why I'm building it.
Let's see what happens
I've learned that building websites is a little like planting trees. You don't get to know which one will grow before you plant it.
So I'm planting another one. This one just happens to contain a few thousand years of Chinese wisdom.
→ Chinese Wisdom — one thought at a time
I write about AI, building in public, and honest experiments at Ordinary Man Trying.
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