I Bought Another Domain. Then I Accidentally Started Building a Second Internet Business.

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.

ChineseFortuneTools

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.

That was the beginning.

(Related: Why I moved everything to Hostinger — that migration is what made this second site possible.)

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 currently describes itself as:

Chinese Metaphysics · Explained for the West

That sentence captures what I was trying to build.

Not: “Believe everything Chinese fortune telling says.”

And definitely not: “This website can predict your future.”

Instead:

Here is a traditional Chinese system. Let me explain what it means.

The distinction matters. The website itself says:

“You don’t need to believe it. You just need to understand it.”

I like that. 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 my parents and grandparents would say. 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. Things people say when someone is being naive about money. Things people say when somebody doesn’t understand human relationships.

And suddenly I realized:

This isn’t really fortune telling. It’s accumulated human experience.

Imagine this situation

A husband and wife have just had an argument. Neither wants to talk. One person opens ChineseFortuneTools. They start scrolling. And eventually they see:

退一步海阔天空
Step back, and a wider world opens.

The person doesn’t need a 2,000-word article about marriage. They don’t need a relationship quiz. They don’t even need to agree with the saying.

They might simply think: “Maybe I should send this to her.”

And press: Send this to someone →

That’s when the idea became interesting to me.

I don’t want to build a Chinese proverb dictionary

A dictionary is useful. But I don’t want ChineseFortuneTools to feel like one.

I want something closer to: TikTok, but instead of videos, you discover one piece of Chinese wisdom at a time.

Swipe. A thought. Swipe. Another thought. Swipe. Something unexpectedly relevant to your life.

Maybe:

欲速则不达
Haste makes waste.

And you immediately think of your friend who is trying to rush everything.

交浅不可言深
Don’t reveal your deepest thoughts to someone you barely know.

And suddenly you remember the conversation you had yesterday.

塞翁失马，焉知非福
A setback today may become a blessing tomorrow.

And maybe you needed that one.

That’s the product I’m trying to build.

The strangest part: I want the wisdom to find the person

Instead of: Chinese proverb → English translation

it becomes: Real-life problem → Chinese wisdom → possible action

For example:

You’re fighting with your spouse

→ 退一步海阔天空
→ Maybe don’t try to win this argument.
→ Send it to them.

Your friend is rushing into everything

→ 欲速则不达
→ Slow down before the mistake becomes expensive.
→ Send it to your friend.

You just failed at something

→ 塞翁失马，焉知非福
→ Maybe this isn’t the end of the story.
→ Save it for later.

Someone doesn’t understand boundaries

→ 交浅不可言深
→ Not everyone deserves access to your deepest thoughts.
→ Remember it.

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 categories. 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

Literally, roughly: Even an angry person is reluctant to hit someone who approaches with a smile.

A generic flame emoji doesn’t explain that.

So why not show a tiny visual story? An angry person. Another person approaching calmly. The tension between them. Then the tension softens. The user should understand the situation before reading the explanation.

I’m building these scenes with lightweight SVG and CSS rather than generating hundreds of AI images. Instead of 1,000 images, I can build 30 visual metaphors and reuse them intelligently.

That’s exactly the sort of thing I like about building with AI. AI doesn’t have to generate the final product. 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 don’t have a brilliant monetization strategy. Maybe someday there will be advertising, premium tools, affiliate products, partnerships, or something I haven’t thought of yet. Or maybe none of them work.

The website might make $0. That’s entirely possible. And I’m strangely okay with that.

Because I’m not investing millions of dollars into it. 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’m not sure what jobs will exist when he is older. I’m not sure how much traditional education will matter. I’m not sure what AI will make cheap, what it will make worthless, or what it will make possible.

But I do know one thing. 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. Writing. Programming. Using AI. Building products. Watching things fail. Trying again. Making something useful for strangers.

Maybe one of these projects works. Maybe none of them do. But he’ll have seen the process.

ChineseFortuneTools is now my second experiment

Ordinary Man Trying is my public experiment with AI, work, money, websites and trying to build something from scratch.

ChineseFortuneTools is something different. It’s an experiment in:

culture + software + AI + SEO + human behavior.

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 a website make someone stop scrolling for five seconds and think? Can one sentence actually help somebody handle a difficult day?

I don’t know. That’s why I’m building it.

And maybe that’s what the internet is still good for

There is a lot of discussion right now about AI generating everything. Articles. Images. Videos. Websites. Code. Content.

Soon enough, producing something won’t be the difficult part. The difficult part may be deciding:

What is worth producing?

A million AI-generated articles aren’t necessarily useful. A million AI-generated videos aren’t necessarily useful.

But maybe one sentence that reaches someone at exactly the right moment is.

Maybe 退一步海阔天空 arrives in someone’s feed five minutes after an argument.
Maybe 塞翁失马，焉知非福 shows up after someone loses a job.
Maybe 交浅不可言深 helps someone avoid telling the wrong person the wrong secret.
Maybe 家和万事兴 reminds someone that winning an argument isn’t always the same as winning in life.

That’s the experiment.

I don’t know where this second website goes

Right now, ChineseFortuneTools is still small. It’s still being built. Some ideas will be stupid. Some pages will never get Google traffic. Some tools will probably get almost no users. Some things AI builds will need to be rebuilt. And I will probably change my mind about the entire site ten more times.

That’s okay.

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.

Let’s see what happens.

Try it

If you’re curious, the experiment is here:

ChineseFortuneTools — Chinese culture, fortune tools and ancient wisdom

And if you want to skip the fortune-telling side and go straight to the part I’m currently most excited about:

Chinese Wisdom — one thought at a time