A few years ago, I built a Chinese-language website about making money online.
Over time, it grew to more than 1,500 articles. I covered freelancing, e-commerce, content creation, affiliate marketing, dropshipping — basically every way an ordinary person might try to earn money on the side.
Then I shut it down.
Not because it failed. Not because I ran out of ideas. I stopped because I looked at what I was building and couldn’t live with it.
What the Site Was
The site was called zfuye.org. The name roughly translates to “making money on the side” — which tells you exactly what it was about.
The business model was straightforward: build traffic with free articles, then sell paid courses and premium resources to people who wanted to learn how to make money online. It’s one of the most common business models on the Chinese internet.
The content was real. I wasn’t making things up. I was researching legitimate strategies, explaining them clearly, and helping people understand their options.
But there was a problem I kept trying to ignore.
The Thing I Couldn’t Ignore
I hadn’t actually made significant money from any of the strategies I was writing about.
I’d tried selling on Wix. I’d built the goji berry website. I’d researched Temu. I knew the landscape. But I didn’t have a success story to tell — just a series of attempts and a lot of learning.
And yet I was positioning myself as someone whose advice was worth paying for.
The people most likely to buy what I was selling were people in difficult financial situations — people who genuinely needed a way out and were willing to spend money they couldn’t really afford on a course from someone whose main credential was having thought about these things a lot.
That’s the moment I realized I had built something I didn’t want to be.
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
I want to be careful here, because I’m not saying the “make money online” industry is inherently dishonest. There are people who teach these skills and have genuinely earned the right to do so.
The problem wasn’t the category. The problem was me, at that specific point in time, selling advice I hadn’t validated through my own results.
The Chinese internet has a term for this: 割韭菜 — “cutting leeks.” It refers to taking money from people who are hoping for a way out, selling them dreams you can’t guarantee. I didn’t want to be someone who did that, even accidentally, even with good intentions.
So I stopped updating the site. The content is still there — it’s not hurting anyone — but I’m not selling anything from it, and I’m not adding to it.
What I Do Differently Now
This blog is my attempt to do it the right way.
I’m documenting what I’m actually doing, in real time, including the failures. I’m not positioning myself as an expert. I’m not selling courses. I’m not promising outcomes I can’t guarantee.
If something I try works, I’ll tell you exactly what I did and what the results were. If it fails — which has happened plenty of times — I’ll tell you that too, and why.
The only thing I’m claiming is that I’m genuinely trying and genuinely documenting. That’s it.
I think there’s real value in that kind of honesty. Not because it makes for a more successful business model, but because it’s the kind of content I wish had existed when I was starting out — something real, from someone in the middle of the journey, without the polish of hindsight.
That’s what I’m trying to build here.
Have you ever stopped doing something because it didn’t feel right, even if it might have worked financially? I’m curious how other people navigate that line.