I’ve been writing this blog in English, for an English-speaking audience, about an ordinary Chinese guy trying to make money with AI. There’s a small irony in that I’ve never mentioned the other side hustle I run — in Chinese, for a Chinese audience, doing something close to the opposite.
It’s an account where I translate and adapt real side-hustle stories from Reddit and IndieHackers into Chinese.
Why This, Specifically
Here’s the gap I noticed: English-language internet forums are full of incredibly specific, often unglamorous side-hustle stories — someone made $400/month reselling thrifted furniture, someone built a tiny SaaS that does one boring thing well, someone’s “passive income” dream collapsed in three months and they wrote an honest post-mortem about it. That kind of material barely exists in Chinese. What does exist tends to be either translated corporate news or wildly exaggerated “I made $50k in a weekend” content optimized for clicks, not honesty.
So the idea was simple: find the real, specific, often modest stories — the ones with real numbers and real failures in them — and bring them to a Chinese audience that doesn’t have easy access to that part of the English internet. Information arbitrage, basically. The information isn’t secret, it’s just separated by a language barrier most people don’t bother crossing.
What It Actually Looks Like Day to Day
I read through Reddit threads and IndieHackers posts, pick out the ones with genuine substance — specific numbers, specific timelines, specific mistakes — and rewrite them for a Chinese audience using AI to help with translation and adaptation, then go back through by hand to make sure the tone stays honest instead of turning into hype.
It’s slow, unglamorous work. There’s no dashboard showing dramatic growth. Most days it’s just: read ten threads, find one worth telling, write it up, post it, see what happens.
The Part That Surprised Me
What I didn’t expect was how much this account ended up teaching me about my English blog, the one you’re reading right now.
Going through hundreds of these stories, a pattern kept showing up: the posts people actually trusted and engaged with weren’t the ones promising big numbers. They were the ones that included the boring middle part — the three months where nothing worked, the spreadsheet that proved the idea was slower than expected, the moment the person almost quit.
That’s roughly the same realization that shaped how I write here. The Goji berry website story, the side hustle I quit after one bad client — those posts exist because translating other people’s honest stories made me notice how rare honesty actually is in this space, and how much it’s worth when you find it.
Why I’m Telling You Now
Partly because keeping it unmentioned started to feel a little dishonest, on a blog whose entire premise is “I’ll tell you what’s actually happening, including the parts that don’t make me look good.”
And partly because it’s a genuinely useful data point if you’re thinking about starting something similar: a side hustle doesn’t have to be glamorous, doesn’t have to scale, and doesn’t have to be in your “main” language to be worth doing. Sometimes the best opportunity is just standing in the gap between two audiences who can’t read each other’s internet.
I’m not going to link the account here — it’s for a different audience, in a different language, and that’s fine. But if you’re looking for a side-hustle idea and you happen to be fluent in two languages that don’t talk to each other much online, you already have an advantage most people don’t.
Do you run anything “on the side” that you’ve never actually told the people closest to you about? I’d be curious why.