In 2018, a friend of mine was trying to export goji berries to overseas markets. He needed an English website to reach international buyers. I said I’d build it.
He dropped out six months later. No product, no business partner, no plan.
I kept going for another five and a half years.
That website — mjy-shop.com — became one of the strangest things I’ve ever done. More than 800 articles. Hundreds of hours of work. A near-zero income for the entire run. And when the domain came up for renewal last year, I just didn’t pay it.
I’ve been thinking about why ever since.
What I Actually Built
To be clear, I wasn’t just copying content. I was genuinely trying to build something real.
I learned basic SEO. I studied which keywords had traffic. I wrote about goji berry nutrition, recipes, health benefits, how to buy them, how to store them, where they come from in China. I wrote in English even though it’s not my first language — careful, studied English, the kind you produce when you’re thinking in one language and writing in another.
At its peak, the site got maybe a few hundred visitors a month. Mostly random traffic. Almost no engagement. Google AdSense rejected my application. I couldn’t figure out why for a long time.
The Problems I Couldn’t See at the Time
Looking back now, the issues are obvious.
The English wasn’t natural. I was translating my thoughts from Mandarin into English, and readers could feel it. The sentences were grammatically correct but somehow stiff — the kind of writing that tells you immediately that the author is working in their second language. Google’s quality guidelines penalize this kind of content, and honestly, so do human readers.
The niche had no real audience. Goji berries are a health food. People search for them occasionally. But I had no connection to the actual buyers, no way to fulfill orders, no product to sell. I was writing content for a business that didn’t exist.
I had no monetization strategy. My entire plan was: write content, get traffic, apply for AdSense, make money. When AdSense rejected me, I had no backup. I just kept writing and hoping something would change.
I confused activity with progress. 800 articles sounds like a lot of work, and it was. But I was measuring success by content volume rather than by whether anyone was actually reading, engaging, or taking action. I optimized for the thing I could control (writing more) instead of the thing that actually mattered (whether anyone cared).
What Six Years of Failure Actually Teaches You
Here’s the strange thing: I don’t regret those six years.
Not because the website succeeded — it didn’t. But because I learned things I couldn’t have learned any other way.
I learned that persistence alone isn’t enough. You also need a mechanism — a realistic path from content to reader to value to income. I had the first part and none of the rest.
I learned that language quality is non-negotiable for an English website targeting Western readers. One bad sentence in a paragraph can destroy trust. I can’t compete with native English writers on fluency, so I need to compete on something else: authenticity, perspective, a story that only I can tell.
I learned that niche selection matters more than I thought. “Goji berries” was a product, not an audience. I should have been asking: who are the people I’m trying to help, and what do they actually need?
Why I’m Trying Again
When I decided to start this blog, people in my life thought I was a little crazy. You already tried an English website. It didn’t work. Why would this be different?
Here’s my answer: because the problems are different now.
The English quality problem is solved by AI. I work with Claude to write in natural, native-sounding English — not translating my thoughts, but actually expressing them in the right language from the start.
The niche problem is solved by my actual story. I’m not writing about a product I don’t have. I’m writing about my real experience — the failures, the experiments, the things I’m genuinely figuring out. Nobody can copy that, because it’s mine.
The monetization problem is something I’m building into the strategy from day one this time.
Will it work? I genuinely don’t know. But I’m not going in blind anymore.
If you’ve ever built something for years without seeing results — what kept you going? And at what point did you decide to stop, or to try something different? I’m curious.