As long as there is life, there is tinkering.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the world was curious about China's rapid development. Beyond the official state-run foreign-language media, there was still strong demand for English-language coverage from other sources, so readers could cross-reference. This project ran for about two years and gathered a group of overseas subscribers, but my interests shifted, it lost momentum, and it was discontinued.
Veteran e-commerce people of a certain age have generally heard of this name. Many years ago, at the start of this century, when people were still debating whether selling things online was even viable, my foreign-language background let me keep up with e-commerce trends in the United States in real time. That was an information advantage, and I used it to write a bit of content and earn a bit of a name. Later, Chinese e-commerce caught up and thoroughly outpaced Europe and America, and that advantage vanished. As the blogging era faded, it long ago became "fertilizer for the times", and was discontinued.
Helped foreigners find jobs in China and offered professional Chinese résumé writing services. I collected job postings for foreigners from major recruitment sites and company websites, translated and polished them into professional English, and published them on china-job. Domestic companies could post company profiles and job openings for free. For job seekers, the first ten job postings were free, with pay-per-click after that; Chinese résumés were a paid service. One foreigner used a polished Chinese résumé to land an anchor position at CCTV's English channel; on the other hand, a young Chinese-American received his Chinese résumé and disappeared without paying. The project ran for two years, but the market was too small to scale, and it was discontinued.
During Amazon's rapid expansion, non-compliant listing hijackers ("piggyback sellers") were a constant headache for sellers. test-buy.com provided overseas recipient addresses to help sellers fight non-compliant hijacking; in exchange, sellers shipped their products to those addresses for free, and the recipients kept the goods. Both sides benefited and each got what they needed. The project ran for half a year, but marketing could not keep up. Later, Amazon addressed the hijacking problem through Brand Registry, and by then the project's window of value had closed. Discontinued.
As a fan of Xu Haofeng, a well-known Chinese film director and martial-arts writer, I built an unofficial fan website and an Android app based on it, as a non-profit project. Only later did I realize this had made me the "head fan".
This is the one that haunts my dreams the most — and, of course, the one furthest from making money. Through reading the classical TCM texts and visiting renowned physicians around the country, I have increasingly found that TCM has a self-consistent system, but one that mainstream science cannot currently explain or accept. I want to distill and explain this system using Western formal, logical language, and then gradually turn it into products. Phase 1 is TCM literature curation: sorting out and correcting the texts and textual history of both the transmitted classics and excavated manuscripts. Phase 2 is axiomatic reconstruction. Phase 3 is computability research. Phase 4 is software engineering. This is unquestionably a very expensive project with a high probability of failure. So I once imagined (rather fancifully) a "three-stage rocket": the first stage accumulates capital in e-commerce; the second stage invests that capital in IT to further accumulate capital, technology, and talent; and only the third stage is this TCM project. As things stand, the casing of the first stage hasn't even been built yet.
Since I enjoy attending all kinds of events in my spare time, I wanted to gather event information from across the city and beyond, then pick and choose which to attend. There are some event apps available now, but they never quite meet my needs — most are incomplete and narrow in scope. However, crawling, cleaning, and aggregating information is the "heavy, dirty work" of the internet industry, with a high barrier to entry. With limited time and resources to invest, it has not yet reached meaningful scale or influence.
From one angle, there are really only two kinds of sellers in business. The first is the product-focused specialist, who thoroughly understands the product or category they work in, has clear goals, and rarely makes big leaps — what people used to call "vertical e-commerce". The second is the general merchandiser, with no strict boundaries on the product line, who sells whatever has high margins and relatively low competition. This project solves the second type of seller's core question: what to sell? Once complete, it would model any product or product line on a given platform, produce numerical analysis, and forecast sales volume for a given product on that platform over a given period.
Whenever I come across a good foreign book, I want to translate it and share it with everyone. Translating a single article online is easy, but there is still no good solution for translating a book of over a million characters. This project aims to solve that. It has a window of roughly two years: if it cannot be effectively implemented before 2028, gaining market share and building an ecosystem on top of it, the opportunity will be swallowed by large language models. The project has currently translated about 200,000 characters.
Xiong Wei | Email: jamic2003@163.com | WeChat: xiwall | Come join my group of fellow tinkerers!