I bought a domain for about one dollar.
That sentence sounds like the beginning of one of those internet stories where, three paragraphs later, the writer tells you how they turned $1 into $10,000.
This is not that story.
My internet revenue is still:
$0.
I haven’t made my first dollar online yet.
What I do have is something much more interesting than I expected.
That $1 domain turned into a real website, a collection of working tools, an automated analytics system, a small product laboratory, and eventually the idea for my own reusable website-building system.
This is the story of what happened.
The $1 Domain #
The domain is:
ChineseFortuneTools.online
It wasn’t part of some brilliant business strategy.
It was cheap.
Very cheap.
Roughly one dollar for the first year.
And like many cheap domains, it could easily have become another domain sitting unused in an account until renewal time.
Instead, I started asking a different question:
What is the most I can learn from a $1 domain?
Not:
How can I make this look like a million-dollar startup?
Not:
How can I generate 1,000 AI articles?
Just:
How far can one ordinary person take this using AI, GitHub and mostly free infrastructure?
That question became the experiment.
First, I Turned It Into a Real Website #
ChineseFortuneTools.online became what I now call my:
Chinese Culture Lab.
Instead of building another traditional content site, I use it as a place to test small ideas.
Things like:
- a Chinese gift taboo checker
- a red envelope calculator
- an exact Chinese zodiac calculator
- a Chinese family title finder
- festival countdowns
- a 2027 Chinese New Year greeting generator
Some ideas may work.
Some probably won’t.
That’s fine.
The point is not to pretend every idea is good.
The point is to put ideas in front of real users and let the data decide.
You can see the experiment here:
ChineseFortuneTools.online
AI Made Building Easy #
This is the part that still surprises me.
I am not a traditional software developer.
A few years ago, building several interactive web tools would have required much more technical knowledge, time and money.
Now I can work with tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Codex.
I describe the product.
AI helps me think through the architecture.
AI writes and reviews code.
I test it.
I break things.
AI helps fix them.
I learn.
Then I ship.
This changes the economics of building small websites completely.
The cost of creating software has fallen dramatically.
But that creates a new problem.
If building becomes easy, you can build far too much. And I did.
The Hard Part Is No Longer Building #
AI gives you a dangerous superpower:
You can have another idea every five minutes.
Then another.
Then another.
A calculator.
A quiz.
A generator.
A new domain.
A new niche.
A new website.
Soon you have dozens of things under construction and no idea whether anyone actually wants them.
I slowly realized:
Building is no longer my biggest problem.
My bigger problem is deciding what deserves to be built further.
So I started turning the $1 website into an experiment system.
Build. Measure. Decide. #
I connected the site to Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Then I created a simple dashboard.
Instead of asking:
Do I personally like this tool?
I want to ask:
- Did anyone visit it?
- Did anyone find it through Google?
- Did visitors actually start using it?
- Did they finish?
- Did they share it?
- Did they click through to one of my main websites?
- Is search visibility increasing?
- Should I keep investing time in it?
The dashboard tracks things such as:
- visitors
- tool starts
- completion rate
- share rate
- clicks to my main site
- Google impressions
- Google clicks
- CTR
- average search position
And each experiment can eventually receive a simple decision:
Graduate
Accelerate
Observe
or
Retire
At the moment, many of the numbers are tiny.
Some are zero.
I actually like that.
Because this is where the story really starts.
I’m not showing you a dashboard after the business became successful.
I’m showing it while almost nothing is happening.
That makes the experiment real.
Then GitHub Became Much More Than a Place to Store Code #
Before this project, I mostly thought of GitHub as a place programmers put code.
Now I look at it very differently.
For a tiny one-person internet business, GitHub can replace an amazing number of paid services. I started discovering that GitHub could act as:
- static website hosting
- a scheduled computer
- a simple JSON database
- a static API
- an AI job scheduler
- a monitoring system
- a product idea database
- a lightweight voting system
- a release/download center
- a testing environment
- a remote configuration system
- an automated website doctor
- an SEO checker
- an experiment management system
- a content automation engine
- a founder dashboard
- a giant source of open-source product research
That completely changed how I think about small websites.
A tiny website does not automatically need:
a VPS,
a database,
a CMS,
a backend,
ten SaaS subscriptions,
or $100 a month in infrastructure.
Sometimes a few static files and some automation are enough.
One GitHub Repository Can Be Surprisingly Powerful #
Here is a simple example.
A website can read:
data/tools.json
That JSON file can contain the current list of experiments.
Another file can contain public metrics.
A scheduled GitHub Action can update those files automatically.
The website reads the JSON and displays the result.
Suddenly GitHub is doing several jobs:
source control
automation
data storage
deployment
monitoring
And for a tiny project, the infrastructure cost can be close to zero.
That matters to me.
I’m not trying to build a venture-funded startup.
I’m experimenting with whether one person can build a sustainable portfolio of useful little internet businesses.
Eventually I Noticed Another Problem #
After building several websites, I noticed something ridiculous.
Every time I started a new site, I asked AI to build the same boring things again.
Sitemap.
Robots.txt.
Canonical URLs.
Open Graph tags.
Structured data.
Analytics.
Breadcrumbs.
Affiliate disclosure.
Templates.
CI checks.
Performance checks.
Deployment configuration.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Then I had one of those embarrassingly obvious realizations:
Why am I asking AI to rebuild the factory every time I want to manufacture a new product?
So I stopped.
And built the factory.
My One-Person Site Starter #
I created a private reusable system I call:
One-Person Site Starter
It is deliberately boring.
That is a compliment.
The stack is basically:
Python
Jinja2
Markdown
plain CSS
vanilla JavaScript
No React.
No giant JavaScript framework.
No database by default.
No login system.
No Docker.
No complicated infrastructure.
A configuration file defines the website.
Content goes in.
The system automatically handles things such as:
- sitemap generation
- robots.txt
- canonical URLs
- Open Graph metadata
- structured data
- breadcrumbs
- noindex handling
- analytics wiring
- affiliate disclosures
- performance checks
- CI checks
The goal is simple:
Never spend expensive AI tokens solving the same infrastructure problem twice.
The First Test: ChinaTea101 #
The first real website created from this system is:
ChinaTea101.com
The idea is simple:
Chinese Tea, Made Simple.
Instead of telling AI:
Build me a Chinese tea website from scratch.
I can now say:
Create a new website using my existing starter.
The infrastructure already exists.
That means more of my time — and more of the AI’s time — can go toward questions that actually matter:
What are people searching for?
What tools would genuinely help?
What content is missing?
What would make someone return?
What could eventually make money?
This feels like a much bigger improvement than simply getting better at writing code.
I Think This Is What AI Changes for One-Person Companies #
There is a lot of discussion about AI replacing jobs.
I’m interested in another possibility.
AI may make very small companies much more capable.
A single person can now have something that resembles a tiny team:
one AI helps research,
another helps write code,
another reviews it,
automation handles repetitive tasks,
GitHub runs scheduled jobs,
Cloudflare serves the site,
analytics tells you what users are doing.
It does not mean one person magically becomes a billion-dollar company.
It means one person can attempt projects that previously required more money and more specialized skills.
That is why I’ve become increasingly interested in the idea of the:
One-Person Company.
One person.
One laptop.
AI.
Automation.
A collection of small internet assets.
And lots of experiments.
But There Is a Catch #
Cheap technology does not mean easy money.
This is something I want to be very clear about.
AI can make a website.
AI cannot force anyone to visit it.
GitHub can host your project.
GitHub cannot make people care about it.
Claude can write a tool.
Claude cannot guarantee that people need the tool.
ChatGPT can help with SEO.
ChatGPT cannot guarantee Google rankings.
And buying a $1 domain definitely does not create a business.
Distribution still matters.
Trust matters.
Brand matters.
Search demand matters.
Useful products matter.
Patience matters.
And probably a little luck matters too.
That is the part I am now trying to learn.
My Internet Revenue Is Still $0 #
This may be the most important part of this article.
I have been experimenting with websites for months.
I’ve bought domains.
I’ve written articles.
I’ve created tools.
I’ve connected analytics.
I’ve learned GitHub.
I’ve learned more about SEO.
I’ve spent many nights building things when I should probably have been sleeping.
And my internet revenue is still:
So why am I continuing?
Because I genuinely enjoy it.
Building websites has become a little like fishing for me.
You don’t necessarily catch something every time.
But you keep learning where to cast.
And every once in a while you see movement in the water.
A page gets impressions.
A keyword reaches page one.
Someone uses a tool.
Someone stays on a page for several minutes.
Those tiny signals make me want to keep going.
My First Goal Is Not $10,000 a Month #
It is much smaller.
My first goal is:
One real dollar.
From someone I don’t personally know. Because something I built provided enough value that money moved in my direction.
That first dollar would prove something very important to me.
Not that I am rich.
Not that I have discovered the secret to passive income.
Only this:
The machine works.
After that:
$10.
Then $100.
Then maybe recurring revenue.
Maybe one of my sites eventually pays for all the others.
Maybe none of them do.
I genuinely don’t know yet.
That’s why this is an experiment.
Why I’m Writing About It Before I Succeed #
Most business stories are written backwards.
Someone succeeds.
Then they explain how everything supposedly made sense from the beginning.
Real life doesn’t feel like that.
Right now I have no idea which of my websites will work.
I don’t know whether Google traffic will grow.
I don’t know whether affiliate marketing will work.
I don’t know whether anyone will ever buy anything through one of my sites.
I don’t know whether my 20-site experiment will produce one winner or twenty failures.
So I want to document it while I still don’t know the ending.
That is much more interesting to me.
This Is Ordinary Man Trying #
I’m 46.
I’m not a Silicon Valley founder.
I’m not selling a course.
I’m not claiming to have discovered a secret business model.
I’m a normal person trying to understand what AI makes possible.
Trying websites.
Trying SEO.
Trying tiny tools.
Trying affiliate marketing.
Trying to build assets instead of only consuming things on the internet.
Some experiments will probably be embarrassing.
Some will fail.
Hopefully one or two will surprise me.
That is exactly why I called this site:
Ordinary Man Trying.
The $1 OPC Experiment #
I’ve now given this experiment a name:
OPC means:
One-Person Company.
The question is:
Can one ordinary person use a $1 domain, AI, GitHub and mostly free tools to slowly build a real internet business?
I don’t know.
But I intend to find out.
You can see the live $1 experiment at:
ChineseFortuneTools.online
You can also see the real experiment dashboard there.
And here on Ordinary Man Trying, I’ll document what happens next:
- traffic
- mistakes
- tools
- SEO experiments
- GitHub automation
- website costs
- affiliate attempts
- revenue
- failures
- wins
- and eventually, hopefully, the first dollar
No screenshots of imaginary income.
No rented Lamborghini.
Just the experiment.
Starting from:
$1 domain.
$0 revenue.
And one ordinary man trying.