AI and I Came Up With a New Website Idea. Then I Asked: Are We Selling Combs to Monks?
When you are a solo creator experimenting with AI, it is dangerously easy to generate elaborate project ideas. Give an LLM a tiny spark, and within minutes you have a brand, a database, a tool, a premium version, a marketing strategy, and a five-year roadmap. I recently went through this cycle whil
Posted on Oct 22 • Originally published at ordinarymantrying.com
When you are a solo creator experimenting with AI, it is dangerously easy to generate elaborate project ideas. Give an LLM a tiny spark, and within minutes you have a brand, a database, a tool, a premium version, a marketing strategy, and a five-year roadmap.
I recently went through this cycle while looking for a project to host on a new, inexpensive VPS. AI and I brainstormed everything from Chinese grocery ingredient guides to specialized condiment databases and personalized Chinese stone seals.
Every time, the AI made the business model sound brilliant. But it reminded me of the classic business parable about selling combs to monks: sometimes, being clever enough to invent a use for a product doesn't mean anyone actually wants it.
The more detailed an imagined business becomes, the more real it feels. When exploring a niche for Chinese seasonings, we mapped out comparisons for soy sauces, vinegars, and pastes. It looked like a classic SEO playbook: focused databases, comparison tools, and substitution guides.
Then I asked a sobering question: How does this website actually make money?
A user lands on the site, reads about light versus dark soy sauce, and then buys a $4 bottle at their local Asian supermarket. The website makes $0. There is a vast difference between "this person needs information" and "this person is about to spend money."
We shifted to another idea: custom Chinese stone seals derived from my existing project, ChineseNameCraft. Instead of just reading an article, users could design their own seal glyphs online and order a physical carved stone.
The commercial path was tighter, but a core question remained: Does anyone in Europe or America wake up needing a traditional Chinese seal?
Low competition can mean opportunity, but it can also mean nobody cares.
Rather than spending months building a standalone seal website from scratch, I decided to test the demand directly inside an existing workflow. Users who generate a Chinese name will see an option to view it as a seal. If thousands of relevant users see the feature and nobody clicks "buy," the market has spoken. If they do, a tiny business is validated.
Having a normal day job and a low-fixed-cost server means I can treat these websites as long-term experiments rather than overnight rental payments. You can read the full breakdown of how I evaluate these projects on my personal blog: AI and I Came Up With a New Website Idea. Then I Asked: Are We Selling Combs to Monks?