I’m Still Building, Just Not for the Numbers

It has been almost a month since I last updated Flowanriver. I did not stop because I wanted to give it up; I simply did not find anything during this period that I genuinely wanted to write about.

There were topics I could have followed, trends I could have commented on, and certainly things I could have written because they were easier to rank or more likely to be indexed by Google. But every time I tried to approach writing from that direction, I felt something was off. I did not want to publish something just to keep the site active, or choose a topic simply because an algorithm might prefer it.

If I am going to keep Flowanriver, I want every article here to be something I can stand behind. That does not mean every article has to be important or useful to everyone who reads it. What matters to me is that every time I press publish, I have actually said something I wanted to say rather than simply filled another empty space on the website.

Before I created Flowanriver, I had already tried sharing some of my thoughts elsewhere. I wrote on Xiaohongshu, and I published posts on Medium. I enjoyed putting my thoughts into words, but the traffic was never as good as I had hoped.

Flowanriver was not created because I thought having my own website would solve that problem. What I wanted was a place where I could share what I genuinely thought without constantly wondering whether it fitted the rules of a platform, whether the topic was popular enough, or whether an algorithm would decide that the post deserved to be seen.

I wanted a place that belonged to me, somewhere I could write about AI one day, digital economies another day, or simply something I had been thinking about while building a business, questioning my own direction, or trying to understand a world that seemed to be changing faster than I could keep up with it.

Of course, having your own website does not mean you stop caring about traffic. I still feel disappointed when something I have written reaches very few people, and I still wonder sometimes whether the topic was wrong or whether I could have expressed it better.

But once that feeling passes, I usually go back to the same question: what am I actually trying to say?

I will adjust the structure, rethink the topic, and look for a better way to express the idea, but I do not want those adjustments to become a habit of chasing attention at any cost. I do not want to exaggerate an opinion because controversy travels faster, choose a topic simply because it is trending, or write a title that promises something the article cannot really deliver.

I want Flowanriver to grow, and I want more people to read what I write. I simply do not want traffic to decide what I am allowed to think.

The same kind of doubt appears when I think about AI. I have written more than once on Flowanriver about how AI has changed the way I work, and that part is real. I use AI almost every day, and it has helped me research, organize ideas, write, communicate, solve problems, and take on work that might once have required much more time. AI has also helped me earn money, even if the amount is nowhere close to some of the numbers I see online.

What I have talked about less is how often I have questioned whether I truly understand AI well enough.

Sometimes I come across a video about someone using AI to build a website and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from it. I remember seeing one about a father who had apparently built a successful website with AI, and my first reaction was not simply admiration. I wondered what I was missing.

I have been using AI for quite a long time, so when I see stories like that, I naturally ask myself whether my approach is wrong. If these tools can create so many opportunities, why have I not built something similar? Do I understand the tools but not really know how to use them, or am I simply looking in the wrong direction?

Those questions have pushed me to try things. Sometimes I will look into the model behind a project, test a similar tool, or think about whether I could build something along the same lines. In some cases, I probably could, but more than once, after going a little deeper, I have realized that I do not actually want what I thought I wanted when I first saw the result.

That experience has taught me something important about the way success is presented online. What we usually see is the final number: someone built a website, it makes a certain amount of money, AI was involved, and the whole story can be explained in a few minutes. What we do not see as easily is the process behind it: what they already knew, what did not work, how they found users, and how many decisions were made before the result became visible.

AI can shorten parts of that process, but it does not remove the process itself.

Seeing another person’s result can give me an idea, but it cannot give me their path. I still have to understand what fits my own skills, what I am willing to spend years working on, and what kind of thing I actually want to build.

Sometimes trying someone else’s method teaches me how to make money, while at other times it simply teaches me that I do not want to build that particular business. I think both are useful.

Maybe understanding AI is not only about knowing how to use more tools or finding the fastest way to monetize them. It is also about becoming better at recognizing which possibilities are worth following and which ones only look attractive because someone else has already shown us the result.

I think the same thing applies to Flowanriver. When I look at someone else’s traffic, growth, or success, it is easy to see the number and forget everything that happened before it. But the answer is not always that I am doing something wrong; sometimes I am simply building something different.

I cannot say that everything I share here is valuable. Some thoughts may be incomplete, some opinions may change, and there will probably be things I write today that I understand differently years from now.

But I do not think every piece of writing has to teach someone a lesson.

Sometimes it is enough for one person’s experience to meet another person’s experience at the right moment. Maybe you are going through a low point when you happen to find one of these articles, or you are frustrated because something you have worked hard on is not moving. Maybe you are questioning whether the direction you chose is still right, or wondering why everyone else seems to be progressing faster than you are.

Your situation may be completely different from mine, but if one sentence makes you look at something from a slightly different angle, then I think the writing has already done something meaningful.

Over the past year, I have continued working on other people’s projects while building my own things in between. I have written and edited SEO content, researched AI and crypto, worked with clients, thought about brands and products, and learned more about how content, search engines, and online businesses actually work.

Ironically, the more I learned about how to make content perform, the more certain I became that I did not want Flowanriver to be built entirely around performance.

When I look back at the articles I have written here, the topics may seem broad. There is AI, crypto, digital finance, technology, entrepreneurship, and sometimes things that do not fit neatly into any of those categories. Yet underneath them, I think I have been asking variations of the same questions: How do we keep creating when the world around us keeps changing? How does technology expand what an ordinary person is capable of building? What should we keep for ourselves when more of our work can be automated?

Somewhere underneath all of those questions is another one that I am still answering: what exactly am I trying to build?

I still do not have a perfect answer. Sometimes I think about brands and products, sometimes I am fascinated by AI as a creative partner, and at other times I am more interested in how technology changes the way individuals work and build. For a long time, I thought these interests meant I had not found a clear enough direction.

Now I am beginning to see it differently.

Maybe clarity does not always come from narrowing yourself into one topic; sometimes it comes from doing enough things to notice which questions keep returning. For me, the recurring theme has never really been a specific technology. It has been creation: how people create when tools change, how individuals build with limited resources, how an idea gradually becomes something real, and how technology can help us do more without replacing the part of us that decides what is worth doing in the first place.

That is probably why I have never been completely comfortable turning Flowanriver into a conventional content site. I want people to find these articles through search, I want the site to grow, and I would be happy if one day the traffic becomes much larger than it is now. I will continue improving the site and finding better ways to distribute what I write, but I do not want growth to become the only reason I write.

Flowanriver is becoming a record of that process. When I look back at older posts, I can see not only what I was interested in at the time, but also how I was thinking then. Some ideas became stronger, some disappeared, and some questions are still following me.

Maybe years from now, I will look back and realize this site became something completely different from what I once imagined, or maybe it will simply remain a place where I left parts of my thinking while I was trying to build a life, a business, and a direction of my own.

For now, I am okay with either possibility. I still do not know exactly where all of this is going, but I know why I started, and for me, that matters more.