Word count: ~1500 words
Estimated reading time: ~5 minutes
Last updated: September 22, 2025
Preface
Hey, I’m Mr. Guo. This weekend, my feed was flooded with various AI and SEO offline events. I’ve attended many over the years, and although each year brings plenty of new content and strategies constantly evolving with the times, I’ve discovered one common thread.
That is: many enviable, successful projects are just consistently doing work that looks very dumb and very tedious. Get-rich-quick schemes exist too, but they’re not universal and don’t work for every project.
I’m writing this article to hopefully wake up some friends who keep throwing out wild ideas while not focusing on what’s right in front of them.
First Dumb Thing: Treating “Building a Website” as Top Priority
I have friends whose teams look down on “building websites.” They always think: “My product is so awesome, my team background is so elite — building a website is trivial, just have some intern or outsourcer throw something together.”
Reality? Let me just ask a few questions:
-
Is your website’s technical framework actually suitable for your product form? Can it organically integrate landing pages and tool pages?
-
Did you skip static rendering? Can Google’s crawler smoothly crawl it? Is there an automated sitemap generation mechanism?
-
Do you have proper llms.txt? A CMS suitable for continuous iterative operations?
-
Does your website have 404 broken links? Has the code been optimized for performance and user experience?
-
Is there an appropriate Schema structured data injection method?
These hassles — give them to some random outsourcer or junior frontend or intern, and they won’t give you professional, helpful answers. Outsourcers will just “ship it fastest,” junior devs will just use whatever’s within their “knowledge boundaries.”
Here’s a personal example: In a Next.js project, I clearly raised the Schema structured data injection requirement. The frontend developed it as a client-rendered component. I said it must be a server component; he very reluctantly went to modify it and questioned: “As long as it exists, why change it?”
I could only ask: “Who do you think this is for? Would humans randomly look at a bunch of JSON code? If you’re showing it to crawlers, using client-side components, can crawlers even see it?”
If there’s no one willing to “nitpick” such things, can projects achieve expected goals and results? So just “building a good website” — this simple “dumb thing” — if you don’t give it enough importance, you’ll definitely get the results your “cleverness” deserves because of your “brilliance.”
Second Dumb Thing: Continuously Creating Content
The era of “good wine needs no bush” is long gone. Is your website forever just those few pages, while you daydream about users falling from the sky?
Are you continuously creating blog content? Covering related subtopics to build your topical authority? Is content properly optimized to provide sufficient Information Gain? Are internal links and site structure done right?
These things take time, take manpower, and may show no direct return for a long time. Are you — or your boss — willing to invest resources? Or do you think these are all fluff, and hiring two more salespeople to make calls is more practical?
Third Dumb Thing: Spending Money on Promotion
I often hear this argument: “My product is good, it should grow naturally through word of mouth — buying traffic is too low-class.”
Wake up. This isn’t an era where traffic is lying around to pick up. Backlinks, PR, ads, and KOLs — are you doing any promotion? Expecting to launch a new site from zero without any promotion budget — the difficulty is obvious.
Spending money itself isn’t dumb — spending money wisely is smart. But if you won’t even draw your sword, you can only “kill enemies with your mind” standing still.
Conclusion
If you earnestly did all these “dumb things” and project revenue still didn’t take off, congratulations — you’ve gained an extremely valuable failed experience based on correct execution.
But if you didn’t do any of these “dumb things,” or only scratched the surface, then go around saying this product doesn’t work, this project can’t run — I have to ask: how do you explain the projects that do work?
It’s you who can’t make it work, not the project.
The successful path for software going global is right there. How Wondershare started is no longer an industry secret — their financial reports and prospectuses are all public now. Opportunities always belong to those willing to put in “dumb effort.”
Found Mr. Guo’s analysis insightful? Drop a 👍 and share with more friends who need it!
Follow my channel — let’s build your growth system together.
🌌 The biggest speculation is continuously investing in those unchanging, correct things.