Launched a Navigation Site in Two Weeks: My Offshoring Backlink Experiment and Some Immature Thoughts

My "offshoring" story began at the end of 2024 on the @哥飞 public account. From the moment of inspiration to taking action, I gradually built a few websites as practice, ran into many pitfalls, and also had moments of small surprises. One of the deepest insights along the way has been: backlinks.

For anyone who has done offshoring websites, you'll probably have struggled with the same thing in the early stages: backlinks.

At first, I was like most people—reading tutorials, joining groups, looking for link exchange resources, even researching paid link options. But in practice, I realized that the backlinks painstakingly accumulated either had too little weight or weak relevance, offering limited help for rankings. Truly "useful" backlinks are much scarcer than imagined.

You spend time and effort, only to comfort yourself with: "At least it's not zero."

So, creating a navigation site of my own became a long-standing idea.
This way, whether it’s my own new projects or websites of friends and partners, there could be a stable source of backlinks. But this thought lingered for a long time—partly out of laziness, partly thinking, "There are already enough navigation sites. Does it still make sense to build one?"

Until December 2025, I finally decided to take action.

Step 1: Choose a Domain

I asked AI to generate and filter a batch of short, memorable, and internationally friendly domain names, then used bulk checking tools to filter quickly. I eventually found that freeai.run was still unregistered, and the price was very low, almost negligible for the first year.

I didn’t immediately register it, but hesitated for a few days—“free + ai” is highly competitive, search results are dominated by big companies, navigation sites are already saturated, I have no traffic base, no unique resources—it might all be wasted effort.

But then I thought: if I don’t do it, the opportunity is zero; if I do, there’s at least a chance. Besides, the cost is low, so consider it a practice run. So I decisively took it.

Step 2: Build the Site—More Painful Than Expected

I initially wanted to start immediately, but family matters delayed me for two weeks. When I finally had time, I used a navigation template from @judewei_dev【x.com/weijunext】and heavily customized it. To give the site a more "international feel," I also added multilingual support on my own, which led to a bunch of issues.

With weak front-end skills, I relied on AI assistants step by step: modifying route structures, reorganizing SEO according to my own ideas, rewriting copy (machine translation was not enough), and dealing with components breaking in different languages. It was frustrating, but slowly the foundation was taking shape.

Step 3: Launch—Not the End, But the Beginning

After configuring payments (I even found a problem yesterday, with one SKU failing the process—ugh) and optimizing the basic infrastructure, the FreeAI navigation site finally went live. It currently includes some AI tools, offshoring resources, developer tools, and will continue to curate quality sites.

Of course, the site is still in its early stages and has many issues, but it’s already working.

If you’re also doing offshoring projects, personal products, or just need some high-quality backlink support, feel free to [submit your site here]. I’m also happy to exchange links, especially with sites that are seriously working on products and solid content.

Final Thoughts

Navigation sites may no longer be the trend, but for me, it’s still a “digital asset” worth maintaining long-term. I don’t expect much from this site; I just hope it becomes a truly useful tool site, slowly accumulating value and growing over time.

Website: FreeAI Navigation Site (www.freeai.run)
Purpose: Curate practical AI and offshoring tools, grow together through mutual support
Goal: Discover the best free AI tools and websites
Feel free to visit, and even more, submit your site to help make the navigation more valuable.