Why I built a China travel guide instead of answering the same DMs forever

I live in China, and over the past couple of years I've become the unpaid travel agent for every friend, coworker, and friend-of-a-friend planning their first trip here. The questions are always the same, and almost none of them are about sightseeing. It's "do I need a visa now?" (often no — there are 30-day visa-free entry options many people still don't know about), "how do I pay for anything?" (cash barely works here anymore; you need Alipay or WeChat Pay set up before you land), and "which apps do I actually need?"

The English-language content on this stuff is either outdated or written by people who visited once in 2019. Payment rules and visa policy have changed a lot recently, and a guide that's even a year stale can genuinely wreck someone's first day. So I did the obvious thing and turned my copy-pasted DM answers into a site: firsttripchina.com.

It's deliberately narrow. It covers the four things that actually block first-time visitors — visa-free entry rules, mobile payment setup, the short list of apps worth installing, and getting around on high-speed rail — plus city guides for Shanghai, Beijing, and Xi'an. No affiliate-stuffed listicles, no "top 47 things to do."

It's a solo side project and still early days. The bet is content quality plus SEO: this is a space where being local and keeping pages current is a real edge over the big travel content farms. Next up is expanding the city guides and keeping the policy pages fresh, since visa rules here change faster than most sites update.

If you've been to China recently and something confused you that I haven't covered, I'd honestly love to hear it.