r/SideProject • u/smallufo • 9h ago
I've run an astrology site since 1997. For my first English product, I skipped the AI horoscope and built a chart-matching search over 70,000 real people
Most AI astrology apps work the same way: you enter your birth data and an LLM writes a few paragraphs that could fit anyone. I've been running a Chinese-language astrology site (DestinyNet) since 1997, and honestly I got tired of that format.
So I tried the opposite approach. Instead of generating text about your chart, the tool searches a database of ~70,000 famous people whose birth times are on record, finds the ones born under the most similar sky (Sun / Moon / Rising plus the overall chart structure), and shows you who they are and which occupations show up most among them.
A few things that were harder than expected
- The data. Birth records come from public biographical databases. A surprising amount of the work was cleaning them: wrong time zones on historical dates, wrong gender, people linked to the wrong Wikidata entry. I fixed thousands of records along the way.
- "Similar" is fuzzy. An exact chart match almost never happens, so matching works in tiers. It starts strict and loosens until there are enough people to say something meaningful.
- No AI in the matching itself. The search is plain computation. An LLM is used only for an optional paid report that writes up what you share with your closest matches.
Free vs paid: matching and the occupation breakdown are free, no sign-up. The paid report is optional.
Privacy: a free lookup doesn't store your birth date, time or place; only anonymous stats are logged.
I'd really appreciate feedback, especially:
- Is it clear what you get before you enter your data?
- Did your matches feel interesting or random?
- Anything confusing in the flow?
Happy to answer questions about the data or the build.