Business update, week 25

January 11, 2026 at 10:45 AM

Since the last update I:

• Took a break for a few weeks to visit family for the holidays (and be sick)
• Created a Robotics Prep LinkedIn page and started collecting followers
• Started posting educational and interview prep content on LinkedIn
• Did an introductory call with my first prospect for the mentor program, and booked a second call (no actual signups yet though)
• Started deep diving a specific robotics topic, which I will be producing a variety of educational content for over the next couple weeks

I unfortunately had a very unproductive couple of weeks over the holidays. I had intended to work maybe 50% of the time during my 2 week visit home, but illness derailed things at the beginning and then I never got on track. It was nice to have a little break though and now I’m feeling excited to get a bunch of work done.

I had my first ‘introductory call’ for the career mentorship program this week after, surprisingly, somebody booked a call a few days after my first LinkedIn post about Robotics Prep. The call went okay. It seems like the person isn’t going to sign up for the program, but I think that’s mostly because they’re more experienced than my ‘ideal client’ and sensed that I wasn’t really more experienced then them, not because I did a terrible job on the call. Although there are plenty of things I’ll do differently for the next call.

Speaking of which, I’ve got another call with a second prospect for the mentor program this week. Given the limited reach my advertising for the website has so far, it’s encouraging that I’m seeing even this small amount of preliminary interest. I’m curious to see if that continues or grows over the next couple weeks as I expand my network and create more educational content.

I spent some time this week creating posts for LinkedIn, one “explainer” post for a very narrow robotics topic, and one “interview prep” post that just included a handful of practice interview questions. The first was very slow to create, the second went much quicker. I’m sure I’ll get faster over time, most of the slowness came from ‘not knowing how to use Canva’ rather than ‘not knowing what to say’. I will be trying hard to stick to a one post per weekday pace for now, but if that seems unsustainable, I’ll err on the side of fewer, better posts vs. more, lower quality posts.

The broader marketing and content strategy I have is something like this: I’ll spend a block of two weeks focused on a specific topic. I’ll study that topic, take notes, think about how to explain the key ideas clearly, and do some kind of interesting project that demonstrates the ideas for that topic. Then, I’ll create:

• A YouTube video (or set of videos) where I explain the key ideas and build up to the software demo
• A longform written article that explains the key ideas
• A set of 10 or so LinkedIn posts related to the topics I’ve been reviewing
• A set of links to any resources I found useful in learning the topics (to add to the study guide)

I’ll then repeat that cycle for a new topic. I’ll post the content from the first cycle while building the content for the next one. Every video, post, etc. will include a brief call-to-action referring back to the website. I like this approach because I can focus on one topic at a time and create a bunch of resources all at once for that topic, rather than jumping around and constantly switching contexts.

Tentatively, I’d like these to be two week cycles. I think this pace will be very challenging at first (especially the video part), but I’ll try to keep to that pace as much as possible. Hopefully after a few cycles I will get faster at all the different steps. I will try my best to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here, particularly when it comes to ‘production quality.’ For educational content, the quality of the explanation is the most important thing.

For now, most of my effort is focused on this marketing work, but I’ve also scheduled some time into my weekly schedule for both website upgrades and general networking / outreach. And any ‘client work’ takes precedence over everything.

I think I was feeling a bit burned out after all the effort that went into creating the guide and website, but this new phase has been fun so far. Learning about robotics topics, thinking through how to explain things clearly, building demo projects… all of that is fun for me and I think will be invigorating to work on. And working with real clients will be motivating. I also have metrics to track now (impressions, signups, website visitors, etc.) so there is real world feedback on the actions I’m taking, which I didn’t have before now.