Business update, week 10
September 29, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Hi everyone,
Sorry for missing the update again last week… the good news is that I was busy doing some actual paid work for a couple of clients! I may stick to a biweekly cadence for future updates rather than every week, since that feels a bit more sustainable over the long term. Anyway, let me tell you about what I’ve been up to the last few weeks.
In my last update, I mentioned that I was probably moving on from my ‘Forecasting 101’ idea, and had started working on a robotics career development idea. I had just started on a ‘Get Hired in Robotics’ guide and had set a goal of completing a portion of that.
Since then, there have been a few interesting developments:
Forecasting 101 lives on
I hinted at this in the last update, but one of the two people who had expressed interest in my forecasting guide was the founder of an AI-based forecasting startup. After I told them I was going to drop the project, they offered to pay me to go ahead with writing it. We ended up settling on a deal where they’d pay me $1000 to write it ($500 up front, $500 on completion), they’d get the first $1000 from any sales, and then we’d split any additional sales. That was enough that I felt it would be worth the time commitment, so I agreed to that arrangement.
So just like that, I’ve got a 4-figure deal! I don’t really expect that many people to pay for Forecasting 101 once it’s written, so I doubt I’ll get any additional money from it, but it’s cool to make a meaningful amount of money from a project I came up with completely from scratch, and didn’t pay anything to advertise.
Other forecasting work
The other person who had expressed interest in the guide also followed up with me when I let him know I planned to drop the project. He asked if I had other resources I could recommend and offered to pay me to make him a study plan and do a coaching call. So I worked out a deal with him where for $250, I would make him a personalized study guide for forecasting and do a 1-hour coaching call after he had worked through some of the study materials. I made the guide and sent it over to him last week.
I also had a call with someone from the Rand Forecasting Initiative, who saw some of my forecasting-related LinkedIn posts from a few weeks ago. His team is working on educational resources for K-12 students - we talked about some of his projects and he asked if he could reach out in another month or so about me helping out with one of their programs in the future. I don’t have anything concrete there, but that’s another potential opportunity coming down the pipeline.
Robotics guide
In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to work on the ‘robotics job tutor’ idea I talked about in the last update. I’m about halfway done with drafting my ‘Get Hired in Robotics’ guide, which I’ll then clean up and turn into a website. Once that’s published, I’ll share it and start creating other educational robotics content to complement it. Then I’ll try to recruit a first group of job-seekers for my job tutor program and start advertising it on the website where the guide lives.
I continue to think this could be a really good business over the long term, so I’m trying to keep devoting time to it, even as I work on the various forecasting-related opportunities that have popped up.
What are my goals for next week
Main goal: Complete a draft of part 1 (of 3) of Forecasting 101. I have until Nov 1 to deliver the full guide which should be plenty of time, but I want to avoid procrastinating. I’ve written an outline for part 1 and completing it this week is very doable if I stay focused.
Secondary goal: make incremental progress on the robotics guide
What’s working / what isn’t
More than at any point up until now, I think I have a clear picture of what I should be doing and more generally, how to get from ‘no idea’ to ‘paying customers’ for a business. My biggest challenge at the moment is staying focused and grinding out the work, most of which is writing. This is the inverse of what the first month or so was like, where I had no idea what to spend my time on but high capacity for doing work.
It’s interesting that the one idea I actually put out into the world ultimately turned into over $1000 of sales within a month. I never actually launched anything in the wild with any of my previous ideas, but as soon as I put something out there and told people about it, I found interested customers. It’s also interesting that every customer (which to be fair was only 2) who was willing to pay $10 was also willing to pay hundreds of dollars. I guess this is the big advantage of having very niche products - yes, it’s hard to find customers, but the customers you do find tend to be very high-value customers.
In closing, September sales are up over 1000% compared to August, so I think things are on the right track. I just need to keep that growth rate up for a few more months and then I can retire.
That’s all for this week!
Jake