Business update, week 15
November 3, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Hey everyone,
I’ve been hard at work finishing up Forecasting 101 which I’m happy to say is now complete! I’ll have it available online within the next few days, but anyone here is welcome to check out the final draft which you can access with this link. If you do read it, feel free to leave comments or provide feedback, I’ll continue to make minor updates for a while. Overall I’m happy with how it turned out, although it also took a bit more time and effort than I had anticipated.
I think it’s too soon to say if this was a good use of time or not, ultimately that will depend on whether it helps me land any additional consulting clients over the next month or two. Going into the project, my calculus was that between the $1,000 I was offered to write the guide and the potential publicity from Mantic listing it on their website, it should eventually generate enough return to be worth the month it would take to write. I’m currently feeling more skeptical that it was worth it, but we’ll have to wait and see how the next couple months go.
If nothing else, it was nice to spend a full month working on a project and see it to completion. This was the largest writing project I’ve ever taken on (it ended up at about 90 pages), and it forced me to work out some strategies to stay focused and make steady progress while doing what was mentally-taxing work. I’m looking forward to the next month of work now because it feels like whatever I work on can’t possibly be as challenging as a full month of doing nothing but writing!
This week
My plan for the next week is to update the website where I had initially advertised Forecasting 101 and turn it into a more comprehensive landing page for my forecasting-related services business. In addition to selling the guide there, I’ll include more information about other services I offer, so that hopefully it’s clearer to site visitors if there’s anything I offer that would be useful to them.
Then, I’ll prepare a bunch of forecasting-related snippets to use as LinkedIn posts, and aim to post 2-3 of those per week for the next couple months. Each post will provide interesting educational content, and link to the updated website. From there we’ll wait and see if there seems to be interest in those services and if I’m able to land any additional clients.
I expect the website update to take about 1-2 days, and the LinkedIn posts to take another 2-3 days (to prepare about a month’s worth of posts), so I’m aiming to have all that work wrapped up by the end of the week. By the start of next week, I’d like to have all of the forecasting-related work at a point where it’s only taking about an hour of work per day, most of that being networking and LinkedIn post writing (at least until / if I get additional clients).
This month
My goal for the rest of the month is to have my ‘Get a job in robotics guide’ finished and converted into an interactive website. This project has been on the back-burner while I wrote Forecasting 101, but I’d made great progress on it before that. My rough estimate is that I’ve got a week left of writing work, plus 2-3 weeks of work to turn the draft into an interactive website. I’ll also prepare a page explaining my ‘robotics job tutor’ service, with an option to sign up for an initial exploratory call.
If all goes to plan, by the end of November, I’ll have the robotics offering to the point where I can spend most of my time seeking out potential clients, and hopefully bringing some initial clients through the program.
High-level reflections
The last six weeks have been a completely different experience from my first two month working on the business. For the first two months, I was doing different things pretty much every day or every week, exploring lots of different ideas, working very long hours, but also not producing much valuable ‘output.’ In contrast, I’ve spent the last six weeks working exclusively on two specific projects, the robotics guide and Forecasting 101, each one taking a month or so of up-front work, but hopefully generating returns far into the future.
Long term, I need to find a balance between:
- devoting substantial time and effort to creating things of value, like Forecasting 101 or the robotics job guide, and the related services I’ll offer
- publicizing those things and actively seeking out customers
- getting feedback and improving my products/services
The early weeks were strange because I didn’t really know what ‘things of value’ even looked like so I was frantically searching around to figure out what I should work on. Recently I’ve been focused exclusively on #1. This was necessary because you can’t really do #2 or #3 until you have real things to sell, but felt odd because I wasn’t spending any time actually going after customers. So even though I knew logically that I was doing useful work, it felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere.
By December I’d like to have a roughly even split between 1, 2, and 3, continuing to create new things of value (and servicing existing clients), but devoting more time to seeking out customers and getting feedback from the real world.
Goals for this week:
- Complete website to sell Forecasting 101 and advertise my other forecasting-related services
- Prepare LinkedIn posts for the rest of the month
That’s all for now!
Jake