Business update, week 17

November 17, 2025 at 3:49 PM

Hi everyone,

The last two weeks were a mixed bag. The first week was very unproductive and I hit such a wall with the remaining forecasting-related work that I decided to completely abandon it and switch to the robotics idea full-time. The second week was much better, and after a slow start, I finished the rough draft for my ‘how to get a job in robotics’ guide, and started converting it to a website. I’m optimistic about how the next month will go, but unsatisfied with what I have to show for the mid-September to mid-November stretch of time.

Once I finished Forecasting 101 and sent it off to the company that funded the project, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I had a vague plan to make a website advertising the book, along with a few other ‘forecasting-related’ services, which I mentioned in my previous update. For some reason, I just could not motivate myself to create this website. I think there are a couple of reasons I hit this wall:

1. Deep down I don’t really believe that this is a good business idea, and to the extent that it is, it’s not a business I think I would enjoy building. I think it would require finding lots of one-off consulting gigs, either directly making forecasts (I know of a few other forecasters who make money this way) or by running training programs (like what Good Judgement Project offers). Despite thinking about this quite a bit, I don’t have other ideas to grow or improve this business, and I suspect making consistent revenue would be challenging. Before I was offered money to write the forecasting guide, I was close to abandoning the idea for this reason, and now I’m back in that same spot.
2. While I recognize there are both personal and public benefits to forecasting and the existence of forecasting platforms (I wrote about some of those benefits in Forecasting 101), I increasingly think that the industry, prediction markets in particular, are net-harmful to society, certainly for the vast majority of individual participants. Prediction markets these days are essentially just general-purpose gambling platforms, but lack even the basic safeguards that other gambling companies are obligated to implement (which themselves are a joke). This is a fairly recent development, and was not the case when I first started forecasting a few years ago. It’s mostly a result of the CFTC’s 2024 decision not to regulate prediction markets, which has opened the floodgates to enormous investment and resulted in the rapid expansion and gamification of the industry, which particularly targets young men like myself. I’ve been gradually developing a distaste for what the ‘forecasting’ industry has turned into and feel more of an aversion to it than I did in the past.
3. At the same time, I have an alternative that I am much more excited about. My ‘robotics career mentorship’ business idea seems better than the forecasting idea in almost every way. I know more about the subject, the business model is clearer, there are lots of ways I can pivot if the initial iteration doesn’t work, and I like thinking about and learning about robotics. I’ll also be doing work that is unambiguously beneficial for my clients, by helping them get jobs and develop skills. Having this alternative business idea on the back-burner has made it difficult to maintain motivation for the forecasting work.

So for those reasons I decided to drop the forecasting stuff completely and focus solely on the robotics idea. Forecasting 101 is written and exists and I can return to it in the future if I decide that’s a good idea. But for now, I’ve fulfilled all my obligations and would like to stop thinking about it for the time being. (And I did make $1250 along the way which isn’t nothing!)

I feel pretty optimistic about where the robotics business is headed. I finished a rough draft of all the text for the ‘get hired in robotics’ website I’m building and have started constructing the actual website. I expect to have version 1 of the website live by Thanksgiving (you’ll be able to find it at robots.jobs sometime this week). And unlike with the forecasting work, the more I think about the robotics business, the more ideas I have for ways to make it better, and the more confident I feel that it can actually work.

Just to list a couple of thoughts I’ve had around this idea:

• I’m building a Jobs Board for robotics industry jobs, which I’ll make available to mentees to help them find jobs to apply to. This is both a selling point for the program, and something I could sell access to as a standalone subscription for people who aren’t willing to pay the high price of the mentorship program.
• I have lots of educational content I want to make that will be both fun to make, and a great lead-magnet for my mentorship program. And I’ll become more and more of an expert in robotics as I develop these materials, so even if the business completely fails, I’ll be in a great position to get a robotics job myself!
• This idea benefits from network effects - as more people go through the program and get jobs, the ‘alumni network’ becomes an increasingly useful byproduct. I’ll have an expanding list of people I know inside of different robotics companies, who can potentially provide referrals to future participants (many companies offer referral bonuses to employees who refer candidates, so everybody wins). This then becomes a new selling point for the program.
• I’ll connect with people at many different robotics companies. I can figure out the specific skills they’re having a hard time finding and encourage my mentees to work on those skills. I do free recruiting for companies and in return, I get the inside scoop on what skills are most in demand. As long as I’m careful about not sending lots of unqualified candidates their way, this seems like it could become a mutually beneficial relationship for both me and the companies I connect with.

In general, this is a business where effort compounds over time. The program gets more attractive as the network grows, the educational resources accumulate, my industry connections and knowledge expand over time… I keep thinking of new ideas. So I think committing fully to this idea for the time being is the right move.

Now all of this sounds good in theory, but almost all of the work is still ahead of me. Right now the most important thing is to start building some of this and validate the idea as quickly as possible. We’re getting close to December and I still haven’t hit my checkpoint of earning $1000 in a month. I have a lot to get done over the next month to take this from a promising idea to a business that actually exists.

Stay tuned!

Jake