Business update, week 21
December 15, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Hi everyone,
Over the last month, I’ve been building roboticsprep.com, which I’ll start sharing publicly later this week. It came together a bit more slowly than I expected (sorry for the long gap between updates, I decided to prioritize getting the site ready to go and it kept dragging on…), but I’m happy with how it’s looking now. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think or if anything looks wonky on your device. (There are several obvious things I know still need fixing, so give it until Wednesday to report any bugs!)
The one sentence concept for the business is “I help software engineers get jobs in robotics”. Initially, I’ll do this in three ways:
- A “study guide” that covers all the concepts that an early career robot software engineer should understand (free)
- On-demand live practice interviews ($100)
- A mentorship program where I take an active role in helping a client land a job ($1000)
The study guide will theoretically be a “lead magnet,” a useful, free thing that I can share around easily and that will attract people who are likely to be interested in my paid offerings. The current version of the study guide leaves a lot to be desired, but I think it’s good enough to be useful to some people, and I’m going to keep improving it over time. This seems like a case where I’m better off launching the imperfect version and iterating (and potentially getting real user feedback) versus spending another month improving it in private.
Ultimately I’d prefer for people to join the mentorship program over booking one-off practice interviews but I suspect that early on, people will be more willing to try out individual interviews than pay up for the full mentorship program. I’m not sure what will happen though, the first few months will be an experiment to see what people will pay for (or if they’ll pay at all) and that should give me information to decide what to prioritize later on.
Over the next 6 weeks or so, my top priority is figuring out how best to market the business. I’ll try out a variety of LinkedIn posts, and also do some direct networking/outreach. I may also consider offering very steep discounts (or even free access) for the first few people in order to work out some of the details of the mentorship program and collect a few testimonials.
Longer term, I think “organic content marketing” is a promising strategy - for this business, that means creating free educational resources (YouTube videos or explanatory articles for different robotics concepts) that can be shared around and discovered ‘organically,’ in which I also give a brief pitch for my paid services. Because there’s strong overlap between people who would search for this educational content and my target customers, the recommendation algorithms of the platforms I post the content on will do the hard work of finding me potential customers (as long as my content is actually good).
I have a long list of other ideas to try out, but for now the most important thing is sharing the website and determining if anyone will actually pay for the services I’m offering. If this is a viable idea, I think I should be able to get a couple paying customers by the end of the year, and maybe a dozen or so in January. If I’m in that ballpark, I’d consider that a strong signal that this can grow into a real business.
Zooming out to the big picture, I’ve used about half of the time I’ve allotted myself to start a successful business before I’ll probably need to start looking for a normal job again. Tentatively, I plan to take until the end of January to evaluate the robotics idea. If that’s a total flop, I have time to give a solid attempt (2 months or so of effort) at one additional idea before I start looking for a job. I’m feeling optimistic about the robotics idea, so hopefully it doesn’t come to that, but that’s the rough timeline I’m looking at.
With that said, one thing this experience has taught me is that if I can even spend just a couple hours per day on a business idea, and sustain that for several months, that’s plenty of time to develop and test out an idea. Prior to starting this effort full-time, I had considered trying to start something in my free time, but I felt like the workload that would require would be unsustainable. Now that I know what the general strategy and day-to-day steps are for testing a business idea, the idea of working on a business ‘on the side’ feels much more realistic. That is to say, if I do end up needing to return to a regular day job, I could see myself continuing to test out business ideas on the side.
Until next time,
Jake