Welcome back to Watch Me AI
A big update this week: I’m having a baby!
If all goes according to plan, by the time you're reading this, our second child will have arrived earlier this morning. As I write this, I could not be more excited to meet our little guy.
Here’s the second big thing: I’m not pausing my business while I’m on maternity leave.
Instead, I’ve spent the last few weeks building a system that will keep this newsletter going, keep LinkedIn updated, keep generating income, and keep me learning from what happens, all while I’m offline with a newborn.
I’m calling it Watch Me AI: Maternity Leave Mode.
It’s the biggest experiment I’ve run.
Why I’m doing this
A few reasons:
- I love running this business. If everything just stopped for three months, I’d have serious FOMO.
- I also like earning money. As a solopreneur, I don’t have a company paying me during maternity leave. I want to see if I can keep revenue going while I’m away.
- I love AI and automations. I’ve been excited to try this exact experiment for months. Having a baby is the forcing function.
- I hope this inspires other moms, parents, and caregivers. If a working parent sees this and thinks “I could do that too,” it was worth doing.
What it looks like
What’s running on auto: The Newsletter Agent and LinkedIn Agent handle drafting. An AI Mollie bot handles questions, points people to resources, and keeps the conversation going. I’ve also added monetization and marketing layers to my existing products and content, so the things I’ve already built can keep working harder while I’m out.
A few things happening at once.
- The newsletter still ships every Tuesday morning. LinkedIn posts Monday through Thursday. The topics stay the kind of thing you’ve come to expect from Watch Me AI, all generated by AI Agents.
- An AI Mollie bot handles questions, points people to resources, and keeps the conversation going.
- I’ve also added monetization and marketing layers to my existing products and content, so the things I’ve already built can keep working harder while I’m out.
- Agents run periodically to check my earnings and optimize across my products for revenue.
What’s actually off: my consulting work. No live meetings, no deliverables, no deadlines for three months. That part is genuinely paused.
The whole system has learning loops built in. The idea is that it can self-regulate, surface what’s working, and maybe even grow on its own over the three months.
I’m not planning to be 100% removed. Once we find a rhythm with the baby, I envision using Wispr Flow to tell Claude what to do from my phone, probably while nursing or on walks. The goal is for most things to run on their own. The whispering part is for the fun stuff I want to bake in on top.
I also hope to go deeper on my AI craft and AI-mom projects. The first one just launched: a Family Crest Generator. More on the rest later.
I'm sharing the full journey here: https://molliemueller.com/maternity-mode.
What I’m excited about
Three things:
- Seeing what’s actually possible. Most people would say you can’t keep a one-person business publishing, selling, and learning while the founder is offline for three months. I want to find out.
- Learning a ton along the way. Building this has already taught me more about agent design and content systems than any single project I’ve done. Operating it for three months will be its own education.
- Inspiring someone, hopefully. If even one parent sees this and decides to try something they would have written off, that’s a meaningful outcome.
What I’m worried about
I had way less time to set this up than I hoped. I was up late Monday night orchestrating agents instead of sleeping. So this is a real experiment in every sense: I'm not sure I did enough setup before today, and we're about to find out.
I'm worried about building in public and failing. Telling everyone I'm running this experiment makes it harder to quietly pull the plug if it stops working. I'd rather be honest than perfect, but the public part of "public experiment" has its own weight.
I'm worried about losing interest. Three months is a long time. The thing I've been most excited about for the last few weeks might not be the thing I'm most excited about by August. That's how most projects die.
I'm worried about it becoming a distraction from my family. The whole point is to be there for the new baby and my daughter. If the system keeps pulling me back to the laptop, it's worse than just pausing the business.
And I'm worried about the judgment that working moms get for all the things working moms get judged for. Whether I'm doing too much. Whether I'm doing too little. Whether wanting to keep working at all means I'm not committed enough to my kids. Whether automating the business means I'm replaceable. The whole catalogue.
I'm telling you these because if I kept them to myself the newsletter would feel less honest. And the honesty is most of the point.
What this could mean
Plenty of founder parents I know have either ground themselves into exhaustion during leave or stepped back from work that matters to them. There’s been no real third option.
If keeping a business breathing while you’re not at the wheel is possible, it’s not just parents and founders who benefit. Anyone who needs a long step back, for health, family, sabbatical, grief, any reason at all, could use that playbook.
I’m building this in public so the lessons are visible. I really hope it works.
What’s next
This morning, my second baby arrives.
Later this week, the next newsletter goes deep on how everything works behind the scenes: what the agents actually are, what's automated versus human-approved, what's not happening at all.
After that, every newsletter will be generated by my Newsletter Agent, reviewed and approved by me before it ships.
If you know another parent with parental leave on the horizon, a friend headed into sabbatical, a colleague burned out and dreaming of a break, or anyone who's wondered whether stepping back is actually survivable, forward this to them.
I hope this playbook gets used by many.
See you on the other side,
Mollie
