I’m building an IT education brand from zero. What would you change before I waste a year on the wrong strategy?

I’ve been experimenting with building an IT education page around networking, troubleshooting, and beginner IT concepts.

I work in IT myself, but I’m still learning, so I’m not trying to position myself like some senior engineer or guru.

Right now I’m posting short educational content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and a little LinkedIn.

The type of content I’m testing is stuff like:
“PC can reach the gateway but not the server. What would you check next?”

Or simple beginner explanations around networking, Windows commands, DNS, VLANs, troubleshooting, etc.

One of my TikToks got around 3k views and a decent amount of saves and followers, but most of the content is still small.

Long term, I’m thinking about improving the production quality with DaVinci Resolve, doing more animated explanations, maybe showing my face eventually, making longer YouTube videos, and possibly selling practical labs or guides later.

What I’m worried about is spending a year getting better at making short form content without actually building something useful or monetizable.

So I’m curious how people here would approach this.

Would you focus heavily on one or two platforms first, or keep distributing the same core content everywhere?

Would you invest time into better animation and editing now, or keep production simple until you know which topics actually work?

Is practical troubleshooting strong enough as a niche, or does it eventually become repetitive?

For monetization, would you look more toward labs, guides, courses, sponsorships, community, or something completely different?
And what metrics would you care about at this stage besides views and followers?

I’m specifically looking for criticism.

If the idea is weak, too broad, hard to monetize, or I’m spreading myself too thin, I’d rather hear that now than after putting a year into it.