Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• My 8 a.m. focus session on video with my developer friend led to a productive morning. See more here. I’m becoming a bigger fan of these sessions, even when they’re early in the morning.
• Most indexes about entrepreneurs are organized by their wealth. But their wealth doesn’t reflect what other entrepreneurs can learn from their experiences. I need to figure out how to structure my entrepreneurs page. See more here.
• Profile pages about entrepreneurs in an index can’t be loaded with too much fluffy text. They need to deliver the important info quickly. I need to rethink how to do this.
• A website that indexes information is basically a directory. When creating a directory website, many things that affect search engine optimization (SEO)—such as URL structure—must be considered up front.
• Explicitly stating the lesson learned from an entrepreneur’s story makes it easier for people to get value from it. They don’t have to try to figure out the lesson on their own.
• Early versions of some prominent, paid, directory-type desktop apps have been built quickly and cheaply using Bubble.
• Contributor marketing is a good way to build credibility and raise awareness of your solution. See more here.
• I couldn’t find a website of an avid reader or blogger that has a well-laid-out index of the books they’ve read. I was really surprised. Seems like a big opportunity.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

I’m rereading Junk to Gold: From Salvage to the World’s Largest Online Auto Auction. It’s the autobiography of Copart founder Willis Johnson. Johnson is worth roughly $3 billion today, most of which is his stake in Copart. I listened to an interview he gave recently, and it made me want to read his book again. He founded Copart in 1982 as a salvage yard. He purchased wrecked cars and sold the parts and scrap metal for a profit. The company has expanded. It’s now a global online auction market for used and repairable vehicles. As of this writing, it has a market capitalization (i.e., valuation) of over $56 billion.

In his book, Johnson describes himself as rough around the edges. He isn’t polished and doesn’t always use the “right” words. He attended community college for one semester on the GI Bill and then dropped out. So, how did Copart become a massive company?

As I shared last year when I read the book, Johnson didn’t have a big vision for the company. He didn’t even have a plan. But he knew he wanted to grow. The key to Johnson’s success was his ability to master two things.

He was a cloner. He paid close attention to what was happening around him and what others had done. If he liked an idea and thought he could make money with it, he tried it out. He learned about a new model involving people pulling parts off cars themselves called “Pick-A-Part.” He studied it closely and copied it by creating “U-Pull-It.” The idea was a massive success. When he heard a competitor was raising capital to expand rapidly by doing an IPO, he paid attention. Two years later, Johnson’s company was trading on the stock market too.

Johnson also was an astute student and avid reader. He believed he could teach himself anything. For example, to figure out how to do an IPO, he started by trying to get a basic understanding of IPOs. He read the IPO prospectus of his competitor many times to understand what the IPO involved and to understand the Wall Street terminology. He then went to his local library to find books that explained the IPO process and all the terminology in more detail. He had trouble finding a book because nothing came up when he searched for “IPO.” He went to three different library branches. It wasn’t until someone at the third library branch told him that “IPO” stands for “initial public offering” that he found a helpful book from Ernst & Young, which he studied extensively.

Being an avid learner and reader is a great way for entrepreneurs to get ideas and strategies to grow their businesses. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors didn’t invent new ideas or strategies; they copied other people’s great ideas. For example, Warren Buffett got the idea to have an insurance company (and maybe decentralization too) as part of Berkshire Hathaway from Henry Singleton and Teledyne. Henry Singleton got the idea by reading the book My Years at General Motors by former General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan.

The beauty of both of these—copying others’ good ideas and self-learning—is that anyone can do them. They don’t require permission or consent from anyone else. Not sure what to do to solve a problem? Not sure how to grow your business? No problem; start reading biographies of credible entrepreneurs. Learning about their journeys to build their companies is bound to give you some ideas about how to grow yours.

I’m still on my journey to learn about marketing (see here). One way new companies can market is by defining their ideal customers (and the problem they solve for them) clearly and then figuring out where those people hang out. Instead of attempting to attract them to an unknown brand, go find them where they’re spending time and introduce your solution and brand to them.

So, how do you do this in a way that isn’t spammy and that builds trust in your solution and brand? I had a rough idea but wasn’t sure, so I did some research. I came across a video that gave a great tactical explanation of how a new company contributes to Reddit posts to market itself. Here are a few of my takeaways:

• The goal isn’t to siphon traffic from communities; it’s to become a respected member who adds value to the community.
• Being a respected community member is a long-term strategy, not a quick fix.
• Most people lurk in communities. Contributing is a way to stand out and attract people to you.
• On Reddit, in-depth responses to posts do well.
• Social status in online communities like Reddit and Hacker News is based on how much you contribute.
• Building credibility first is important. It can take months or even a year.
• When you’re contributing to a community, you never know which post will add outsize value to the community and increase your standing in it.
• Because specifics and details that aren’t normally shared or known are so hard to find, people love them.
• Each platform has a unique culture. Learn the culture of the platform

This is tactical advice, but I found it useful. I like the concept of contributor marketing because you lead with adding value to others, which feels more authentic and the way to earn not just customers but people who are fanatic about your company.If you want to watch this part of the interview, see here.If you want to see the Reddit post where some of the above learning originated, see here.

Today, I listened to an interview of Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and Automattic. WordPress is an open-source content management system for websites. The platform helps you manage what your website shows. WordPress is extremely popular, powering roughly 43% of all websites (hundreds of millions of them) on the internet. Automattic is a holding company that owns several internet businesses, including WordPress. It did over $500 million in revenue in 2024.

Matt started WordPress when he was 19. One thing in the interview got my attention. WordPress is a platform that people can build businesses on. To develop his platform strategy, Matt didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, he studied another platform company—and not just any platform company, but the most successful one: Microsoft. He read about Microsoft and realized that the Windows operating system had Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). For Microsoft, building its own application on top of its platform was a key strategy that turbocharged its financial performance.

Learning about Microsoft’s strategy led Matt to ponder what the WordPress equivalent of Microsoft Office would be. What application could he own that sat on top of the WordPress platform? Matt leaned into the strategy but didn’t build an application. He bought one. He ended up purchasing WooCommerce, an e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It allows people to turn a WordPress website into an e-commerce site where people can complete purchase transactions.

WooCommerce, according to Matt, has been one of his best acquisitions. Last year, $30 billion worth of transactions occurred on WooCommerce.

Matt’s a pretty sharp dude. Even so, he got his inspiration from reading about the history of another successful company. He copied its strategy (clearly, it worked, since his product is running a little less than half the internet) and modified it for his situation. He didn’t waste time trying to figure out what would work; he focused on modifying and executing a wildly successful strategy.

This resonated with me because I’ve had a comparable experience. This past summer I read about Michael Bloomberg’s strategy in a biography. After that, everything clicked, and I knew what my strategy was for my book project. I’ve been executing on it  since.

My takeaway from Matt’s interview and my experience is that there’s immense value in the biographies of founders and histories of companies. If you’re unsure about what strategy to take to grow your company, reading biographies and learning about other entrepreneurs’ strategies and why they worked is a good use of time. You might just read one that clicks and changes your business or idea, too.

If you want to see this strategy section of Matt’s interview, it’s here. If you want to watch the entire interview, which is good, see here.

I’m knee-deep in experimenting with the “Entrepreneurs” page on this blog. I’ve been talking to people to figure out the best way to present the list of entrepreneurs and the details on a dedicated page for each entrepreneur. The two pages I have up now are for testing layout ideas and getting feedback from friends.

I’m a fan of copying what works, so I’ve been doing some research. Surprisingly, I haven’t found any great lists of entrepreneurs that aren’t based on net worth. Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes Billionaires are well formatted and insightful. The list of names is easy to go through, and each entrepreneur has a great profile page. The main hook to get you to click on each page is their net worth or the source of their wealth (for many, the company they founded). So, these two do a great job but focus only on the richest people in the world. Other lists I’ve looked at that aren’t based on net worth aren’t high quality from a presentation perspective.

I like some visual aspects of how Bloomberg and Forbes present their lists. They’re clean and simple. Each person’s profile page is laid out well (I love the Bloomberg layout). But wealth is the anchor, which isn’t what I want for my page. I’m going to have to figure out what my anchor will be and how to get people interested in learning more about the entrepreneurs without making it all about their wealth.

Today, I had another two-hour focus session via video. This is the second one I’ve had (see here for learnings from the first one). It was a little different—we started at 8 a.m. I usually don’t take meetings early in the morning because I want to protect the time when I’m most productive (I’m a morning person). But I want to show the software to a few people at a conference in a few weeks and we have a lot to get done before then, so 8 a.m. it was! A few takeaways from today:

• I created a document with system instructions and a process diagram that my developer friend needed to understand before he started writing code. We spent a few minutes walking through it. I’m not sure if that was time well spent—I might have been able to do a Loom video, which he could have watched beforehand. Then we’d address any questions and try the system instructions in the AI studio together before he started coding. The Loom video would be good documentation that’s useful later for other developers. It might have saved a little time (though not a lot) and produced something that would be useful later.
• During the last ten minutes of the session, we both shared what we’d gotten done, discussed our plan for the next session, and identified the blockers each of us should remove before then. Those blockers became to-do lists. For example, he needs me to write another system instruction, so that’s on my list of things to do before our next session later this week.
• Starting at 8 a.m. felt good. Since this wasn’t a traditional meeting but rather a focused working session, I felt like it was a good use of my most productive time. I got a bunch of stuff done in two hours, which is my objective with my morning time. We were done by 10 a.m., and I felt good and in a productive groove. I worked on another project until lunch and got a lot done on it, too. The two-hour session made my morning more productive.

I’m not sure what to call these sessions—my developer friend calls them “pair programming”—but I’m a fan of them. I wasn’t sure about the 8 a.m. start time, but it worked surprisingly well. I think having a bit of structure at the beginning and end of each session helps us get the most out of them by setting expectations and clearly defining the next action each person must take before we meet again.I’m looking forward to the next session.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 48
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 301
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, a framework book about marketing storytelling and messaging  
• Created a system instruction to guide a LLM through a defined workflow
• Created a new, lucid chart to document the above process flow
• Created an “Entrepreneurs” page on the blog to test ideas about presenting data
• Started creating the data structure for other types of data to be presented on the blog
• Started testing various marketing ideas on this blog; see here

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Get feedback on the problem, vision, and mission statements from two seasoned entrepreneurs
• Create a concise hypothesis statement  
• Share the draft taxonomy with two people
• Continue linking blog posts about the same book
• Continue updating descriptions for blog posts about the same book

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred fifty-three was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• I didn’t make as much progress on my tasks related to software development as I wanted to this week. We had some good breakthroughs on getting the UI and website to visualize data from the software. I ran hard in that direction, given the momentum (and excitement), but it came at a cost: less progress on the software. I need to figure out how to keep all areas moving forward consistently.

What I learned:

• I still need to work on my pitch. I was rambling when I pitched on the fly twice this week. See more here.
• The Bloomberg-terminal-for-entrepreneurs analogy resonated well during the above-mentioned pitches. I’ve added it to the marketing message list.
• I’m using this blog as a laboratory to test marketing messages and strategies that will help with this project.
• I haven’t figured out a way to show the data from the database in a way that doesn’t overwhelm users. Also, we’ll have lots of data, but I don’t know what information they’ll value most. This blog is a good way to learn by testing. I’m adding new pages to this blog. Hopefully, people will find them useful. If not, I’ll adjust them until they add value. Stay tuned!
• Before entrepreneurs invest time into learning about another entrepreneur, they want to know why it’s worth it. They want to establish credibility before investing time. Quantifying the other entrepreneur’s company size through revenue, profits, or the amount their company was sold for are common data points entrepreneurs look for to establish credibility.
• Building a custom platform to display information from the database doesn’t make sense at this point. There are web platforms with good-enough functionality that can be updated via an API from our database.
• Creating the software that houses the information from biographies is a different project than presenting that information in a way that’s useful to others. The two projects complement each other, but they have different objectives. One is data, and the other is more media-ish. How revenue can be generated from each is different, too. These might need to be two different companies.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

I’m finishing up Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller. The book is about a framework for communicating your company’s solution and value add in a way that resonates with customers. A framework is an approach to thinking about problems in a way that increases your chances of identifying a superior solution. I’ve been embracing frameworks, and I now view them as valuable thinking tools that lead entrepreneurs to better solutions in less time.

Miller describes the psychology of customers, what strategies can influence their perspective of a company’s solution(s), and what’s needed to get them to act (purchase or take the next step in the sales process). One of Miller’s principles is that every person is trying to avoid failure. If you can communicate to customers the downside of not using your solution, you position yourself as helping them avoid failure.

Miller, expanding on this idea, shows that one reason it works so well is human psychology—specifically, loss aversion. Loss aversion is a cognitive bias. People perceive losses as being more significant than gains. Someone can lose $1 and then gain $1, but the lost dollar will feel more painful than the dollar gained will feel pleasant, even though the amount lost and the amount gained are the same.

If you can communicate the downside to not using your solution (lost status, time, etc.), your customer will want to avoid that loss and will be more inclined to purchase.

Loss aversion is a real thing, something I’ve noticed in myself when investing. Losses are inevitable when investing. I know this and expect them to be part of the process (but not too large). But when I’ve lost money in the past, it feels more painful than an equivalent gain feels pleasant.

I’d never considered loss aversion as a potentially useful strategy in marketing messaging, but Miller’s point makes a lot of sense. Now that I know this and I’m paying attention, I see this strategy in lots of ads.

Tying marketing messaging into psychology made things click for me, given that psychology is another topic I’m actively learning more about. Interestingly, Charlie Munger talked about loss aversion, and its implications for decision-making, a good bit in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. When multiple people who are credible say to pay attention to something, I take heed. Loss aversion is a cognitive bias I’ll consider more heavily in my decisions and marketing.

I’ve been learning a lot about marketing lately. It’s my Achilles’ heel, but I want to change that. To learn the big concepts in marketing, I’ve been reading books, listening to and watching podcasts on YouTube, reading newsletters, etc. I’m even debating attending a conference on written marketing, something I never would have done before.

Knowledge and wisdom are different. Here are my thoughts on this from an old post:

Knowledge is acquired by learning new information or being made aware of something. Learning about marketing is an example of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge acquisition doesn’t always equate to adding value. There’s another step.

Wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge in a manner that aligns with the outcome you desire. Wisdom means changed behavior and improved decision-making—knowing what to do and when to do it. Wisdom is acquired from experience (yours or someone else’s). Growing your company through marketing execution is the result of wisdom.

I’m now trying to move from acquiring knowledge about marketing to gaining wisdom. I’m getting experience by applying my knowledge and running tests on this blog. Here are a few things I’ve been doing:

• Titles – David Ogilvy’s books (and my most-read blog post in 2024) helped me understand the importance of titles. The content can be great, but if no one is curious enough to read it, it doesn’t matter. The title is critical to generating curiosity. My blog post title was an afterthought before. I’d throw something together just before I published to say I checked the box. I’m now more intentional about titling and have the beginnings of criteria for my blog post titles. My titles are much better than before I learned about marketing, but I still have more work to do.
• Descriptions – Similar to the titles, descriptions were a check-the-box exercise before. Each blog post has a description that’s visible in Google search results. I’m now making it a priority to write descriptions that generate curiosity.
• Tagline – People need to know what this blog is about, so I’ve added that info to the tagline. I also added a personal flex and credibility booster by including my number of consecutive posts (1,775+!). Now people know this blog is about entrepreneurship and biographies. The messaging in this tagline might still change, but it’s better than before.
• Calls to action – Marketing is all about getting people to act, usually by buying something. I’m not selling anything, but I still want to test getting people to act through my marketing efforts. Persuading them to subscribe is my focus. I’ve never made it a priority to get subscribers, but I’m changing that. A pop-up has been added to the bottom of blog pages to prompt readers to subscribe. I’ve added some text to the pop-up to test my messaging skills. I’m trying to clarify the value add, but I don’t love what’s there now. I’ll keep iterating on this message.
• Awareness – Awareness is broader; it focuses on optimizing for search engine optimization (SEO). Titles, descriptions, and a bunch of other stuff are being refined to help make posts show up in Google and AI app search results.

Those are most of my marketing efforts underway now. I’m learning a lot from doing them. As I read and learn more about marketing, you’ll likely see more changes to this blog. Everything won’t work, and I’m OK with that. The goal is to acquire wisdom through my own experiences.