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:

• At the conference I attended, the goal was to show off an early version of the software and an MVP of a book directory built on my blog (My Learning Library). The blog feature was done, and people were impressed when I showed it to them. The software was finished the morning of the conference, but it was designed to run locally, and we couldn’t get it to run on my computer. It was frustrating to not be able to show it to people. I had to pitch it without demoing it, which went over decently. A few people are interested in seeing the demo.

What I learned:

• I tested a name at the conference, “I Study Entrepreneurs,” and it did well. I’m definitely using that name in the future.
• Discovery platforms and relationship platforms are materially different. Discovery platforms have algorithms that help people find you. Think TikTok or Instagram. The downside is that you don’t own the relationship with the user. It’s borrowed distribution, meaning someone can change your ability to reach people anytime. Relationship platforms give you a direct relationship with a user that you own, but discoverability is much harder. Think blogs, newsletters, or SMS. This is owned distribution, meaning no one but you can change your ability to reach users (mostly).
• Several entrepreneurs’ entire business model revolves around creating content that’s a deep dive on a person, industry, or topic. I met a few of them at the conference.
• Buying local newsletters that people are running as side projects and scaling them is a strategy that can do well.
• A newsletter can be a great growth engine if you sell products or software. If you’re savvy, you can convert your newsletter marketing from a cost center to a profit center by paying to acquire subscribers and getting paid to make them aware of other products or services.
• I learned a ton more from conversations and presentations!

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

I’ve been working on a project to share more about the books I’m reading. It all started with my frustration around how painful it was to share the books I’d read in 2024 (see my post here). Two days ago, I shared a list of the 52 books I read in 2024, sorted by month (see my post here). Yesterday, I shared My Learning Library, a searchable list of all the books I’ve read, and I’ll update it weekly (see my post here).

Those were all lists of books, but I built something else, too. Today, I’m sharing the third part of this project: Book Profile Pages. Each book I’ve read has a dedicated page on my blog that includes a description, my notes, and other information about the book. The stories of entrepreneurs often overlap. It’s common for entrepreneurial biographies to describe deals or battles with other entrepreneurs. They also mention other books (I find most books I read this way). But it wasn’t easy for me to see those connections visually, so I built Book Profile Pages to solve this problem. It’s something I hope other people find helpful because it makes it easier for them to discover books and other information about people they’re interested in learning more about.

To see examples of book profile pages, check out the page for The Gambler, a biography about Kirk Kerkorian. This biography helped me discover another entrepreneur, Billy Wilkerson, and I read two biographies about him. Another example is A Passion to Win, the autobiography by Sumner Redstone. See the profile page for A Passion to Win here.

This is the third part of this project that I’ve shared this week, but the project isn’t done yet. I need to do more work on other parts before sharing them, which I hope will be in a few weeks. In the meantime, I hope the book profile pages and other pages I launched this week are useful!

In yesterday’s post, I shared that my 2024 reading list is live and that creating that list led to a much bigger project. I realized I don’t just want to share my reading list at the end of each year; I want to share it in real-time. I want people to know what I’m reading every week, not once a year. I want people to be able to see the personal library I’m building to help me learn.

So, today I’m sharing the second part of this project: My Learning Library. This is a searchable list of all the books I’ve read, and I’ll be updating it weekly. It includes a description of each book, my notes about it, and when I read it (some I’ve read multiple times).

If you want to see a list of the books I’ve read in 2024 and 2025, check out my learning library here!

This is the second part of a bigger project, but there’s still more that I’ll share in the coming days.

On January 3, I shared my reading stats for 2024 (see here). After I wrote that post, I realized I wanted to share a list of the individual books—and how hard it is to do that (see here). I tried creating lists in GoodReads and played with creating something in Airtable, but I didn’t like those options. I wanted something that didn’t require updating another platform and that would look good visually on my blog. So, I ended up building something, which turned into a bigger project than I’d planned for.

To create this reading list, I had to create a database with lots of details on each book. Some of that I shared here. But the thing I underestimated most was creating descriptions for each book (see here). Most of that tedious work is now done (I still have a few descriptions I need to clean up).

I’m sharing the first part of this project today: my much-promised 2024 reading list. This is a list of every book I read; it includes a description of each book, my notes on each book, and the month I read it.

So, if you’re interested in seeing the 52 books I read in 2024 and what they’re about, take a look here!

Like I said, this is just the first part of a bigger project. I’ll share the rest of it in the coming days, but hopefully this 2024 reading list will be helpful.

Early-stage founders often take one of two paths. Sometimes they lived a problem and used their experience to build a solution and market it to people like them. Other founders learn about a problem and then must learn more about it to figure out what solution to build. You can do both, too, but that happens less frequently.

If a founder has lived the problem, they are the customer. They’re building something for themselves and people like them. If founders haven’t lived the problem, they need first to understand it from the customer’s perspective. To do this effectively, ideally before they start building, founders would be well served to do customer discovery interviews. Simply put, they should interview customers to understand a problem from their perspective and, ideally, uncover unique insights about a problem. When done correctly, customer discovery saves time and resources by preventing founders from building something customers don’t want.

Customer discovery is more difficult than it sounds because founders want to tell everyone about their ideas. This process isn’t about the founders’ ideas; it’s about the customers’ problems. So, founders have to go from sell mode to listen-and-learn mode, which isn’t always easy. Ideally, the founder’s ideas shouldn’t even be mentioned during customer discovery conversations.

Luckily, there’s a great book written for founders that details a framework for conducting effective customer discovery interviews. It’s called The Mom Test. I’ve read it a few times and gotten value from it each time. Whenever I want to learn about a problem, I refresh myself on the framework. It reminds me how to ask questions in a way that leads to my gaining a better understanding of the problem, which leads to unique insights and creative ideas about how to solve the problem.

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: 51
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 322
• 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 Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker, a biography of Albert Lasker
• With the help of my developer friend, added the ability to run multiple functions in sequence
• Created a process for creating book descriptions optimized for the value the books will provide to entrepreneurs
• Got feedback from two more people on the desktop and mobile layout of the book-list page
• Tweaked the desktop and mobile layout of the book-list page to optimize for descriptions
• Did discovery meetings with two entrepreneurs; the focus was on why they don’t read more books

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Attend conference
• Share software with five people at the conference
• Launch 2024 books-read page
• Launch page that will list every book I read going forward
• Finalize descriptions of every book I’ve read

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred fifty-six 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:

• It’s been significantly harder than I expected to create descriptions of books. This threw off my schedule for the week. So, I haven’t gotten as much done as I planned, and my deadline for the conference I’m attending is this upcoming week.

What I learned:

• People know the benefits of exercise but often don’t make the time. Trainers can help them exercise. Similarly, entrepreneurs know the benefits of reading but don’t make the time. I see an opportunity to help entrepreneurs read more as a way to solve problems faster.
• There’s also an opportunity to create better descriptions of books—descriptions that appeal to what entrepreneurs want to know about books before they read them.
• Adding user comments and insights to a book library would enrich the data and make it more valuable to entrepreneurs.
• Linkages between various data sources on my blog are valuable to readers because they can easily follow the connections, but creating them is time-consuming. It needs to be done programmatically to make it scalable.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

This week, I talked with a family member about my book project and artificial intelligence. He shared how his employer, a huge Fortune 500 company, uses AI. A few takeaways:

• Microsoft Copilot is the only authorized AI tool at his company because of concerns about proprietary data.
• He’s more productive because of ChatGPT and similar tools.
• His coworkers aren’t using AI and aren’t interested in learning about how to use it. He’s an outlier in his group.
• He feels he has a lot to learn about AI and is hungry to learn more about it and how he can use it to advance his career.
• Corporate America doesn’t understand AI and hasn’t figured out how to use it. When it does, companies will realize how much more efficient they could be and start moving in that direction.

I tend to talk to entrepreneurs and people in tech who stay on top of the latest technologies. This conversation provided a perspective from inside a large, mature organization, something I rarely get. It reminded me that AI is in its infancy and many people and companies haven’t figured out how to use it to their benefit.

I’ve been working on new parts of my website where I can share a list of all the books I read in 2024 (more here) and, going forward, a cumulative reading list updated weekly. I thought these would be live already, but I hit a hurdle (fingers crossed in the next few days). One of the things that’s taking a ton of time is creating descriptions of the books. This pain led to a few insights.

When I purchase books, I never read descriptions. I usually buy a book because it was mentioned in another book or because someone credible mentioned it. I never thought about descriptions until this project. So, I started reading the descriptions on Amazon of books I own. I was shocked. The descriptions are horrible. There’s no consistent formatting or length. Some pump up the author, which I don’t care about.

As an entrepreneur, I want to read books that teach me things that will help me solve problems or understand concepts. The descriptions of books on Amazon don’t help me with this at all. To get around the issue, I usually read reviews for clues. But reading reviews can be hit or miss.

I played around with using AI to generate book descriptions. The results weren’t bad, but they weren’t stellar either. This is without creating enhanced prompts or system instructions. If I went that route, I probably could make them better, but still I don’t think AI-generated descriptions would be stellar, from an entrepreneur’s perspective, for various reasons.

So, what’s my takeaway from all this? Descriptions of biographies and other books that entrepreneurs would be interested in suck. There’s an opportunity to create better descriptions that would help entrepreneurs find the right books at the right time.

This week, I caught up with a founder friend. His company is early-stage, and he’s at an inflection point. They have early customers, and revenue is growing at a moderate clip. But he has a nagging feeling that his market isn’t the ideal market to build a company in. There are lots of competitors, and prices are going down quickly, which is pressuring his margins. His customers could build a comparable solution in-house, but they use his solution because it’s cheaper, for now, than building it themselves. Translation: his customers will build something in-house if they start spending too much with his company. Last, his customers view his solution as a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

The founder is trying to figure out whether he should keep pushing through with his current product. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s giving up too early.

I thought about Felix Dennis and his book How to Get Rich as we chatted. The book is about how to succeed as an entrepreneur, which leads to wealth—it’s not just about how to get rich. One thing Dennis shared was that entrepreneurs need to be persistent. They need to have conviction that they’re right and will be proven right (hopefully shortly). Conversely, though, Dennis said that entrepreneurs shouldn’t be stubborn, which means you’re persisting even when there’s plenty of evidence that you’re wrong or that you shouldn’t persist. In a post about this book (see here), I shared the following:

Acknowledging a mistake and realizing a new plan is needed are signs of clear thinking and help focus your persistence on the right activities. The most successful people I know are persistent but also rational and clear thinkers.

I’m not sure what my friend will do, but I shared with him that giving up on something doesn’t mean you aren’t persistent if the data and the market are telling you it isn’t working. It’s an opportunity to redirect your energy and persist toward the right thing.

My takeaway from this chat and Dennis’s book is that I want to be persistent but not stubborn. I want to think rationally in choosing what to work on and be persistent about the right things.