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.

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: 50
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 315
• 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  Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, the autobiography of Michael Dell
• With the help of my developer friend, added function calling to the code base
• Created schema for book information in website CMS
• Uploaded information about all the books I’ve read into the website CMS
• Created a test blog page listing all the books I’ve read; got feedback from four people
• Finalized the desktop and mobile layout of the book-list page and what information will be displayed on it
• Finished linking all related blog posts and the relevant books on my blog

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• 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-five 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:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• We might be able to launch this software’s MVP without having every table I envision built into the database if the system instructions are strong. We’ll test to confirm.
• How good a book is isn’t just a function of what was written. It’s also a function of what the reader is looking for (i.e., what problem they’re trying to solve). A poorly written book that explains a superior solution to a reader’s pressing problem is a stellar book for that reader, while others might say it’s mediocre.
• Quantifying the results of an entrepreneur’s efforts in bullet points—companies founded, sold, acquired, and invested in—makes people want to learn more about the entrepreneur. Adding dollar amounts helps too (e.g., sold XYZ company for $X million).
• Less is more when communicating information about a lot of people in a directory format. Reducing the description of a book to as few words as possible isn’t easy.
• Sharing my deadlines with people close to me but not involved in my work enhances accountability and makes me more focused.
• There’s an art to arranging text and images in a way that resonates quickly with people. I wasn’t blessed with that gift.
• Figuring out how to display the information I want to know about books, entrepreneurs, and the link between the two has helped me crystallize what data needs to be stored in our database and confirm what type of information needs to be extracted.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

Last month I shared my stats about my reading in 2024 (see here). I wanted to share the list of books, too, but it’s a pain (see here). I said I would share my book list manually in a blog post, but when I started working on that, I didn’t like the result. I looked at different ways to do it in a single blog post, but I didn’t like any of the options. I was hopeful that Airtable or Notion would work, but I didn’t like the idea of managing another external tool solely to house my reading list.

I think there’s another path that will enable me to share not only my 2024 reading list but all the books I read going forward. It’s more involved to set up, but I think it’ll be a better long-term solution and more helpful to anyone looking for biographies to read.

I needed to aggregate all the data from my reading list to do this correctly using this new path. So, last week and this weekend, I cleaned up the reading list I manage in Google Sheets. I did the following:

• Amazon affiliate links weren’t formatted consistently, which meant some links weren’t sending people the correct books (i.e., the edition I read). I formatted this correctly for each book and updated my spreadsheet. I also reviewed each blog post containing an Amazon link to a book and updated each one.
• I noted the edition, format (paperback, hardcover, or Kindle), and publication date of each book in my spreadsheet.
• I added to my spreadsheet a link to the blog post series I wrote about each book. Now I can quickly find my writing about a specific book instead of having to search the site.
• I updated the links to the posts on my blog. For each book, all posts related to that book are now linked.

This was a decent amount of tedious work. I went through every blog post I wrote in 2024, updated links, and added information from posts to my spreadsheet. The exercise wasn’t fun, but now I think it was worth it. The next step is to take the book-list information for past and future books and present it in a way that’s valuable to others.

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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: 49
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 308
• 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):

• Reread Junk to Gold: From Salvage to the World’s Largest Online Auto Auction, an autobiography about Willis Johnson’s journey to build Copart.
• Started turning data from books into database embeddings. My developer friend led this effort
• Defined what needs to be built before I attend a conference where I plan to demo the software
• Finished linking blog posts, books, and entrepreneurs in a spreadsheet
• Finished linking all related blog posts and the same book on my blog
• Defined the attributes on a “book” table in a database
• Created a mockup of the website page to communicate book information

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Continue updating descriptions for blog posts about the same book

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred fifty-four 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:

• 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!

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’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.