My developer friend has been helping me, nights and weekends, to build the first version of my software. He has his own start-up but was intrigued by the challenge of my project and took it on as a side project. It’s been a great experience; we’ve both learned a ton. He’s deep into artificial intelligence (AI) and building systems to manage large data sets, so he was a terrific fit. It was great to have someone with the right technical experience who could complement what I envisioned. We should have a hosted version of that first product version done this week.

My friend’s start-up is hitting a critical point, and he has less free time, so he won’t be able to devote programming time to my project going forward. I’m appreciative of what he’s contributed thus far. His expertise led to some valuable insights. In the beginning, we had a candid conversation and set clear expectations; we agreed this day would come eventually, and here it is.

He’ll still help with my project, but it will be more high-level as time permits. That being the case, I need to find a developer who can help us knock out the last few features I envision for this project so others can play with it. If you know a talented, full-stack developer interested in building the Bloomberg Terminal for entrepreneurs, let me know. A love of reading books is a strong plus.

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: 53
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 336
• 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 The Man Who Sold America, a biography of advertising entrepreneur and political strategist Albert Lasker
• Published a profile of the above-mentioned book on my blog
• Completed follow-up with contacts from Newsletter Marketing Summit

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Make it possible for software to be hosted in the cloud instead of locally
• Get feedback from five people regarding alternative layouts for a list of entrepreneurs on my blog
• Pick layout for list of entrepreneurs and test live page with real data

Asks:

• If you know any full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred fifty-eight 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:

• Entrepreneurs who prefer listening to books struggle to create voice or written notes about important parts of books or their thinking around parts of the book they’ve listened to.
• It can be difficult to remember to review an annotation from a book. An entrepreneur requested the ability to set an automated reminder that prompts him to do so.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

It’s only been a few days since I shared my blog’s new pages (see here, here, and here), but I’ve been gathering feedback. Today, chatting with an entrepreneur, I showed him the searchable list of all the books I’ve read—or My Learning Library, as I call it now. I showed him how he can see each book's profile page and the connections between books on a profile page.

His initial feedback was that My Learning Library is a well-curated list of books. Having all the books on one page eliminates his usual need to search for and research books, which adds friction to his process of finding books to read. Instead, his mind went straight to wanting to purchase a few of the interesting books using the links on my blog.

Selling books isn’t my goal. I want to make it easy for entrepreneurs to find books that can help them solve problems faster or that they’ll enjoy reading for pleasure. It’s early days, but providing a curated list of what I’ve read seems to be accomplishing this.

I like the connections between books and blog posts on the profile pages. Building this out was a decent lift. I think it’s great for discovery. It’s an easy way to follow breadcrumbs between books. I want to get more feedback from people to find out if they see this feature as valuable.

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: 52
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 329
• 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 Growth Levers and How to Find Them, a framework book about finding the right strategy to acquire customers by Matt Lerner
• Attended Newsletter Marketing Summit
• With the help of my developer friend, finished the first version of the software; although it ran locally on his computer, we couldn’t get it to run on mine, so I couldn’t demo it at the conference
• Finalized descriptions of all the books I’ve read so far and updated them on this blog
• Published my 2024 Reading List page on my blog; see here
• Published a searchable library of all the books I’ve read, which I’ll update weekly; see here
• Published a book profile page for each book I’ve read showing the connections between books, blog posts, and more; see here
• Showed the pages on my blog to several people at the conference and got feedback
• Pitched the software idea to roughly twenty people and obtained contact information of five people interested in seeing the software

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Conference follow-up
• Make it possible for software to be hosted in the cloud instead of locally

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred fifty-seven 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:

• 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.

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!