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.

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: 47
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 294
• 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 John Train’s Money Masters of Our Time, a biographical anthology about seventeen public market investors
• Updated class diagrams showing proposed linkages between various classes (tables) in the database
• Successfully extracted the first data type from a book via code—my developer friend led this and wrote the code to do what I envisioned
• Created UI for MVP—my developer friend wrote code to make this match the requirements I documented

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Create a comprehensive system instruction to guide LLM through a defined workflow
• 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-two 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:

• Keeping the momentum going on projects is important. I lost momentum but got back on track this week with focus video meetings. See more about this here. Lesson learned: don’t lose momentum.
• Diagrams and charts that explain my thinking are helpful to others, especially developers. Creating them forced me to think through things that I might not have if I’d just had to explain verbally. Also, a lot of people are visual learners.
• I want to attend a conference and show the early version of the product to a few people at the conference. This conference deadline has motivated us and forced us to focus on what can and must be done before the conference. Lesson learned: Targeting industry events is a way to heighten focus and intensity. See more here.
• I need to share my posts about the biographies I’m reading on other platforms. Links on other platforms to my blog posts aren’t effective today.
• SEO is changing a lot. People are using ChatGPT and other AI apps to answer questions instead of going to Google. However, based on my testing this week, many of these AI tools seem to use Google’s search results to answer their users’ questions.
• I pitched the idea a few times this week. The problem statement I crafted over the holiday resonated with and excited listeners. That felt great. I need to trim the wording, but I can clearly state the problem, and people get it quickly.
• When Google’s Gemini releases new models, it doesn’t always make them available via API. The Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model just got released and is impressive. I’m using it for personal things, and I love it. We tried to use it via API for this project, but there isn’t an API for the model yet.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

One of the things I want to do is expand the reach of the content I share on my blog. I’ve been studying marketing for the last few months (see here), and I’ve learned that a big part of marketing is making people aware that something exists. I figure my blog content is a good way to do some more learning by doing.

One thing I noticed and have read about is that people are now posting blog-type content directly on platforms instead of directing them back to their website. Instead of sharing a link to their blog, they’re posting the blog content directly on X (formerly Twitter) or LinkedIn, for example. Apparently, if your post includes a link to content off the platform, the platform’s algorithms show that post to fewer people.

Learning this reminded me of how I started. When I began blogging in March 2020, I wanted to start in as frictionless a way as possible. I didn’t have a blog site, but I did have a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn allowed you to post “articles,” so I started sharing my daily posts as LinkedIn articles. Those did well because of my built-in LinkedIn connections. After my writing habit was fully formed months later, I bought a domain, designed a website, transferred my old posts to the website, and started posting daily on both platforms. Then, I stopped sharing content via LinkedIn articles and started creating posts that linked back to my blog site. Eventually, I stopped LinkedIn altogether after about two years and posted exclusively on my blog.

Well, I want to test some of the marketing tactics I’m learning by helping my blog content reach more people, so I’ve been debating posting my content on other platforms. Basically, I’ll start doing what I used to do. I’m familiar with LinkedIn, so it makes sense to start posting there again. I want to learn X, so it also makes sense to post there.

The concern is that I’ll have to manage posting on three platforms—my blog, LinkedIn, and X—every single day. One is fine, but three I’m not sure about. I’ll continue to ponder it a bit, but maybe instead of going from one to three, I should go to two and then move to three after I’m comfortable with the second platform.

The last few weeks have been full of distractions. It snowed twice in Atlanta, shutting the city down. Before that were the holidays. Traction on software development of my personal project slipped. A developer friend is helping as a favor. All of the above, plus other stuff, impacted our ability to schedule time to work in person on the project.

With snow forecasted for this week, we made a change to get going again. We couldn’t meet in person, so we decided to try a video meeting instead. But we didn’t want to have sessions where we talked. We wanted to have sessions where we got stuff done. So here’s what we did:

• We booked two-hour blocks to meet over video twice this week.
• Beforehand, we defined what we would each do during the working sessions.
• If my friend’s work depended on my completing something, I did it in advance so he wouldn’t be blocked during our session. And vice versa.
• At the end of each session, we discussed, and demoed if applicable, what we worked on.
• And we discussed what we would work on during the next session and what needed to be completed beforehand.

During our working sessions, he wrote software, and I fine-tuned class diagrams, workflows, etc. Our work didn’t overlap unless we had a question. This is where the benefit of this working style became clear to me. Instead of stopping what I was working on, sending an email or text to him, waiting for a response, and restarting work hours or a day later, I could get an answer instantly and keep working. Of course, this was true from his perspective too.

There are a few names for this type of work. Some call it “parallel working.” My developer friend called it “pair programming.” Whatever the right name, I’ve never tried it before this week, but so far, I’m a fan. We were able to get a lot done in a short time.

I was thinking about why the sessions were so effective. A few things stood out to me:

• People block out focus time on their calendars. These sessions are the equivalent of scheduled focus time on a specific project, but for a team.
• Friction and blockers are removed as soon as they arise, so more continuous work gets done.
• There’s an increased level of accountability. You can’t BS during these sessions.
• The work is planned beforehand, so sessions are execution focused, not discussions or attempts to figure out what to work on. I think this is a big reason this works so well.

I’m happy my friend suggested we work like this. I feel like it’s time spent efficiently. I’m also happy this project is rolling again.

I’ve been making daily learning a top priority for the last few years. Some time ago, I shared how I approach daily learning (see here). That list is still relevant, but the prioritization of the items has changed. I aim to read a biography a week, so that’s the method I focus on most. But I do a lot of other learning throughout the week. For example, I challenged myself to learn the big concepts around marketing (see why here) and have consumed a ton of information. I now have a better understanding of the big marketing concepts and how marketers think.

I’ve recently started creating notes documenting what I’ve learned, and from what sources. I’ve been sharing some of that with founders and friends. They’ve found it helpful. In blog posts, I share what I’m learning from books—but not non-book learning. I want to find a good way to share on my blog the best non-book information I’ve consumed.

I haven’t settled on how to do this, but an idea I’m thinking about now is a weekly list of the top five to ten sources I consumed that week and what I learned from them. I don’t want to keep good information to myself. I want to get into the habit of sharing more useful sources from which others can learn. I just need to figure out how to do it in a way that’s not a huge lift so I can do it consistently. I’m open to ideas. If you have suggestions, send them my way.

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: 46
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 287
• 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 Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, a memoir and collection of famous speeches by Charlie Munger
• Picked three types of output and associated user problems and created a lucid chart to document the process flow to solve them
• Created class diagram showing proposed linkages between various classes (tables) in the database
• Documented the required elements for the UI of the MVP

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-one 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:

• Creating a class (database table) diagram for all the links between data classes is hard if I try to draw it on paper from the start. It was easier to walk through one class at a time, defining its relationship with other classes and the type of relationship (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many) with each class. AI helped me through this exercise and created a JSON output that documents all the relationships. I then used the JSON output to create the class diagram.
• The UI doesn’t need to be spectacular for an early version of a software product. It just needs to work. But engineers who aren’t full stack want an example of the UI they should build. Finding examples of UIs from other products and asking a developer to clone one of them (or parts of it) is an efficient way to get a developer what they need.
• Categorizing the use-case types that entrepreneurs will want to use the “book library” tool for was a great exercise. Each type of problem can have a specific, repeatable solution. Creating an approach or framework for each problem type was a nice unlock.
• Thinking about the use-case types as one big process and creating a flow process diagram to document it was a big step forward. The document also fostered alignment between my developer friend and me because he could see how I envision the user flow.
• I need to collaborate with people who complement me, especially in marketing. I had a chat with a friend who’s skilled in marketing. We uncovered some low-hanging-fruit opportunities that could be great ways to drive long-term awareness of this tool organically (i.e., not through paid marketing).
• Headway is a bootstrapped book-summary app founded in 2019. It’s rumored to do over $200 million in annual revenue with 30% profit margins (source). It raised $100 million at a $2.3 billion valuation in 2024 (source).

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

Last year, I added Amazon affiliate links to my blog and podcast for books I shared (see here). Affiliate programs are commission programs. For every person I refer to Amazon who purchases the item I recommended, I get a commission on the sale. These programs didn’t interest me initially. For books, the effort exceeds the reward. Affiliates earn roughly $0.50 on a book sale. But then I realized the true value is in the data. Amazon’s affiliate program is robust, and I can track which books people click on and which books they purchase. I was very interested in the data, so I signed up for the program and started using affiliate links in mid-June 2024.

I have roughly six months of data. Here are the high-level stats:

• Items purchased: 14
• Total revenue generated (for Amazon): $226.05
• Average revenue per item (for Amazon): $16.14
• Total affiliate earnings (for me): $6.17
• Average earnings per purchase (for me): $0.44

I earned about $1 a month from affiliate commissions. My time to implement and execute this was worth more than $6, lol.

But I dug into the data and had some interesting insights:

• No book had more than one affiliate purchase.
• The books purchased were mostly about investors who became entrepreneurs when they founded investment firms: Jim Simons, Ed Thorpe, etc. This was interesting and unexpected.
• I had three international sales in Germany and the United Kingdom. I didn’t expect to have international reach.
• The majority of purchases were of Kindle or audiobook versions. I’m a physical-book person, so this surprised me.

Absent this affiliate experiment, I wouldn’t have known any of these things. So, from an insights perspective, the experiment was valuable. The sample size is small, of course, so I can’t draw definitive conclusions, but it’s still helpful.

So, what’s the verdict on my Amazon affiliate experiment? I’m glad I did the experiment because of the data it provides. I won’t get rich off affiliate commissions on book sales, but the insights are valuable. Now that I’ve got this, stopping the experiment doesn’t make sense. I’ll keep adding the affiliate links to content I share about books.