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!