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.

When I chat with other founders about what I’ve learned from biographies, I try to understand how they learn and ask them about their reading habits. Many have said they want to read more but don’t have the time or haven’t made time. In other words, entrepreneurs have an execution problem around reading. They know the benefits and want to do it, but picking up a book and reading is challenging.

This weekend, I was thinking about the focus sessions I’ve been doing with my developer friend (see here). They’re scheduled execution sessions on video that are focused on deep work. I love them because they’re about executing on something high priority, they add accountability and a feeling of teamwork, and they’re scheduled.

I started wondering if this format could be useful for entrepreneurs who want to find solutions to their most pressing problems by reading (not leisure reading). Could bringing entrepreneurs together early mornings on video to read books help them overcome their execution problem around reading?

I did some research and found groups that are doing something similar: scheduled video sessions for people who want to be more productive and do more deep work. One group has over 1,500 paid members around the world.

I’m going to do more customer discovery on this execution problem entrepreneurs have around reading to understand what a solution to the problem could look like. Maybe it’s focus sessions; maybe it’s something else.

This weekend, I finished reading Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, which is the autobiography of Michael Dell. The book was first published in 1998, so it covers only Michael’s (remarkable!) early journey. Michael turned $1,000 in 1984 into a company doing over $12 billion in revenue during the fiscal year ending February 1, 1998. That’s an astonishing level of growth in 14 years.

Michael is an incredible entrepreneur. He was in his early thirties when this book was published. A lot of Dell’s success can be attributed to him as its leader. (Side note: He’s still CEO over 25 years later.) But in the book, Michael highlighted another factor that led to Dell’s success: the PC market. In 1984, Michael unknowingly stumbled into a market in its infancy that exploded in growth for various reasons (including the internet) over the next 14 years. Dell rode the wave of the personal computer market (later, servers too). Michael’s genius was in combining explosive growth in a new market with an innovative business model (selling direct). He realized what Charlie Munger calls a Lollapalooza effect. The result? Dell became a massive company that grew at a torrid pace for 14 straight years. And Michael amassed a sizeable fortune, $125 billion per Bloomberg as of this writing.

The lesson learned is that markets matter a lot. A rapidly growing market is an ideal place to build a business because it usually means the number of people experiencing the problem is growing rapidly too. In that type of market, a company’s solutions don’t have to be stellar. They need to not suck. If companies can check that box, the demand from the market will yank them along. In this type of market, there’s enough business to go around, so there likely isn’t much price competition and margins and profits are healthy.

Michael Dell built, and still runs, a juggernaut of a company. Dell is a textbook example of why entrepreneurs want to start businesses in markets that are—or will be—growing rapidly.

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!