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: 60
• Total blog posts published: 385

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs, a biography about Netflix’s history from its origin through 2011

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Create an opportunity solution tree for this project
• Finalize details of the 2025 Summer Uncomfortable Challenge

Asks:

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

Week two hundred sixty-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 struggles this week

What I learned:

• Web analytics can help me test different copy on my blog in a data-driven way and help me increase email captures.
• Before true website optimization can be done, site visits need to grow to a statistically relevant number.
• College students in AI-related majors can’t easily find jobs or internships. A developer to help me with the next leg of the journey to build my software could be among them.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

This week, I had a regularly scheduled lunch with an entrepreneur friend. I updated him on my search for a developer, but our conversation mostly focused on my blog. I shared some of the experiments I’ve done in the last year and talked about it being hard to quantify the results. And I told him it’s hard to understand reader behavior and I want to improve at email capture.

To my surprise, my friend has tons of experience in website analytics and has helped enterprise companies in this area. He gave me a few suggestions, shared the names of a few tools, and offered to show me a few things. I didn’t expect this from our lunch—what a pleasant surprise! I’m excited to learn from my friend about analytics and use that knowledge to improve this blog.

This conversation reminded me that I never know what or who someone knows. I should continue to share what I’m working on with credible people and always have a clear and specific ask for help.

I’ve been thinking about my 2025 uncomfortable summer challenge (see here). I’ll definitely do something related to writing. I want to stick with my theme of reading mostly biographies and sharing what I’ve learned from them with others. A few other things I’m considering:

• Copywriting – I want what I write about books to have a fun voice and structure that capture and retain the reader’s attention. I could commit to learning more about copywriting and experimenting with my writing this summer.
• Newsletters – I’m curious to experiment with sharing content in an email newsletter format. This would force me to learn how to capture and retain subscribers.
• Social media – I want to share more of what I’m learning on X (formerly Twitter).
• Digests – Last year I created a summary—a digest—of each biography used for a blog post series. The process was haphazard. I want to refine how I create digests and what’s included in them. It’d be great to have consistently formatted digests for all books.
• Connections – Biographies detail connections among people, books, companies, etc. But it’s hard to understand that those connections exist without reading the book. It’d be cool if I could visually show the connections—maybe include a relationship map as part of each blog post series.

I’m still thinking through this challenge and what I want to do exactly, but these are my thoughts from a recent brainstorming session.

I’m excited to nail down exactly what I’ll do, and I’ll share it with you once it’s solidified.

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Last week I shared that I was behind on one of my goals (see here). I’ve been consistent in hitting my reading goal: a book a week. But I haven’t been as consistent this month in updating the books section of this site so others can see the books I’ve read.

I aimed to fix this by adding all the books I read in April to this site by this past Sunday. I’m happy to share that I’ve checked that box. Now my plan is get back on schedule and add new books as I complete them every Sunday.

If you want to see the books I added, take a look here.

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: 59
• Total blog posts published: 378

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read Continuous Discovery Habits, a framework for understanding and building what customers will pay for

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Create an opportunity solution tree for this project

Asks:

• If you can get me an invitation code to Manus, please let me know!
• If you know any senior full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred sixty-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 struggles this week

What I learned:

• Copywriting Course is a great service for getting feedback on your messaging for a product if you already have product–market fit.
• Google’s search algorithm changed about a year ago. Google began prioritizing blog content over other content types, such as lists.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

Last year, I wrote a few popular blog posts on biographies I’d read. Traffic to the blog increased, so people apparently found them useful. Since then, I’ve been trying to be more intentional with the blog. One area several people pointed to as a weakness was email capture. They said I was getting more people visiting the site, but they weren’t likely to read my new posts or come back to the site—unless I gave them a reason or reminded them. Capturing their email would give me a way to keep a reader I’d acquired engaged with (or at least aware) of my new material.

Email capture wasn’t something I ever thought about when I created this blog. People could enter their email address and be notified of new posts, but email capture wasn’t a priority. I never looked at the stats around how many emails I was capturing.

After hearing the same thing many times, I added a new feature a few months ago. A pop-up asking people to subscribe was added to the bottom of the site. Subscribers are notified of new posts.

The messaging in the pop-up was never really optimized. It was a placeholder to test whether the feature worked correctly. I’ve been learning about copywriting and am eager to put that knowledge to use. Today, I decided to adjust the pop-up message. I made some mistakes and broke some stuff, but it’s updated now.

This will be a process of iteration and experimentation, which is best done with data. So, I began tracking more subscription-related data. I can now experiment and see how effective changes are. I think these small experiments will be fun, and I’ll learn a lot.

If you have thoughts on this pop-up feature or the messaging, I’d love to hear them (criticism welcomed too). Write me at hello(at)jermainebrown.org.

The last month or so has been busy. Hitting my goal of reading a book every week has been harder, but I’m doing it. But I’ve slacked off in a related area. Earlier this year, I added this section, which shows the books I’ve read, to this site. My intention is to update that section weekly when I finish a book. I’m missing the mark in April—I haven’t added the books I’ve read this month.

I plan to fix that this weekend by adding my latest books. I aim to have the books added to my site by 12 p.m. ET on Sunday.

Last year, I set a goal to create 100 podcast episodes about the biographies I was reading. That challenge was uncomfortable, but it led to unexpected learnings. And it led to a new habit of reading a book every week (I’ve been doing this for over a year), my software idea, and other things.

I want to set another goal for this summer. It needs to be uncomfortable but directionally congruent with my current interests. I want something that will force me to grow by pushing me to the limit. Something I can focus on intensely with an end in sight.

I’m not sure what it’ll be, but my gut is telling me I should do something related to writing. I’ve been reading a lot about newsletters, copywriting, persuasion, etc. This challenge could be a good way to put everything I’ve learned to work.

I’ll think about it more, but another summer challenge is likely to be in my future.