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 last week

What I learned:

• Instead of starting a newsletter from scratch for this project, I could acquire one at a reasonable price at places like Duuce, a marketplace to buy or sell newsletters.
• Gary Hoover is a serial entrepreneur and walking encyclopedia of business history. He has studied 35,000 business books and had a collection of over 70,000 books before a tragic fire. He sold BOOKSTOP to Barnes and Nobles. He took small business information publisher Hoover’s, Inc. public via IPO in 1999 and sold it to Dun & Bradstreet for $117 million. He’s the founder and executive director of American Business History, an interesting resource. I learned a lot from this interview he gave.
• The brand-journey framework exercise was very helpful. I like starting with a goal and working backward, so it was right up my alley. It made the concept of building a brand make logical sense to me and provided me with something that will make decision-making and saying no to things that don’t align easy. For a more detailed explanation of the framework, see here.
• Google Tag Manager (GTM) allows for much more granular tracking of actions and events on a website than Google Analytics. It’s more involved to set up, and I needed someone with experience in both tools to help me set up GTM. But the granularity of the data should be well worth the effort.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last 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

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 62
• Total blog posts published: 399

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

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

• Read Pre-Recorded History, a biography about Andre Blay, the entrepreneur who created the home movie industry and paved the way for Netflix, Blockbuster, and others
• Created an opportunity solution tree for this project using the framework I read about in Continuous Discovery Habits
• Ordered the books I need for my 2025 Summer Uncomfortable Challenge (see here)

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Tag specific actions on each page of this site to start collecting data in Google Tag Manager
• Complete a brand journey framework for this project (learn more here)

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-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:

• No struggles this week.

What I learned:

• The International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad is a university in India that’s well known for its curriculum around natural-language processing. Alumni and students from this school could be a good fit for my project.
• The opportunity solution tree framework in Continuous Discovery Habits is helpful. It’s a great way to lay out customers’ mini pain points and brainstorm solutions that can help resolve them. It helps you determine which pain points are the highest priority and can be solved in a way that aligns with your business objectives. The book doesn't say this, but the most important and highest level is a major customer problem or need. Adding this to the framework helped me tremendously and focused everything on the customer’s pain.
• Capturing, recalling, and using what I learn from mediums like YouTube to solve problems is just as challenging as it is with books. See more here.
• The brand journey framework is a good way to think about how to create a brand intentionally. You start with your goal and work backward to today by answering four questions:
  
  • 1. What outcome do you want, or what’s your motivation for doing something?
  • 2. What do you have to be known for to get #1 to happen?
  • 3. What would you have to do to be known for the thing in #2?
  • 4. What do I have to learn right now to do the thing in #3?
  • For a more detailed explanation, see here.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last 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

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 61
• Total blog posts published: 392

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

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

• Read Damn Right!, a biography about Charlie Munger  
• Finalized details of the 2025 Summer Uncomfortable Challenge
• Added this site to the Google Tag Manager platform

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Create an opportunity solution tree for this project
• Order books needed for the 2025 Summer Uncomfortable Challenge
• Tag specific actions on each page of this site to start collecting data in Google Tag Manager

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-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:

• For weeks, I’ve been looking for a developer to replace my friend. I’ve chatted with several developers but haven’t found the right person. This is frustrating because it’s slowing things down more than I anticipated.

What I learned:

• Ben Thompson’s Great Unbundling essay (see here) describes how technology and unbundling have impacted various media forms. This great piece articulates clearly how and why the media industry has changed. Notably, it doesn’t mention books. This essay got me thinking.
• An avid reader who shares his book reading and learning from books on X (formerly Twitter) is doing the same manual note-taking and highlighting that I do.
• Quotes and maxims are valuable and resonate with people. The person mentioned above keeps a file of quotes from the books he’s read. I’m stealing his idea.
• Cold outreach via X works well when you have a body of work to share that complements what others are doing. It establishes your credibility.
• The issue with sharing information from books is that they’re full of unstructured text. Tools like Reducto focus on the unstructured text problem. Investors are getting behind these companies (see here). These tools might be useful because we might not have to build extraction tools from scratch.
• I played around with Google Tag Manager for the first time. I’m aiming to start tracking information that’s more granular on this blog.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the 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

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.

‍

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.