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: 49
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 308
• 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):

• Reread Junk to Gold: From Salvage to the World’s Largest Online Auto Auction, an autobiography about Willis Johnson’s journey to build Copart.
• Started turning data from books into database embeddings. My developer friend led this effort
• Defined what needs to be built before I attend a conference where I plan to demo the software
• Finished linking blog posts, books, and entrepreneurs in a spreadsheet
• Finished linking all related blog posts and the same book on my blog
• Defined the attributes on a “book” table in a database
• Created a mockup of the website page to communicate book information

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Continue updating descriptions for blog posts about the same book

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred fifty-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 material struggles this week

What I learned:

• My 8 a.m. focus session on video with my developer friend led to a productive morning. See more here. I’m becoming a bigger fan of these sessions, even when they’re early in the morning.
• Most indexes about entrepreneurs are organized by their wealth. But their wealth doesn’t reflect what other entrepreneurs can learn from their experiences. I need to figure out how to structure my entrepreneurs page. See more here.
• Profile pages about entrepreneurs in an index can’t be loaded with too much fluffy text. They need to deliver the important info quickly. I need to rethink how to do this.
• A website that indexes information is basically a directory. When creating a directory website, many things that affect search engine optimization (SEO)—such as URL structure—must be considered up front.
• Explicitly stating the lesson learned from an entrepreneur’s story makes it easier for people to get value from it. They don’t have to try to figure out the lesson on their own.
• Early versions of some prominent, paid, directory-type desktop apps have been built quickly and cheaply using Bubble.
• Contributor marketing is a good way to build credibility and raise awareness of your solution. See more here.
• I couldn’t find a website of an avid reader or blogger that has a well-laid-out index of the books they’ve read. I was really surprised. Seems like a big opportunity.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

Today, I had another two-hour focus session via video. This is the second one I’ve had (see here for learnings from the first one). It was a little different—we started at 8 a.m. I usually don’t take meetings early in the morning because I want to protect the time when I’m most productive (I’m a morning person). But I want to show the software to a few people at a conference in a few weeks and we have a lot to get done before then, so 8 a.m. it was! A few takeaways from today:

• I created a document with system instructions and a process diagram that my developer friend needed to understand before he started writing code. We spent a few minutes walking through it. I’m not sure if that was time well spent—I might have been able to do a Loom video, which he could have watched beforehand. Then we’d address any questions and try the system instructions in the AI studio together before he started coding. The Loom video would be good documentation that’s useful later for other developers. It might have saved a little time (though not a lot) and produced something that would be useful later.
• During the last ten minutes of the session, we both shared what we’d gotten done, discussed our plan for the next session, and identified the blockers each of us should remove before then. Those blockers became to-do lists. For example, he needs me to write another system instruction, so that’s on my list of things to do before our next session later this week.
• Starting at 8 a.m. felt good. Since this wasn’t a traditional meeting but rather a focused working session, I felt like it was a good use of my most productive time. I got a bunch of stuff done in two hours, which is my objective with my morning time. We were done by 10 a.m., and I felt good and in a productive groove. I worked on another project until lunch and got a lot done on it, too. The two-hour session made my morning more productive.

I’m not sure what to call these sessions—my developer friend calls them “pair programming”—but I’m a fan of them. I wasn’t sure about the 8 a.m. start time, but it worked surprisingly well. I think having a bit of structure at the beginning and end of each session helps us get the most out of them by setting expectations and clearly defining the next action each person must take before we meet again.I’m looking forward to the next session.

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: 48
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 301
• 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 Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, a framework book about marketing storytelling and messaging  
• Created a system instruction to guide a LLM through a defined workflow
• Created a new, lucid chart to document the above process flow
• Created an “Entrepreneurs” page on the blog to test ideas about presenting data
• Started creating the data structure for other types of data to be presented on the blog
• Started testing various marketing ideas on this blog; see here

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-three 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:

• 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.