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.