177: “Do things that don’t scale” — On Books and Mission-Based Business Building with Readwise CoFounder Daniel Doyon
I’m delighted to welcome Daniel Doyon to the pod this week, co-founder of one of my favorite software services, Readwise. Every morning while I have my coffee, I look forward to checking out the daily email roll-up of five serendipitous snippets pulled from my entire library of Kindle highlights.
Readwise has also been a game-changer in preparing for podcast interviews with authors, and for book and newsletter writing, especially once they added the export to Notion feature. Now my entire Kindle library of highlights also lives within Notion, with pages for each book that are interlinkable and searchable from my externalized business mind.
In this conversation, we cover: how Dan and his cofounder handled the famous “hug of death” from Tim Ferriss recommending their service in his 5-Bullet Friday newsletter; the perils of premature optimization and why you should do things that don’t scale; what to do when you do slam against a scale ceiling; the benefits of running a mission-oriented business; how we’re handling the progressive atrophying of our attention for reading books, and our favorite page-turners that spark joy and as Dan says, “whisk you to the end.”
More About Daniel: Daniel Doyon is the cofounder of Readwise, a reading tool that helps readers revisit the highlights from their ebooks by synchronizing and then sending a daily email resurfacing the best highlights from Kindle, Instapaper, iBooks, and more. He is also an expert in creative real estate acquisitions and partnerships, bibliophile, oenophile, and sailor.
🌟 3 Key Takeaways
Be wary of premature optimization: Do things that don’t scale without trying to predict how your systems will break. Only once you “slam” against a ceiling should you work on solving for the next level of scale.
Hire from your user base: You’ll find the most passionate, mission-based people to work with from your own community, people who already love what you’re creating and what you stand for.
Minimize meetings by taking a page from Readwise’s playbook: No more than 1.5 recurring meetings per person per week. That means one weekly, and one bi-weekly—that’s it!
📝 Permission: Reset the expectations around whether or not you reply to inbound messages, and the amount of time it takes you to do so.
✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: Sign-up for Readwise if you haven’t already! It’s a game-changer for carrying your favorite highlights forward from the books you read. Every day you’ll get a round-up email of five random highlights, and a sixth suggestion from an adjacent book that you haven’t read yet.
🔗 Resources Mentioned
Daniel on the web, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook
Dan’s “whisk you to the end” book recs: Trader Joe’s Book, Doctor Dealer
Jenny’s favorite true story page-turners about large-scale drug ops: American Kingpin by Nick Bilton (on the DPR/Silk Road build-up and bust), The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff (verticalized prescription drug and arms kingpin), Dreamland by Sam Quinones (decentralized drug trade, “Uber of heroin”)
People: Michael Norman, Tim Ferris, Ali Abdaal, David Perell, Tiago Forte, Matt Ellison, Peter Thiel
Tools: Readwise, Readwise’s Export to Notion feature, Reader and mobile app for iOS or Android, Roam research, Notion, 37 Signals
📚 Books Mentioned
Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
🎧 Related Episodes
084: Sprinkling the First 1,000 Serendipity Seeds of a Launch
130: Day in the Life of a Podcast Episode and How I Prepare for Guests
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