Hi, one of the makers here. Pleasantly surprised and honored to be featured on Product Hunt. I was instructed to share why we build this and give a preview of future plans. So here it goes:
What is this about?
See everyone has their own super heros or people that they aspire to be. When such a person recommends something to you, you are more likely to pay attention and you know it is more likely to be useful to you. When that person also says "why they recommend something" - it just becomes way more useful to you. In your mind, you already know who to seek guidance from, for various topics, be is startups or tech or even buying a car. For eg startups, I want to get advice from @pmarca(among others), but he is super busy, he is not going to respond every time someone tries asking him a question. So if there was some way to asynchronize this information, then I can learn from the best of people and from the people who I think is relevant to me. So what we are trying to do is to create a "People first review engine". If you notice on the landing page, you will see a list of people, not a list of book recommendations. The reason is because, we feel the most important entity here is people, not the book.
Basically we were trying to see how we can accelerate our learning process. On the internet, we are in an information abundant economy. The hard part is picking the right content/information. Our hypothesis is that recommendations from people that you respect will help narrow down on what to read. We are doing books for now. We would like to cover other learning material later.
Upcoming:
We are in the very early stages of building this product. Couple of things we are working on are building a post login experience & a bookmarking feature. Obviously, we look forward to and would be absolutely delighted to get feedback.
@alexjv89@pmarca great idea, one I've been walking around with for a large amount of time. Nicholas Nassim Taleb says books are the most scaleable way of spreading information, and I've learned a great deal about building a company by distilling what A players have shared in books & blogs. Too early to tell whether it will truly work out well for our company, but I see some positive change for sure. I'm sure that these A players have learned from the best as well, so knowing where they all draw their information from I believe will surely help in building a better world.
Would be great to see some patterns I now see more explicitly displayed as "truisms" backed by smart people so that people know it's a strong theory that hasn't been falsified yet. Too often the world is giving the microphone to people spraying the wrong information, all because the busy A players are too busy actually doing it. Keep it up!
@alexjv89 Awesome idea! it will be great there was a list of top books in the empty space on the right . From there one can click on the book to see who are the personalities that have recommended it. That's my feedback.
The most comprehensive list is definitely @pmarcahere with 85 recommendations!
If I find the maker, we have some awesome book collections here on Product Hunt that can help fuel some more :)
@bentossell - thanks for adding highlyreco. Looking at the booking collections on Product Hunt right now... How do you suggest we go about finding "why" each of these book were recommended by the respective person? Will try digging up their review context online..
I love that on Highly Reco the recommendations are not limited to contemporary, newly released novels, but rather (from my understanding) is a hub for everyone to coalesce over their favourite books of all time. Are you looking into developing a database of novels in the future including a brief synopsis, cover, author, publisher, etc or will you continue to link directly to Amazon?
@aleyadwivedi - You are right about the first part. About the second part of your question, we think we might stick with just linking to Amazon. Our understanding is that the value to users is in the review of the person that you care about. Once a review catches your attention, you can go to amazon and get the description of the book. When you read a review of a person that you know/respect/care about, its like that person is right next to you and telling you why you should pick up that book. That is what we think makes the most sense.
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