Miguel from Grumo.com here.
I’ve been a Tim Ferriss fan since 2009 when I read The 4-Hour Workweek.
In hindsight, publishing that book right after the 2008 recession was great timing.
Like millions of people, I lost my job in 2008, so when Tim came along with his book selling us the idea that anyone could start an online business and give up the dreaded 9-5 – I was all ears.
Up to that point, I had never considered entrepreneurship as a viable option to make a living. I thought you needed to be rich and well connected to start companies.
Here comes Tim, saying he is running a multi-million supplement online business with almost no overhead, no office, and no employees.
Tim introduced us to the concept of the “New-Rich.” Individuals that, thanks to the Internet, could now launch highly profitable businesses that would afford them a semi-retired lifestyle while still young.
Don’t tell me more Tim – By the end of 2009, I had launched two businesses from my living room’s couch.
The first one was a complete failure. The second one was a complete success.
So in a sense, I have to thank Mr. Ferriss for planting in my mind the seed of entrepreneurship. Without it, who knows what I’d be doing today (besides eating cookies).
For those that follow Tim, they’ll be familiar with his subsequent successes such as making a ton of dough as an angel investor (Uber, Facebook, Shopify, etc.), publishing four additional New York Times bestsellers, and launching the first business/interview podcast to exceed 100 million downloads.
Ok, how does all of this connect to my app?
Tim’s last book, Tribe of Mentors, compiles the answers of 130 world-class performers to the same 11 questions.
Tim paid a lot of attention to the precise manner in which those 11 questions were worded in order to yield the best possible answers.
Questions in hand, Tim emailed them to several hundred famous people and received 130 replies.
Not everyone replied, and only a few people responded to all 11 questions. In total, Tim got just over 600 answers, which ended up making up the bulk of the book.
The main issue I had with the book is that given how the book is structured (basically a huge pile of email responses with some quotes and Tim commentary scattered along the way), discovering those insights or “golden-nuggets” turned out to be quite difficult.
This is where the idea of turning Tribe Of Mentors into an app came from.
- I wanted to be able to easily search through all the mentors and their answers without getting lost in the jungle.
- I wanted to be able to remember which answers I had already read and save the ones I found most interesting.
- Finally, I wanted to have a searchable list of all the books and products recommendations mentioned by the mentors in their answers.
A few months after attempting to read Tribe of Mentors, I found Glide, a no-code mobile app building platform.
Glide turned out to be just the perfect tool to create an interactive version of the book.
I just needed to create 3 Google Sheets tables, one for mentors, one for answers, and one for products. Then, I could let Glide do its magic. Basically creating a beautiful mobile app from my Google spreadsheet.
Ok, it turned to be much, much harder than that. Not so much the app-building itself, but the painfully slow process of extracting 130 mentor profiles and 600+ answers into separate rows inside a spreadsheet.
I even programmed a PHP script with some regex magic to automate some of the process. But, even with the script, it took around 20 hours of copying and pasting to get the entire book inside the app.
But that paled in comparison with the mind-breaking effort of finding hundreds of mentor profile pictures, book covers, product images, and links to all of them.
Anyway, once all the book data was imported and neatly arranged inside tables, the next step was to add the logic necessary to navigate between mentor profiles, answers, and products, save my favorite items and keep track of my overall reading progress.
In the end, I estimate it has taken me about 150 hours of work to complete this app.
I’m very happy with how the app has turned out. I use it regularly to check up on the mentors, read new answers, and get recommendations on books and products.
You can see how it works in this video → WATCH THE APP VIDEO
Now, I originally built this app for personal use, but I think Tim, and specially thousands of frustrated readers like myself, would find it quite useful too.
So…
Where can you download the app?
Well, you can’t because I’d like to get Tim’s permission to make it public first.
I’ve tried to get in touch with both Tim Ferris and the book publisher, but I’m yet to receive any response.
If this app ever comes into Tim’s radar and finds it useful, my intention is to give it to him so he can offer it as a nice complement to all Tribe Of Mentor readers.
Do you know Tim or know how to get in touch with him?
Tim gets thousands of emails every day so I’m not surprised I haven’t heard back from him.
This is where I’m hoping I can leverage my network.
So, if you know a way I could get in touch with him, let me know!
If I ever get a response, you’ll be the first to know.
Thanks for being there for me, my dear Grumers!
Peace. Love. TOM-Cookies.
Miguel @ Grumo.com
P.S. Tribe of Mentors book trivia: can you guess which book got recommended the most by the mentors in Tim’s book?….. It was Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. And I agree, it was a life-changing book for me too.
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