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@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..
@rrhoover Agree on the fundamental functionality. This project is basically scratching our own itch. Sourcing recommendation from Twitter is a good start. Personally from what we have observed, there are a few people you follow on Twitter whom you are eager to learn from and follow them religiously. It is this few people who are important to you and gives immense value to you.
We are experimenting with this concept we call people first review engine where people recommend products that they love. To give you an idea, you go to google.com and enter Nathan Bashaw, and you get a list of all the products he has recommended (sorted by categories of course). And if you enter: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", you'll get a list of all the people whom you follow and their reviews of the book.
The project is in its infancy stage. It has just been few weeks since we went from ideation to 0.1 version MVP. We are fortunate to have been featured on Product Hunt and this opens up a chance for us to talk to lots of relevant and interested people and get feedback.
Thank you
Looks cool; but what is the reason for creating an account with twitter? I can't see it adding any extra functionality.
it's also saying "null" when I'm logged in:
https://nimbus.everhelper.me/cli...
@_jacksmith You log-in to Highly Reco just like how you log-in to Product Hunt via Twitter or Facebook. It removes the step of having to signup using a username and password.
With respect to the error, we are still working on the details and we are fixing the errors as we go. We'll look into it. We'll update to you once we figure out this heisenbug.
@abybeats yes, I got that. I meant what does creating an account with your site actually do? I couldn't see what having an account does, seemed same as not being logged in
@_jacksmith Right now the functionality is very limited. Going forward, you'll be able to add recommendations & reviews, follow people, and get updates.
I like the concept but surely there are more awesome people out there than the ones selected, yes? I originally thought that anyone could get on there as "an Awesome person" and recommending books as well. Perhaps this is something you're working as there is a login but doesn't appear to be something of use yet.
@bryansarnold - Yes, you are right, thats the idea. Our hypothesis is that there are global maximas - people who are generally known as awesome people by a lot of people and then there are local maximas - people in each persons network, who a given person respects a lot, on a specific topic. Thats the idea with the login. We have not build that part yet. Can you run a couple of ideas through you?
Hey Alex, where are you pulling these recommendations? I love being included, but I haven't read a couple of the books I am supposedly recommending. Meanwhile, I've recommended hundreds if not thousands of others books not mentioned.
@ryanholiday - Woooo! This is like a major selfie moment. Super kicked to be replying to this.
To be honest, I had only finished exhaustively curating book recommendations by @pmarca. And then all this happened. I listen to Tim Ferris podcast once in while. Listened to the episode with you on it and then wanted to list down the books that you recommended. Made a quick note about the books mentioned here - http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014... . I kind of know that you have a full reading list. Sorry about that. Will make the necessary changes.
@ryanholiday Honoured to have you checking out our project. Me and Alex manually researched our heroes and found out information from the internet. We were in the process of adding more people, organizing and fact checking information we collected when our project got featured on Product Hunt (Thank you Ben!). If there are errors, we apologize. We were not prepared for getting hunted!
To give you a bit of a context, this project is in the earliest of the earliest stages (for example, there is no functionality implemented except listing people and books by us for us). We started this project weeks back with the hypothesis that people would love to learn from masters of respective fields and recommendations are one of the best forms of getting insights in improving your craft and yourself. Organized this information well, it is of immense value for people looking to learn from yourself and others.
What we were going to do in the next 2 weeks was to reach out to yourself and other people in the list we prepared to get perspective. To be honest, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask if it is ok to reach out to you. My email id is aj@abyjames.com. And in all sincerity, I'd love to get the thousands of books that you have recommended. If it requires, we are prepared to meet you where you are!
It is 2:15 AM in India, and Alex went to get some rest half an hour back. I tried calling him, but I can't reach him.
P.S: Hopefully this is not misinterpreted in this conversation context, but I have read Trust Me, I'm Lying 9 times and I absolutely love it!
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 Great stuff, Alex! I'm always on the hunt for the best books on business and life. Btw, I think you misspelled Mr. Spolsky's first name.
@tomstocklein - Thanks for pointing out the error. Fixed. Also awesome that you liked it..
@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.
@juliangijsen @pmarca - Sorry, I missed this comment. I soooo totally agree with your comment. Its less than a year ago, that I realized that the A players read a ton of books. Then I think I further realized that "I have no time to read" makes absolute no sense. Reading a well written book is a much faster learning process. I am strong believer of "there is a right time to read the book". Sometimes you read a book but you dont get it, (I attribute that to lack of context/experience.)
I think the insight that makes sense is that - learning anything, be it Entrepreneurship, swimming, playing an instrument etc - anything constitutes 2 parts - observing and doing. Doing is the part where you actually try to master it - the part where you start a company, jump into water and try to stay afloat or pick up a guitar and try it out. Observing is reading a book, watching a pro athlete swims, or watching someone play a guitar.
If you only do the doing part - you might master it, but you are going to be super inefficient. If you only do the observing part, you will miss the details and the key insights. The right thing to do is to do both - observing (here- reading a book) and doing.
Oh, i like this idea a lot. I like to read when i actually get to read books but i never know where to begin. I like that this is recommended by professionals in the field that i'm in as well other industries. Well done.
@themelamini - Glad that you liked it. I liked the way you described the value that you get from using the product. We are now building a post login experience. Can we run some ideas through you?
Great idea definitely! Another useful feature could be if you can show how many of the influencers are recommending a particular book. (May be set a counter infront of a book name and link that to the list of names of influencers in your repository)
@ajonit - Glad you liked it. Thanks for the feature request. Totally appreciate it. Will look into it. Would you prefer count/list of influencers (total from our repo) or would you prefer count/list of specifically influencers that you follow ?
@ajonit You can also try https://www.vivilio.com/influencers. Some Indian influencers there as well. @alexjv89
@alexjv89 waw the product is amazing! Few month ago I prayed for someone to build that! I love reading book recomanded by the best people! Thanks!
@david770 - Glad you liked it. Do shout out at us, if there is some functionality that you would like to have on the app.
@alexjv89 btw you can find amazing book recommendation on the product hunt live of great invitees. It's from there that a lot of my books order come from
@david770 - This is interesting. Thanks for point out this source .. will dig into it.. did not know about it.
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.
wow ... a much needed one as it will have recommendations from everyone's personal experience . Thanks for the share
@_vineetshukla - Thanks .. let us know if you have thoughts on how to make this better.
Hey @alexjv89 neat website.
We have been trying to do something similar with Vivilio (@viviliobooks) - https://www.vivilio.com/influencers
Update for July - Here is all the book recommendations from Warren Buffett - https://www.highlyreco.com/usr/w... . We picked it up from his share holder letters and from other parts of the inter web.
I dig it. I agree that the people is the most important entity. It'd be nice to see what the person is currently into. People go in waves. @tferriss might go on a stoicism kick for a few months, @sivers might go on a behavioral science bender. You could do that on your end by extrapolating their reading patterns (even pulling categories from titles using doc2vec or word2vec and some low-touch supervised learning) to inject a level of real-time alignment with the recommendations for people like me. Riding the example out, I might be a fan of both Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers but if I'm really into behavioral psychology right now, then Sivers' recommendations would be more relevant to me right now.
Great idea and execution @alexjv89. Pumped to see it, I'll be a user.
@johnnychan @tferriss @sivers - Thank you for the feedback. The insight about people going in waves - that makes a lot of sense. This comment is super insightful. We might be too early for real-time recommendations, but it definitely looks like something that we would be interested in incorporating. Thanks again.
It'd be really great to have some more women and people of color represented in your list of awesome people... Otherwise, a cool idea, and something I'm constantly wondering about myself!
@annakatrinalockwood - Hi Anna, thanks for the feedback, can you name some people, we will try to dig up.
@markoxvee - Awesome thanks. let me know if there are additional people that you would like to get reviews from.
@alexjv89 great to have these in one place. FYI it's not rendering great on a phone(iPhone 6p)
@ryan_dewsbury - right, Thanks.. actually we never build a mobile version. PH was unexpected. Will fix that asap. Mean time can you tell us people who you would like to get reviews from. We will try and see if we can dig that up.
@ryan_dewsbury - fixed the rendering on mobile. Thanks for pointing out.
THIS IS HEAVEN - although, I wonder if there is someway to integrate goodreads listopia
@jordan_jackson - Glad you liked it. How would you exactly like to integrate it?
@alexjv89 well, a lot of the lists from good reads are from specific people so it would be cool if all the recommendations integrated that (i'm not sure how that works technically) for example Nassim Taleb https://www.goodreads.com/list/s...
@robertjordan33 Nope. The links are direct links to the Amazon website. If you see any affiliate links, it is by mistake and we'll be having clean URLs in place.
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