177: “Don’t scale too soon” — On Books and Mission-Based Business-Building with Readwise Cofounder Daniel Doyon

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If you just approach someone and ask them like, hey, how much do you read? That's actually a very triggering question. I had to learn very early on in the first year of working on Rewise not to ask that because that's kind of like asking like how many times did you go to the gym last week? Or how many calories did you eat last week? So if you're going to build a feature like this, there's such a fine line to making someone feel guilty that they're not doing what they think they should be doing to the point that they'll delete you and rage quit. To actually like uplifting them and helping them establish habits, it's a really hard thing to work on, which is why we haven't done more on it yet.

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Hello Hello Free Timers. Welcome back. I am so excited to be here today with Daniel Doyon. He is the co founder of one of my favorite daily must use software services, Readwise AKA Readwise IO because that's the URL that would take you there. It's a reading tool that helps readers revisit the highlights from their ebooks by synchronizing and then sending a daily email resurfacing the very best highlights once the Notion API got released. And then Readwise would sync my Kindle highlights to an epic Notion database. It completely changed the game for podcast prep. I'm eternally grateful to Daniel. He's also an expert in creative real estate acquisitions and partnerships. He's a bibliophile wine lover. Sailor. What does this guy not do? Dan, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Thank you for making one of my.

Favorite software Services, you're welcome is kind of an accident, but glad you like it.

I first heard about it from who else? Tim Ferriss. And I wonder if you experienced because you started this as a side hustle for you. I know you have a co founder. Did you experience any of the times he mentioned you? The famous hug of death from him sending so much traffic your way.

It's a day I'll never forget. The first time it happened, it was back in 2018. We started working on what is now known as readwise. Probably May 2017 is when we pegged the start date. So we'd been working on it for about 18 months. So this was November 2018. We started in San Francisco, but Tristan, my partner, had moved back to Toronto where he grew up and he was visiting me in San Francisco and he left the night before. Tim Ferriss mentioned us in his five Bullet Friday email newsletter. And I'll never forget, for some reason my phone was vibrating and I woke up in the middle of the night at like 4 or 5am Pacific Time and there were all these alerts on my phone with people emailing us saying 500 error, 500 error, 500 error, which is the error that a website gives when it's down. And I actually knew at that moment. I was like, oh, is this the day that Tim Ferriss mentioned us? I run out of bed, open up my laptop, open up our Readwise emails and see all these emails coming in. And the irony is that Tristan was with me last night, but he had taken a red eye. So he was asleep for about seven or eight hours into this thing. And I could not for the life of me wake him and contact him to get him to help me deal with this issue. But that being said, it was still a great day. If you look at our chart of cumulative users over time, even though our growth is so much larger than it was back in 2018, so it kind of dwarfs the back time. You could still see this little cliff back in late 2018, which is the day Tim Ferriss mentioned us. A great day for Readwise.

Had he given you a heads up? Because I know he's aware that sometimes this can happen for small businesses.

No, absolutely not. We've actually never spoken directly to Tim in our six years of working on Readwise, which is kind of funny, but yeah, no heads up. We learned after the fact that he learned about us through a guy named Michael Norman. So Michael, if you happen to be listening, thank you for this. He was the COO of Roam Research for a period of Time, if you've ever heard of that note taking app. Now he's doing something else. But he's the one who turned Tim on to Readwise.

In free time, I talk about the hug of death phenomenon. Of course, I do mention Tim because it's in a chapter on systems and and are you ready for your big break? And then I say, or would your business break? Looking back, obviously these are kind of the moments that business owners hope and dream for some big break. Some mention by Tim Ferriss Oprah Winfrey. Is there anything you could have done or would have done differently looking back to be ready for a big break should one hit at any given time?

It's a good question. My partner Tristan would call that premature optimization. In engineering lingo, I think for us there's no such thing as just one big break. It's just repeatedly getting up in the morning and continuing to move forward. And when you stack enough of these mentions, we've since had like the next generation of Tim Ferriss or some creators like Ali Abdaal, David Perel, Thiago Fort Nat Ellison. We've had similar instances with those guys. They just kind of stack up. But any one of them by themselves wouldn't have done that much for us. So I don't think we have any regrets for not having done more to prepare for this. And we were ready. I mean, I spent my entire day responding to emails from people, and once Tristan woke up, he spent all that time repairing our server and making it more robust. So, yeah, I think entrepreneurship is just a series of slamming into these ceilings and then doing whatever you have to do to remove the ceiling so you can start to grow again and then hit another one.

It's such a champagne problem to have. You know, I love how you called it slamming into the ceiling because it's so funny how Tristan calls it premature optimization. That is so funny. But it's like no matter how much you try, you still can't always anticipate the volume or what might break, what could break. Very interesting.

Absolutely. Yeah. I think a philosophy of ours has always been do things that don't scale. So when we run into an issue like the hug of death from Tim Ferriss, our solution is more to kind of roll up our sleeves and manually respond to everyone and write personal emails and repair it. And if you do that over a long enough period of time, it really does compound. That's our philosophy for dealing with these things. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who worry too much early on about, well, what happens if this Thing explodes. Like, will it scale? There's a meme in engineering which is like, will it scale or does it scale? And we typically try to run a process until it breaks due to scale. And then we build a new process that's kind of our litmus test for when we add process. We don't add process until it's broken, which is stressful. But I think it's a good means of allocating resources on a personal level.

It seems like one example of that could be email inbox or another one. Even like appointments on the calendar. Are there other areas where you just had to let it get to a point where something broke and didn't scale and then you implemented either personally or within the company?

Oh, repeatedly.

I'd love to know.

It's always just about what things are you fixing right now. Right now I'm personally focused, at least in the business, on fixing our customer support process. We actually released our sophomore product in December into public beta. Before that it was private. So we kind of were able to contain the amount of feedback we were getting what we launched right before Christmas. And as a result we're getting approximately 500 to 1,000 emails per day, which has completely broken our customer support systems and process. So I'm refactoring that right now. There's been a series of engineering processes that were broken. Going public with that. Fortunately, we did prepare to go public and anticipate the stress it would put on our servers. We did several kind of stress testing dry runs or shakedowns to prepare for that, but there have been a series of those as well. We're also at the point as a company where my partner Tristan and I have to start to delegate and become more managers than individual contributors. So adding in a management process and fixing that as well, how do you.

Feel about that shifting into a more manager role?

There are a lot of people who don't like it. We're kind of ambivalent. Tristan and I still do a lot of the grunt work. I think I'd feel better about it if we figured out how to move a lot of the tactical work off our plates. We could spend more time doing so called strategic work. We've managed to assemble such a great team. Readwise is not venture backed, so we have a little bit of a slower mentality. We're still very ambitious. This isn't like a bootstrapping like let's live on a beach in Thailand lifestyle business, but we take things a little bit slower than a VC backed business. And it's a Very mission oriented business. So we've been able to hire just amazing people who share our mission of improving the practice of reading, using software. And the team is so fantastic that it actually is very joyful to work with these smart, intelligent, thoughtful people.

You mentioned before we hit record that you're up to about 15 full time employees, is that right?

Yeah, we also have some people that kind of come and go. I guess this is kind of like a more modern global business which blurs the lines of traditional full time employment. But if we look at like true full time people, it's 15 as of this week. We had a new engineer start this.

Week and do you have a hiring secret sauce that enables you to bring on these people that you just adore and love working on?

We actually do have a trick I.

Would love to know.

I didn't think of it as secret sauce until you asked, but our trick is hiring from our user base. This is one of the benefits of working on a consumer product. When you work in software, one way to bifurcate things would be to think in terms of consumer where you're selling to individuals or enterprise where you're selling to businesses from startups, small businesses, medium businesses or large scale enterprises. Consumer is generally regarded as much more intensive, whereas enterprise is more like easy money. But one of the huge perks of consumer is that we can find people who really love the product and just want to work on the product and as users of the product. In contrast to an enterprise product where you might be making like PDF signing software which no one uses on a daily basis, it just becomes a lot more fun.

I can attest to that because the reason this is even happening right now is that I mentioned Readwise on a podcast and the wonderful production team, One Stone Creative, they'll send every now and then they'll say, hey, Readwise, you were mentioned in this episode. Most companies don't write back, but of course you all did. And next thing I know you're sending a sweatshirt, a T shirt, stickers. All these good things are happening and I was just laughing like it is clear that everybody's passionate about it, including people like me, including long time. I wouldn't even call myself a user. Let's just call myself an avid fanatic of your service that you're part of every day for me. But there's not always a time or an opportunity to interact. So it is pretty special that you have such a responsive team that they're so excited about it and mission driven and so are you. And I think we all really feel that in the whole ecosystem, creators who.

You know, make a podcast or blog or videos like you do often talk about their content being like a so called serendipity machine or serendipity engine. Readwise has been a serendipity engine for us as well. And through it we've met so many interesting people like you or like people who have joined the team. It's been really fun.

And it's also for bookworms.

Right?

It's like people who have the patience and love of reading and a love of books. It's just special to connect. And then you've also created a serendipity engine for knowledge. Because every day I'm getting five snippets that I myself have highlighted. Often I'll grab the one that you throw in there too, because Readwise will say, hey, if you liked those five books, you might like this snippet as well. It kind of just creates a knowledge kernel, as k our mutual friend would call it. A little knowledge kernel. Serendipity every day as well.

Exactly. I mean, it makes sense in hindsight, but people who read a lot, particularly a lot of nonfiction in kind of a seeking or betterment sense, tend to be very interesting people. The serendipity engine is really spun up in a flywheel because of that.

Yeah. Oh, I love that serendipity engine flywheel. Now we're really cooking with guests. I want to come back to your philosophy of life, but first, I have this open loop around the email volume that I just want to ask you about. When you experience such a dramatic shift and you start getting 500 to 1,000 messages a day, and obviously the current system can't really support that. Is that just a matter of. Well, once you fix the product that's in beta and you get the bugs out, that volume will naturally decline. Or do you need to invent an entirely new system and process for tackling the inbox?

So as a result of that, we've had to formalize our customer support function. Before this event, it was running more. Casual is not the right word, but we had two team members and myself, and our process was to reply to literally every piece of email we get personally. And then we're also getting contacted through many other channels. We have a Discord server, there's a Reddit group that's formed. People tweeted us, we'll get YouTube comments, we'll get App Store reviews. Right. So we had to kind of formalize the process and look at all the different types of channels by which users, prospective customers, and current customers were reaching out. And think about like, how do we develop the right coverage? We do joke about like, oh, will this volume go away once we bring the product to a certain level of stability? And it's not just bugs, it's also this product we created. It's an all in one product. The idea is you get all your reading in one place. It attracts so many different use cases that people want to go in different directions for it. So we're just getting all kinds of feedback to go in different directions. I think for this particular issue, not all issues are like this, but for this particular one it's really going to be like five to 10 changes that together enable us to move forward as opposed to just one change.

We'll be right back just after this.

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The app and service we're talking about is called Reader. Now. There have been many different types of aggregation services that have come and gone over the years, like Feedly, Instapaper, Pocket, et cetera. Tell us about Reader. Where do you think it fits and what did you think was missing? Because a lot of people listening are also looking for ways to corral what Thiago calls the second Brain. I know you know Thiago as well.

When we started readwise back in 2017, we always had a long term vision and intent to build our own reading application because we felt like we wouldn't really be able to innovate on the practice of reading unless we participated in that component of reading. But we knew upfront it was too ambitious, too risky. We follow the business advice of Peter Thiel, which is generally try and go and establish a beachhead in a niche, go very deep on a particular small market that's uncontested, and then use that position to expand from there into a larger adjacency. So for us, we started with not the actual process of reading or the reading experience, but what comes after reading. So we started with taking your highlights and helping you get value from them. One of our flagship features is a thing called a daily review, where you get either an email or an app based notification. You review highlights that you've read. That really kind of takes the process of reading a book. I'm sure you've heard the meme like, this book could have been a blog post. Blog post could have been a tweet like that.

All nonfiction books could be a two page outline.

Exactly. But that's kind of missing the point. The point is I pick up this book every night for 30 days. I analyze the same ideas from different angles using different examples. And through that process, I absorb and integrate the ideas contained in the book. It's about like the practice, not so much like a transfer of information. So we took that process and we extended it indefinitely. Not just while you're reading the book, but then after the book, we also sync your highlights to note taking apps like Notion, as you mentioned, and a couple others. So that was our beachhead. And once we felt like we had enough of a position there, we were able to build the team a little bit. We had some users to work with. Really all the feedback kind of shifted from how we could make that niche tool better to complaints about the reading applications upstream from us. So users kind of pulled Reader out of us. To go back to your original question, which is good because it was always our vision and intent to do that. So those two things merged, which was great. And the first problem we sought to solve with Reader, and we're still working on the first problem. There are many problems we hope to tackle over enough time, but you can only do one at a time. Is this notion that reading is fragmented, or at least digital reading is fragmented. And what I mean by that is you might read an article in your browser, a newsletter in your email client, news in your RSS feed, Reader, a PDF on a special app. Yeah, an ebook on Kindle. And before users are yearning to kind of get all that stuff into one place so they can control it and tackle it and kind of deal with it comprehensively. That was the inspiration for Reader, and that's where we are with it right now. So it supports all those different content and media types.

I love what you said about carrying the reading experience forward indefinitely, and that's what I get out of Readwise as well. It's not just a reminder of what I've read, but sometimes I forget. Or I'll read a book really quickly. I might read a book in two days or a week, and yet read wise for the next five years or 10 years. I'll get a little blurb that I forgot about that reminds me of what I've learned. So it really is special how you carry that forward. And it is so necessary. I was joking about my hundred browser tabs, but I have so many Chrome tabs open just because it's different bits of info that I want to read I don't want to forget about. For some reason, they just go to die if I save them in something like Pocket or Instant Paper. And it's a tough problem to solve. It's tricky.

Candidly, we haven't solved that problem. We've made some inroads. We're trying to apply kind of the same magic that we hit with the Readwise Daily Review to that problem of saving these links to Instapaper and Pocket without condemning them to a graveyard. Effectively, we've made some inroads there, but we still have a lot of work to do. I think we first had to get the foundation in place and now we can start to work on those higher order problems.

On a slightly related note, maybe a tangent. At one point you wrote about the Joy of Kindle Samples, and you say that they're one of the most underrated and overlooked features of Kindle that will take your reading practice to the next level. Do you still feel this way at the Joy of Kindle Samples?

Yeah. I mean, for book lovers, which is who we typically deal with, there's definitely a compulsion to just buy books every single day. Like you might be reading a book and hear a book mentioned and just buy it on the spot. Kindle Samples can give you that spark of joy as if you'd bought it without actually buying it. And then when you're trying to decide what to read next, it's effectively the same of kind of like looking at the 20 books on your nightstand stacked up. You can get into it and then you can start reading. And a lot of people ask me, like, how do you read more? And my advice is always, or I ask them, have you ever had the experience of picking up a book that you couldn't put down? Which everyone has had that experience and for me that's the intersection of the right book at the right time. So when you start reading a Kindle sample, if you find yourself kind of whisked to the end, just buy it and then you'll read the whole thing. And that helps you read more because you can hop around and find that right book at the right time. And just making it effortless is the best way to read more.

It's so true. That feeling of getting whisked to the end of a Kindle sample. I love how you put that. And I've been using it similar so I also one click order books like, I mean technically kind of is my job, but like it's my job practically every day. But also if I hear a book mentioned, I'm not sure I do what you just described, which is I just download the sample, then there it is on my device and I don't forget about it. And I love how you put it. I've never put it to words, but if I get whisked to the end of the sample, then I know it's one that I want to buy. So thank you for putting words to that.

I think I also wrote that during a very deep minimalist phase.

Yeah.

At one point in my life I quit my job, sold all my things and backpacked around the world. And through that I had to let go of maybe like a thousand books, which was one of the most painful categories of possession to let go of. And so I felt like Kindle samples also kind of prevented that kind of attachment and maximalism.

How do you currently decide what books to read? Is it just pure serendipity? Do you have a method to your madness?

Me personally, this is very different than Tristan. Tristan is much more. My time on earth is finite. I have to be very judicious with what I read. I don't want to make a mistake here I am much more free flowing. I just decide by whatever kind of catches my attention and going back to that right book at the right time, whatever I can make it effortless with.

Do you find any atrophy in your attention for reading books? Because I ask that. Because I am. Which I find terrifying because I've loved books my whole life since I could read and wild world we're living in in the era of TikTok pace of consumption. How about you? Are you finding any impact on your attention span or has your stay pretty steady?

No, absolutely. I've been feeling it. I don't know about you, but it's been really exacerbated post Covid. Yeah, it's also been exacerbated for me by dog fooding. You know that term eat your own dog food when you use your own product with dogfooding reader, which right now you can really only read on an iOS device or an Android device. So we don't have an E Ink device yet. There are some Android based E Ink devices where you can install the app and kind of unplug. But trying to read a book on my phone is psychologically very hard because there's always that like itch or that tingle in the back of my mind too check Slack or go on Twitter or look at my email. I think that problem could be one of the core problems that we work on in the next year trying to help people reclaim their attention span. Because it does feel good when you get into a flow state reading for typically it takes about 20 to 30 minutes before you ramp into that flow state, but it sure does feel good to read it. Cohesive book that someone spent a lot of time writing compared to reading a blog post and we want to help people experience that more.

Yeah, it is such a great feeling to get lost in a book or have a page turner like Nick Bilton writes such good page turner books. Is there any you've read recently that gave you that feeling? Fiction or nonfiction?

I'm almost done right now. The story of Trader Joe's. I can't even remember the title. That's kind of pathetic. When I have readwise I'll put it.

In the show notes.

It's a great read for any aspiring entrepreneur. It's really good for retailers. A lot of I think parables in there that can be applied to any different types of business.

I love it.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I'm really obsessed by true crime about criminal underworld enterprises that would be as big as Amazon if we knew about them. And we would have celebrated the founders if we knew about them. It's a very weird niche. I can't stand true crime about like murdering women because I wouldn't sleep at night. But I'm gonna put some of my book recs of page turners in the show notes.

Is that a specific book or that's a genre?

I have a couple. It's like my own invented genre. So there's books like Dreamland, Sam Canones, he writes about basically the Uber for heroin, for the heroin trade. And also a decentralized network of dealers where no matter how many you would take out in the US there will always be more coming from this one tiny town in Mexico because it's a nodal, it's a decentralized organization. Then I read a book called the Mastermind about this guy that just built this massive business. A verticalization of prescription pill mill type things ended up like pivoting into guns and the gun trade. Really wacky stuff. And for some reason these books, I find them just absolutely page turning fascinating. Of course, the Silk Road, that was the Nick Bilton one, American kingpin, Silk.

Road one I read.

Yeah, they're like business books, but it's a part of business that you don't hear about. And yet they're every bit as savvy, if not more so. Not that I'm celebrating this level of criminality or violence or any of it. It has a horrible impact on society, but they're more invisible, they're not in the press every day. And I find it very, very interesting. And of course I love reading when they get caught.

Have you read Dr. Dealer? No, that's a Paige Turner.

Oh gosh, yes.

That's by the Mark Bowden who wrote Black Hawk down and a bunch of other books.

Oh, all right. It's going in the list. Can you hear me, Dr. Dealer? This will be fun. We should just do a podcast on page turners to combat our atrophying attention. I noticed that when I'm preparing for a podcast guest, I have pressure because if they've written a book, I want to read their entire book before I talk to them. And that's a little bit of a forcing function that when my attention is otherwise elusive, which I also have noticed a big drop during the pandemic, probably because my stress levels were higher and post Pandemic. But I need something. So when I have a podcast guest I'm able to reconnect to the love of immersion just as you described. But it's almost like I need a reason or the book has to be such a pure page turner like the ones we we just threw out there. That will really get me.

The competition for your attention is at all time highs and books have not really kept up.

Yeah, like I'm not even on social media. I barely go on YouTube for this reason. And so I think the reason I bring it up is just even for me, I feel I'm doing everything I can to maintain focus, deep work pockets, shout out to Kal and whatnot. And still I'm struggling. I feel like I'm like my fingertips are gripping the side of a mountain and one is popping off at a time.

One of the funny things working on software or features within software to help people read more. This will make sense when I explain it, but it's not something you would anticipate up front is reading is very guilt inducing. At least the type of reading we're talking about here. Not necessarily reading say like Harry Potter or something. So if you just approach someone and ask them like hey, how much do you read? That's actually a very triggering question. I had to learn very early on in the first year of working on Readwise not to ask that because that's kind of like asking like how many times did you go to the gym last week? Or how many calories did you eat last week?

Interesting.

So if you're going to build a feature like this, there's such a fine line to making someone feel guilty that they're not doing what they think they should be doing to the point that they'll delete you and rage quit. To actually like uplifting them and helping them establish habits. It's a really hard thing to work on, which is why we haven't done more on it yet.

That's so interesting. What an interesting dynamic. Right? And then there's the public facing what are you reading? Like Goodreads. But we don't always want to share publicly what we're reading. If it's like some self help book about a neuroses I'm going through, I don't post that publicly. And then you also have the New York Times Book Review, there's the buy the book interview section and you can just tell that these people feel the pressure to put the most hoity toity book that they can conjure of what are you reading right now.

There'S a virtue signaling component.

Exactly. That's so interesting of just the psychology of even talking to each other publicly or how an app might make them feel, them being all of us. I want to ask you, you have this great philosophy of life. I wonder if you still uphold this of slow, simple and solid. Is that still a driving philosophy for you?

Oh man, I need to update my personal landing page.

See, that's why I ask if it's still relevant.

I had it for a while. The genesis of that was I spent 10 plus years in Wall street style finance. I had what I call an early midlife crisis. I was in my early 30s. My girlfriend, now wife, she was at Goldman Sachs in New York. So similar path as me. We had these golden handcuffs. I'm not sure if you know that term, but we're kind of like locked into this career. It's very hard to like step away from. We couldn't figure out how to.

Break the golden handcuffs without doing something drastic, which for us was kind of quitting without knowing what we were going to do next, getting rid of all our possessions and then taking a year long sabbatical to kind of go and figure things out. So it was during that sabbatical that developed that philosophy of slow, simple and solid. This is so cheesy and corny, but we were actually at a 10 day silent meditation retreat in the middle of Thailand when at the end of that, that's when I kind of like codified that. Lived by that philosophy for a good one or two years. After that sabbatical we came back to the US but didn't necessarily plant roots for a couple years. Remained nomadic, but in the United States we lived in wine country for like up in Sonoma and Napa county and continued to live it there. But then once I got sucked back into like competitive work and entrepreneurship, it's gradually kind of slipped away. But through my read wise I still get reminded of the philosophy and bring it back. But I'd be lying if I said I was still practicing what I preach as well as I used to.

I wanted to ask you about that because you did mention that Readwise is not by design a lifestyle business. It's not just for you and Tristan to work as little as possible, but travel around the world. And I love that you and your now wife had that experience. How do you blend being a mission oriented company? You haven't taken outside money. I don't know if you want to go public, but how are you finding this kind of happy medium if you're not in as extreme of a slow, simple and solid. You are in the business realm. It is intense. You are building a more complex team than you once had. So how do you still. I guess what I'm winding way of asking how you and Tristan still take care of yourselves and the culture of the company, knowing it's not a lifestyle business, and yet maybe not also wanting to create some kind of insane churn and burn culture that's going to burn everyone out.

Well, Tristan and I are very invested, so we actually don't have good work life balance. In fact, for the longest time I worked in an office building. Like, had to dress up in the morning, which I hated. Had to wake up on a fixed schedule, would work like very long 60 to 80 hour weeks. And so I yearned for like a freer lifestyle, which we now have. Like I can wake up whenever I want. I don't even own a dress shirt or like a suit anymore that fits. But what happens is a business like this, it like leads itself into your life such that there's like no solid separation. So I would say that's probably another ceiling. I can't speak for Tristan, but at least for myself that I'm hitting is like, how do I create this proper separation? I do yearn for that barrier. I have a child on the way, so I think I'm probably just going to like force that in one way or another as a result. But we've done a bad job at it. But it goes back to the original part of the conversation of doing things that don't scale until they break and then fixing it. But our culture for people who work for us is. It is not like a startup culture where everyone's working 60 plus hours per week. It is a pretty moderate culture and we just need to get enough productivity out of the hours that people put in to keep up and keep moving forward at a good enough pace.

Do you have any internal mantras or a certain. I don't want to call it a process, but is there something that is like a rule of thumb that you let people know or to help ensure that people are operating at their best? I'm sure you're familiar with the Basecamp guys. They have all these different ways that they run a comm company. Do you have a favorite within Readwise.

I want to go back and relook at. I was very inspired by the basecamp guys, the 37 signals guys, early on, but haven't revisited it in a while. To be honest, we don't have a Work philosophy mantra. We do try and make sure that our company works. I guess our one mantra is no more than 1.5 meetings per week. That's probably our only mantra that's good.

Per person or per what?

Per person. So that's one weekly meeting and then one bi weekly meeting of recurring.

So could someone have more than 1.5 if they're one offs? Is that the baseline for a recurring schedule?

Yeah, you can have like one off chats and whatnot, but this is a recurring meeting.

Oh, I love that. I love that. Okay, last question. Dan, thank you for being so generous with your time and sharing your story. If you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I guess for me right now, one of the things that we talked about during this session was I'm just overwhelmed by emails at the moment and probably a lot of that is self inflicted because for years me or other colleagues were able to respond to each email individually. But I would say the permission slip is as you reach a certain level of communication, inbound communication, you have permission to reset the expectations around whether or not you reply and the time it takes you to reply because that just can't keep going forever.

It's so true. Especially as you slam against those ceilings like you said. And having a kid will certainly be another one. That's a permission slip I know we all need. So thank you, Dan. This has been such a joy. Of course people should be using Readwise if you're not already Readwise IO you can import your highlights, you can export to places like Notion. They can check out Reader, which is in beta. Is there anywhere else you want to.

Send listeners Readwise IO for the original Readwise which will help you remember and integrate more of what you read. And then Readwise IO Read for the all in one reading product which is in public beta.

And did I hear that there's a full blown app coming soon? Did I see that today in the footer?

Well, yeah, you can find the app on iOS and Android and then probably sometime this year may push to next year, we'll make a native desktop app for PC and Mac.

Oh, that's what it was. Okay. Super cool. All right, we'll put all these links in the show notes, including our Must Read Whiskey to the End page Turner books and listeners. If you have just finished a Whiskey to the End we wanna know about it so you could write in at hi time. Com. Dan, such a joy to connect. Thank you for making one of my favorite services. Once again and to your team for at least responding to this one email that enabled us to do this today.

Yeah, thank you so much for your support and having me. And thank you for everything you do.

Thank you. Thanks everybody for listening.

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