What I'm up to - October 2023

This is my monthly newsletter about what I'm up to, which I send in place of social media.

✨ What I was up to in September

I launched Booklet, a forum as an alternative to chat. It's my attempt to make communication more asynchronous for professional groups. Knowledge workers check chat every 6 minutes, fracturing their attention and preventing deep work. Booklet solves this by encouraging long-form, threaded discussions - and summarizing all activity into one single email per day.

I wrote about my motivation for Booklet on the Contraption Company site.

The actual launch of Booklet went better than expected - with thousands of visitors in the first day, and hundreds of communities created. I've been iterating rapidly based on user feedback, including rolling out a variety of OpenAI-powered tools to improve the email summary.

Some of the early use case for Booklet have been:

• Investors connecting their portfolio founders in a network
• A marketplace building a community of workers to engage them between gigs
• A Substack newsletter adding a subscriber community
• Companies replacing Google Groups for internal announcements

If you know anybody looking for a solution like these, please send them to Booklet. And, you can try out Booklet by joining its customer community athq.booklet.group

Besides that, I had a wonderful trip to Stockholm where the Vasa Museum fascinated me, I ate too many cardamom buns, and I stopped by the Nobel Prize Museum. I also attended the New York Coffee Festival, and briefly stopped by Chicago for a wedding.

🤔 Things to share

• Articles : The Magical Japanese Art of Luggage Forwarding, The Loneliness Economy, Protocol Daddies, The Jargon File.
• Books : Coddling of the American Mind.
• Podcasts : Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on early rejection, customer focus - a look at how Jony Ive is turning Airbnb into a centralized product organization (see "Trend" below). Three Star Coffee Service: Coffee at restaurant Noma.
• Apps : Helicone for OpenAI monitoring and caching.
• Video : "How to Live an Asymmetric Life"
• Trend: With the downturn, more tech CEOs seem to be retaking the "Head of product" role.
• Coffees I'm drinking: Man Vs. Machine Supernatural, Heart Guatemala Amate, and notable IRL coffees at Café Pascal and Drop Coffee.

📫 What I'm up to in September

• Working on Booklet, and enjoying a first month without travel in a long time.

**📍 Where I'll be **

• NYC all month 🗽

(Let me know if we overlap)

📸 Photo

Caradmom buns for fika in Stockholm

The Vasa - a ~500 year old ship that was salvaged and now is on display in an eponymous museum in Stockholm

Intricate carvings on the Vasa