vhpoet

I'd be cautious about providing direct solutions, but generating and asking questions using AI, based on the context the user provides, could potentially help them see their issues from different angles and possibly uncover blind spots. This is what I've been doing at https://www.deepwander.com

I've been juggling side projects while working full-time as an engineer for the last 15+ years. Most of these projects tanked, but a few have started to bring in some side income. About 6 months ago, I went fully self-employed. I'm not at a Silicon Valley salary range yet, but I should hopefully be there in a year or so.

Main income builders: - https://www.deepwander.com - https://www.readthistwice.com - https://www.iso100mm.com

I've got a background in B2B and product development, and I don't think it would be too hard for me to raise some capital, but I'm intentionally choosing the indie/bootstrapped route as I want to maintain my relaxed lifestyle and have complete ownership and freedom over what I work on and how I do it.

I also enjoy working on B2C way more than B2B because I like seeing my impact on an individual level. But I digress. :)

I've created a little tool to do a semantic search of the books on Read This Twice. I'm using Open AI embeddings to create vectors from the book descriptions and user reviews, which I then store in Pinecone. Whenever a user makes a search request, it's vectorized and then used to search Pinecone.

Have you seen this? https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries

There's a less social version with private bookshelves here https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries

Have you seen https://www.readthistwice.com ? (fyi, I'm the founder)

Have you seen https://www.readthistwice.com? (fyi, I'm the founder)

Have you seen this? https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries

One great way to find books to read is to see what people you look up to recommend. I've built a service that scans twitter for book recommendations from ~2000 thought leaders. https://www.readthistwice.com/people

I'm currently working on your second need for book log / recommendations. So far we've managed to compile the biggest book recommendations database from celebrities / smart people on twitter. You can already save these books to your reading list, but it's not too sophisticated yet. https://www.readthistwice.com

A shameless plug here, I've been working on a web app to tackle a small part of the issue here. Showing contextual recommendations from 1300+ leaders with verified quotes https://www.readthistwice.com

I'm trying to tackle a small part of this by building https://www.readthistwice.com which gives contextual recommendations from 1300+ leaders. What I mean by contextual in this case is every recommendation comes with a verified quote from the recommender on why they recommend the book.

See the full list at https://www.readthistwice.com/lists/best-cybersecurity-books

I analyzed 24 blog posts on API design (rest/graphql/rpc) and compiled a list of the books they recommended (sorted by the most popular ones first) https://www.readthistwice.com/lists/best-api-design-books.

Thanks for your help! Reading the article now.

That'd be super cool, sending you an email.

What do you mean by "that's where the real money is"? I'm already building an email list, but not sure how exactly you propose monetizing it.

Hey, thank you! Not to discourage you or anything but monetizing with affiliate book sales is a loong long way to replace a full time job. This post got to the HN front page (first time for me) and I'd be happy to make $15-30 today.. and this is the best day with thousands of visits. I started and continue working on this because it's a passion. I love books and I love seeing people buy books because of something I made. Good luck!

hahah thank you! definitely check out their API, it's a bit messy, but works.

In reality tho, there's a lot of manual work involved haha. Thank you! I get the images from Amazon api https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/.

Thank you! added them to our watchlist. They'll appear on the website as soon as we find book recommendations from them.

Thank you! It's built on React/Node.

Thank you! The website actually includes 1300+ people. Whose recommendations are you interested in?

He means the website also has John Pipers and Timothy Kellers recommendations (they only recommend one book each tho). https://www.readthistwice.com/person/john-piper and https://www.readthistwice.com/person/timothy-keller.

Yup, if you click on the score it takes you to the Goodreads page.

Thank you! The idea is not to "idolize" people, it's more of a new way to discover books. I know PG, I know his mentality and it's super useful when he recommends a book giving you context on why he recommends it. This doesn't necessarily mean I'm gonna read it, but I'll have a better idea on what the book has to offer vs checking goodreads reviews from strangers.

Thank you! Yea, we'll add the tag as soon as we have more of them. Do you have any people in mind? Give me their twitter usernames and I'll take a look.

You can actually change the layout so you only see the titles and the covers. The button to change the layout is right above the list (note to self: make that more visible).

Thank you!

It was both. Started as a side toy to solve my own need, but the monetization potential got me to spend so much time building it.