Drop some Knolly

From concept to launch, again.

Quick Look

• Words of Wisdom

• Introducing Knolly

• New Music

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Words of Wisdom

Albert Einstein: "It’s not that I’m so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."

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What in the Knolly.

It’s January 2, 2024, a new year with ample possibility. I’m listening to music and relaxing in my living room and my phone dings - It’s Jim, a fellow board member I serve on a board with and he is wishing me a Happy New Year and we catch up.

As we chatted away about what he’s up to in his work and travels, I started to talk about Founder Station and if he knew any investors who may want to invest in my crazy idea to back my AI-cofounder app I’ve been tinkering on all 2023 and he reminded me that he wrote a great book about entrepreneurship.

To give you context I created an AI co-founder in early 2023 and created a venture called Moonshot Ventures. It was going to be a new kind of platform for founders to learn from AI as well as an AI-powered VC Associate to help VCs do their first and second-level filtering with AI and more easily match the ideas they want to invest in. Moonshot Ventures turned into Founder Station and I built a new launchpad for founders and started to build an AI co-founder for first-time founders. I created Founder Station as a new playground to unearth what to work on next - this is a habit of mine. It’s painful to be in the “in-between” as a founder and the way out [for me and many others] is usually to build. And build I did.

So, naturally, I suggested that we use his book as a data source on top of an LLM (large language model) and he said unequivocally no to that idea.

I wanted to read Jim’s book but it sounded super dense. I’ll come back to why that’s an issue because all I could think about was that I wanted to immerse myself in Jim’s book and learn from his knowledge and experiences. Still, as someone with a very busy brain who never read a single book during college, I needed a way to “talk to his book”. Yes, turns out I have ADHD. A long story of discovery for another time.

And then it hit me.

At that moment I thought, why can’t I talk to my books?

Then of course I tweeted this.

And the feedback was positive.

One of my replies was from a smart peer and startup friend, Matt.

And, boy, was Matt right.

I would first coin and build an application prototype called BookBuddy. BookBuddy allowed me to upload some of my favorite classics and chat with them. This gave me an insight that if I can chat with my books, I could fully immerse in more than only chat and include voice and audio.

This was January 2024. And so we built an exciting BookBuddy prototype in weeks.

BookBuddy UI

That wild idea and application would get me into Techstars Boulder in February which kicked off in March 2024.

It’s a few weeks now since the Techstars Boulder Demo Day and writing this story in reverse is mindblowing and fun. Those 3 months from March to June flew by like lightning.

About two weeks into the Techstars Boulder program it dawned on me that BookBuddy was small but mighty and my idea was big, much bigger. And so I came up with Knolly - from the word knowledge and the evolution was an AI-powered second brain where you get immersed into your favorite content, take notes, create new content from those notes, and eventually publish that - all with Knolly. A powerful flywheel for content creators, authors, students, lifelong learners, and even knowledge workers who face a large amount of content daily and weekly to be accelerated by something like Knolly to learn faster, get smarter, create incredible new ideas, and publish them to make money.

So, I made a pivot from BookBuddy to Knolly and we built an entirely new product during the program to launch on Demo Day.

And that we did. It was not easy. It was difficult. We moved at lightning speed. And I love that I can reflect on that intensely hard work with admiration and gratitude from a small and mighty team of people who busted their asses to help me achieve this milestone.

So, when I stepped on stage - like I said I would - on June 6, 2024 at 6:30PM (ish) in Boulder Colorado at the infamous Boulder Theater for the final ever Techstars Boulder Demo Day, as promised, I announced the launch of the Knolly Playground. A first taster and demo of the Knolly learning canvas and content creation experience and it was magical.

Here is my Demo Day pitch video, please enjoy it.

Today, as I sit here and write this we are building the features for private Alpha where I’ll be inviting 200 founding members to Knolly Private Alpha where you can kick off your private library creation, daily digital notetaking, and the world’s information at your fingertips to generate new insights from your books and create new content from all that you save in your Knolly second brain.

You can try the Knolly Playground right now by visiting knolly.ai

Knolly Playground and updated UI

Select a book, chat with it, save a note or 20, turn those notes into new insights or a blog post draft, a study guide, a newsletter draft, a book proposal, or anything under the sun and accelerate your daily or weekly content creation. And this is a tiny sliver of the Knolly experience.

By Beta, which is scheduled to launch by late Fall 2024 you will have your second brain where you learn faster, remember more, new daily insights from your content to accelerate how fast you learn and remember what you’re exploring, and the ability to create and publish your insights, notes and even whole books to your public Knolly profile for free or for a fee to your followers - which we’re going to help with by cross-promoting published content to members that are exploring similar insights and knowledge on Knolly.

I invite you to our waitlist here, and to play with the Knolly Playground. I would love your feedback! If you’re an author and would love to see your book on the Knolly Playground as a companion to reading your book please let me know.

I write a frequent update to our Knolly waitlist and Playground members, so be sure to sign up here and stay in the loop, and don’t miss the invitation to become a founding member very soon.

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New Music

There’s one universal language I know we all speak and it’s music.

Found this little jam the other day and it’s such a nice vibe. It’s called Self by Cleo Sol. Enjoy.

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Thanks for reading.

As always — Keep Climbing.

Until next time,

Lizelle van Vuuren

Knolly | Twitter/ X | Linkedin | Instagram | Personal Website

ps. I created a new “what I’m working on now” page. I’ll keep it updated monthly and I suggest you do the same. It’s a fun way to easily point to what you’re working on now.