One of my favorite projects from my summer apprenticeship with Steve Schlafman has been the High Output Founders' Library, which blew up on Twitter last week. This was a project I led to help founders, operators, and other builders and makers find the most relevant, high-signal information and advice that'll enable them to achieve their wildest dreams and build excellent companies.

https://twitter.com/schlaf/status/1286642805037764608?s=20

Over the past few months, I've had the incredible opportunity to work with Steve Schlafman on spinning up his new leadership development company, High Output. This apprenticeship, that I amazingly found on Twitter, has been one of the most rewarding and inspiring professional and personal experiences I've had in my short career. Riding shotgun with Schlaf and helping out with evaluating pitches and all the aspects of starting a new company centered around serving founders has been extremely formative in developing my perspectives and approach to the startup ecosystem.

The project is essentially a Notion page that organizes a bunch of guides, articles, and essays from across the Internet into categories. "Okay, what's the big deal? It's a Notion page..." I hear you! But if you really think it's just a Notion page, I challenge you to go make another Library 😉. The power of no-code/low-code tools is vastly underestimated for their power to enable anyone within an organization to create powerful tools, but that's a conversation for another day.

Over the past week or so, the Library has gotten significant traction on Twitter and a bunch of people have asked me how I made it or wanted to talk about the process; this article will do just that.

We'll go through:

• The Notion architecture of the Library
• A brief outline of the homepage and individual article pages, and considerations made during that process (and how it evolved over time)
• How one would go about adding a new piece and maintaining the Library
• Future plans and vision for the library

As a primer, here are the tools I used to build the Library:

• Notion (duh)
  • Databases, relations, rollups, database templates (for content pages), @-mentions for listing pages, linked databases (for the Top Picks sections), in-page hyperlinks (for navigation), Web Clipper (for top-of-funnel and processing)
• Google Chrome
  • This chrome extension was a lifesaver for outlining and annotating articles. It basically allows you to highlight any text on a page and generate a hyperlink directly to that section! It's not perfect though; sometimes you have to hack around with how much text you have to highlight to get a unique link.
• Sources
  • Schlaf was the key asset here! His two decades of experience made it a lot easier to find and filter for high quality content, which we sourced from and link out to:
  • VC firms' blogs
  • Company newsrooms
  • Founders' and investors personal websites
  • Substack newsletters
  • Journals like HBR
  • This library wouldn't have been possible without all the amazing work done by the operators, founders, investors, and friends of the ecosystem that contributed to the pieces featured as part of the Library. Thank you so much!

I hope that this little piece of documentation will serve to help anyone who's looking to create public facing resources in Notion, especially the intern who will be working on the Library over the next few months! Definitely shoot me a DM if you're interested in that role :) Let's get down to it.

Notion Architecture

As a no-code tool that's basically infinitely flexible, architectural choices probably aren't the first thing that come to mind when you think about slapping together some resources. My background as an engineer came in handy here, though. The choices I made towards the beginning of the process saved me a bunch of time in not having to reorganize all the pieces as the library scaled to over 300 pieces.

There are a few databases that support the Library— I decided to put them in databases because DBs unlock a lot of Notion's power with relationships and rollups!

: This is where all the pieces of the library live. When adding a new piece to the database, I typically use the Notion Web Clipper to bring the piece into this database. Then, when I'm ready to fully process the piece and add it to the live version of the Library, I batch process articles I've clipped in this 'inbox' view, where I fill out the rest of the content for a piece.