957 - How AI Can Revolutionize Book Recommendations W/ John Busch (Iliad)

John Busch (00:01.016)
They're fantastic. Cold Opens are hot. They're great.

Mat Sherman (00:03.821)
They are but the thing is I think before all in I would never consider doing that on my podcast But now because they do it. I'm just like this is hilarious I think I'm never gonna do an unofficial open ever again in the the history in the future of my like podcasting life

John Busch (00:16.056)
It's.

John Busch (00:19.426)
Yeah, I mean, they're supernatural. mean, people love podcasts because they're like conversations and, you know, conversations don't have, you know, formal intros to them typically in the first place. So here we go.

Mat Sherman (00:31.322)
Yeah, 100%. I was just doing a coffee meeting with someone and like it'd be funny if it's like, like this is my name. This is what I do for a living. Why don't you tell me what your name is and what you do for a living? Then we can commence the conversation. Kind of awkward, right? Well, well, let's get started here. So how is it going everyone? Welcome back to Forward Thinking Founders. We are chatting today with John Bush, who is the founder of Iliad. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

John Busch (00:43.414)
Right, exactly, yeah.

John Busch (01:00.396)
I'm doing great. I'm glad to be here.

Mat Sherman (01:03.266)
Yeah, excited to have you on. We had a chat, I feel like late last year. I feel like it was right before holiday break and it was super interesting stuff that you were up to. And you're like, hey, let's see, know, we wanted to catch up. And I'm like, why not do it on the podcast, right? Where people can learn about what you're doing and get insight into the brilliance of Iliad. So excited to be doing this. I think to start, start with what is Iliad? What are you working on?

John Busch (01:25.56)
Yeah, perfect.

Mat Sherman (01:32.781)
Maybe on a high level we can obviously dive into various aspects of it, but for people that are not familiar, which is probably a lot of people at this point, not forever though, what are you working on? What is ILLIA?

John Busch (01:42.53)
Yeah, great question. So I believe books are one of the most important technologies in our history, and I want more people to find their life-changing book. so Iliad is a book discovery platform powered by AI and a good old sense of word of mouth to help readers and then also authors to help their books get product market fit. And so we've...

We are first starting out as a mobile app. live in the app stores. We're growing and the vision is to ultimately target the larger publishing industry.

Mat Sherman (02:20.816)
So I feel like I have a few different relationships with books. Sometimes I buy books and I intend to read them and I get a chapter or two in and then I don't finish them. Sometimes I get a book and I finish it all like same day. Sometimes I get a book to like study. Like right now I'm studying for the series 65 so I can become an accredited investor. That book is super fat but very knowledgeable. But my question for you is like...

John Busch (02:27.128)
Awesome.

Mat Sherman (02:49.089)
Where does this fit in or I guess in other words is this kind of like a good reads type thing or how would you kind of compare yourself to good reads or category similar

John Busch (02:57.73)
Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a good question. The whole concept came out of my frustration as a user of Goodreads during the pandemic. really got really got into reading again and I just went on an absolute tear of just awesome books from great writers and eventually I just had the need for like I need to track my books. I need to find book recommendations. I want to talk about them with my friends and hear others thoughts. And then

You know, I just asked myself, like, there's gotta be, you know, some, some product that already does this already stumbled upon Goodreads and saw that Amazon had acquired them for 150 million over a decade ago. And surprisingly, yeah, fun fact.

Mat Sherman (03:41.965)
I, honest to God, did not know that. I did not realize that Amazon owned Goodreads and they acquired them for 150 million. Wow, good to know.

John Busch (03:50.508)
Yes, yes, yes, fun fact. Amazon has a lot of tentacles in the book space, as we all know. But anyways, I have never found anybody that is a current Goodreads user and loves Goodreads. And pretty much everybody I've met says like, yeah, it's pretty much the only thing available to track my books and I don't trust the recommendations, it's full of bots.

Nobody knows what like 4.4 stars means. Is that good? Is that, that just somebody's opinion? And most of people just trust word of mouth from people they know, like their friends, their family, podcast hosts, influencers online of what books to read next. And so this is something that I, I really, found that, you know, Spotify, for example, you know, it's pretty good for me for discovering new music. but

is a much more expensive problem. And people probably don't think of it like that, but if you don't like a song on Spotify, you just skip next and it costs you 30 seconds of your time. There's no money lost there. But committing to a book and reading a book, to your point, you don't finish every book that you read. Sometimes you buy multiples, sometimes you reread a book multiple times. And the cost of not...

reading a great book is, you the opportunity cost is significant, right? I mean, some books like literally change people's lives, whether it's the information, the ideas, or even the stories, right? And, you know, some people who are huge Lord of the Rings fans, for example, have reread those books dozens of times. And we know how many legendary, you know, Silicon Valley companies are named after the Lord of the Rings characters. So.

Anyways, I see this as something that like if we can make it easier, reduce the friction and helping people get and collect and share book recommendations, then people would be more likely to read more books and discover more life-changing books. And this is that specific problem. The recommendations piece is something that Goodreads never solved.

John Busch (05:56.928)
And so we're starting with simple book tracking, of course. Those are some of the easy, hanging fruit stuff. But the more nuanced problems are the actual, how do we help people discover book recommendations? So that's really where we want to differentiate ourselves and then ultimately grow this out to support authors as well.

Mat Sherman (06:20.403)
I have a bunch more questions about the product and how you kind of use AI, but I do need to see if we're on the same page on something. There's two companies that I can think of in Silicon Valley that are named after Lord of the Rings characters or items. Do you know of more than two? Because I would love to know if there is more than two.

John Busch (06:22.805)
Awesome.

John Busch (06:38.314)
Yeah, you know what? Okay. So obviously Palantir, Andriil, and then I was talking with, I'm sorry, I...

Mat Sherman (06:43.935)
Wait, Palantir? What is Palantir to Lord of the Rings? I'm not even kidding. What is Palantir?

John Busch (06:47.918)
Palantir. No, great. Great question. Palantir is the all seeing orb that Saruman was looking into. so basically Palantir, company is supposed to be the all seeing big data company. And so that's largely why they named it as such.

Mat Sherman (06:56.573)
that's Palantir? Yeah. that's hilarious.

Mat Sherman (07:09.363)
rate.

Well, I'd learned, okay, so there's those two. There's one that just started that I'm gonna hold onto and then one I'm curious if you know about it. What else other than Palantir and Andoril? Are those the two that you know of?

John Busch (07:23.266)
So the third one, I just heard of it like very recently and I heard it was, it's one of Joe Lonzell's new companies. Maybe are we thinking about the same one? It's like a.

Mat Sherman (07:36.682)
Does it have to do with security?

John Busch (07:39.552)
It does. Man, I should remember this. I can't remember what it does.

Mat Sherman (07:42.23)
I actually think they're two separate companies. think so I'm talking the one that I'm thinking of. I generally may or may not be involved. It's Sauron. Is that what you're thinking of?

John Busch (07:49.886)
No, okay, wow. Somebody named their company Sauron. Wow, that's.

Mat Sherman (07:53.622)
The founder, the co-founder of Eventbrite started to create a company called Saron. Just guess, guess what it does. Just like, if you have to guess. Because it's not dissimilar from like, yeah, what does it do?

John Busch (08:03.79)
I bet is it a it a vamp right for orcs?

Mat Sherman (08:09.526)
No, it is a security system for your house. But like super intense and it's like your every house will have the eye of Sauron watching it, which I think is pretty awesome.

John Busch (08:23.63)
That's hysterical. Okay, well they're gonna have really strong product market fit with Tolkien fans and let's see how they do.

Mat Sherman (08:31.307)
No, 100%. What's the Jill Lonsdale one? Do you not remember the name?

John Busch (08:34.542)
You know, I was listening to a podcast last month when he was talking about, I think it was like a drone EMP defense company that I honestly can't think of the name right now. yeah, so that was the. could. No, it's all right. I can't think of it.

Mat Sherman (08:48.831)
I'm gonna... Yeah, sorry, sorry, cut you off.

Mat Sherman (08:55.721)
Is it, yeah, all I'm seeing is Palantir. I can't believe Palantir was the Lord of the Rings. I'm such an idiot.

John Busch (09:05.742)
That's a pretty well-known one.

Mat Sherman (09:09.186)
I had no idea. I really didn't. I knew that Andoril, I'm aware of that. And I think Sauron as well, that's like a well-known character or you could say, or thing in Lord of the Rings. yeah, Palantir, yeah. Anyways, going back to Iliad, how'd you, I guess like, so let's go into a little history then more into like the features. I feel like your name is pretty epic. How'd you pick?

John Busch (09:21.123)
Mm-hmm.

John Busch (09:27.427)
Mm-hmm.

Mat Sherman (09:38.234)
the name for your company. How'd you land on that?

John Busch (09:39.842)
You know, it's funny you ask that. It's actually the sixth name of the company. And we finally stumbled upon this because first we were thinking about like, is there a book or an author that we can name the company after? And we had some fiction candidates. I won't reveal which ones those were. We had some non-fiction ones. And then Iliad popped.

And I had this internal debate with myself, like, is Iliad fiction or is it nonfiction? And then there's actually a lot of... It's actually kind of a perfect blend because it's kind of like historical fiction where the Greek gods are part of Greek mythology and that part's fiction. But then it was based off of the battle of...

Troy and the Trojan War and the city of Troy was a real place and it did allegedly take place in historical Greece. They're not sure exactly what year it even took place, which is also part of the fun mythology of Iliad. It either took place in 1200 BC or up to 800 or 700 BC. And then the Iliad is also the oldest book from Europe. I mean, is arguably the foundation of Western

civilization. mean, it's older than the Bible. It's older than pretty much any other, you know, freestanding country. And it has, there's so much of today's culture and civilization and our traditions and ideas and stories and characters that come from the Iliad. And when Homer, wrote, allegedly wrote the Iliad, I mean, he was, he's also,

Legend in himself. I mean he was a true genius. I mean he was Thought to be to be a blind poet like literally could not See but somehow and like he had apparently like an apprentice that just wrote these wrote this down for him But he memorized the entire Epic poem of the Iliad and he had memorized every word and it all rhymes, of course, right and so for for somebody to

John Busch (11:57.166)
memorize the story. This was something, this was a story that was passed down for hundreds of years. And so to me, that's just, you know, what better homage, homage could we give a book company than to like the original book from Europe. And so that's where the name came from.

Mat Sherman (12:18.364)
That is very thoughtful. I like that story. So you mentioned when you were describing Iliad that you used AI. think everyone uses AI in 2025. I was actually a little late to the bandwagon. I guess we're all early, but I thought it was less useful than it ended up being. And when I started to dive into using it and like including it in Zapier and whatnot, it's truly wild. So, so.

John Busch (12:46.51)
Hmm.

Mat Sherman (12:47.724)
how do you use AI and like how do you use it more importantly how to use AI to make a better experience for your readers or your customers or your users whatever you kind of call them how do you implement that into the flow?

John Busch (12:59.104)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's good question. So we've been we've been talking about like what are the like truly valuable ways that we can Incorporate AI now and then what can we do in the future? I think in the future the potential for like a true like a GI or ASI Combined with books would be absolutely significant. I mean we could really have the concept for reading

books has basically been you open the book and then you read the ink on the pages and then, know, audio books is, you know, they're read to you and you listen to them with your headphones. But then I think like in 10, 20 years, like you could maybe definitely actually fashion them that. I think the.

You could probably change the concept of a book of you actually can talk with the author. You can actually like ask questions to the author, like talk to the book. And so that's also one of the things I think could be like really, you know, game changing like in the future. That grand vision is something that I don't want to rush and I don't want to implement before.

It's a very high quality experience. the very first thing that we're just starting with for now is we're just helping with, with basically just data crunching and predicting. And so as you read more books and write more books, review them on Iliad, then we'll know more information about what you have read, what you like, what you don't like and why.

And then we just identify other similar books to you that that you we think you would like. And then we tell you why we think you would enjoy this book. And it's and we presented in an awesome kind of a funny format. looks like Tinder, honestly, like Tinder for books. And so you can just swipe last swipe right on a book and.

John Busch (14:49.39)
We'll slowly start incorporating more forms of social proof in there to say like, here's another book recommendation for you. And by the your friend on Elliot, Matt Sherman also read this book. He recommends it. And so that element is very important because one of the things that I think AI is terrible at is at least the perception that it can't be trusted as much as a human. I do think that perception of AI will change over the years.

But currently there is definitely that perception anybody who doesn't believe so is kidding themselves. And so one of things to help with improving trust in AI is just with social proof of actual human beings. And so if we can include just like, here's your friends that recommend this book and you like your brother's recommendations, therefore we think you'll like this one. Like that is a very simple way to like make it easier to help reduce the time and options for you to find your next book.

Mat Sherman (15:47.68)
That makes sense. I like that a lot. And I think you don't need to build out like all the so much tech that you would have had to build out like 10 years ago, which I think is an opportunity for sure. So like, so today, if I like walk, you know, treat me kind of like I just heard about this for the first time and I like want to try it, like walk me through what, can I do today? Is there an app? Is it a web app? Like does it, you know, walk me through just like, yeah, you're showing it right there. So, so let's see, let's see how it works.

John Busch (15:53.432)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Busch (16:06.958)
Mhm.

John Busch (16:11.168)
Yeah, exactly. this is yeah. So mean listeners might not be able to see this but the first thing you'll see is like you get your own like digital bookshelf and so

Mat Sherman (16:19.52)
And just so people know that can't see, it quite literally looks like a bookshelf. Like there's literal, like you can see the sides of books and they have different colors and sizes. It's actually pretty cool.

John Busch (16:28.8)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And the whole concept with that at first was simply, and you can even see behind me here, I have this bookshelf behind me where whenever I have friends or family come over to our house and they walk by the bookshelf, almost always people walk up to it and they start asking me about the books and it's a conversation starter. And frankly, I enjoy that conversation every time. And so...

The first thing is to just give people the ability to build out a collection of their favorite books and their top recommendations that they're constantly going back to and recommending to other people. And then the concept is that like,

People could then go check out what's in Matt's bookshelf, what's in Joe's bookshelf, what's he reading, what are his top three books right now. And so you can add your books, you can rate them. We've completely killed the five-star rating system. I could probably write a thesis about why that's a bad rating system for books. I think it's good for a lot of other CPG products. I don't think it's good for books. So like a three out of 10 on our system is not my cup of tea.

Six out of ten is worth a read. Nine out of ten is a read. Ten is a classic. So we've changed the rating system. You can add your reviews. And then you can go see your friends' and their bookshelves. You can follow them, see what they're reading. And then you can go if, because so many people get their recommendations from people they know, their friends, their family members, you can just go to their bookshelves, their collections, and then you can read their reviews and you can then save it to your profile.

And then they'll get notification saying, John just saved one of your book recommendations. John just read, started reading, and John just finished that book recommendation. And then this will turn into an activity feed of all the reviews from yourself and your friends, your family, for yourself to share and then for others to share their recommendations.

John Busch (18:31.01)
further have discussion and comments about the book. And so that's kind of the initial recommendation collecting and then sharing. And then we also have our kind of Tinder for Books AI feature, which is live now.

Mat Sherman (18:47.075)
Do I need to have read books to try out the Tinder for AI? It's kind of download the app and actually just swipe left and swipe right now.

John Busch (18:52.78)
You do not. You do not. Technically, yeah, we did. We had this debate of like, well, should we require that they add 10 books first? But for now, for V1, don't have to add any books.

Mat Sherman (19:09.892)
So, appreciate you sharing all that. So let's kind of walk through the journey that led you here. Have you...

Obviously this is built, you know, because you just showed me, you know, it on your phone, which means like I'm making the assumption that you raised money. And I think from our conversation, you know, you have raised some, walk me through like, what's it like raising for an AI startup or like, what's it like raising for a startup in 2024, 2025? Like what has been your, you know, kind of experience of what you're willing to share, of course, but what's it been like for you?

John Busch (19:44.737)
Yeah, yeah. So I got, I feel like I got punched in the mouth the first time I started even trying to fundraise where I thought, and I worked at VC Backstardust before I was the VP and GM for a PE backed B2B SaaS company here in Chicago called Buildout. And I thought that I could.

come out with my plan, with the team, with the size of the opportunity, and show people like, here's how this is gonna be a massive business, and like, would you like to invest? And man, I really underestimated like, just how hard it was to even like, get meetings. And then I realized like, know, investors have a very, putting myself in their shoes, they just have so many people reaching out to them, like all the time.

that cold outreach is really, really difficult and warm intros are pretty much the best way to go. It takes a longer time and that's probably not the best, most efficient use of everyone's time in the market. And I know you know this, obviously. But once I started to get those warm intros and actually getting people in a room, was a much better conversation.

Constantly I'm trying to show like how I'm de-risking this investment for them. Cause it's just, it's just filled with risk because obviously they can go invest in SP 500. They could go invest in real estate. Um, and so as I'm showing them.

I think one of the big things for investors is to show them like, here's how I thought about marketing. Here's how I thought about the team. Here's how I thought about products, brand differentiation, AI, monetization, the business model. then as you get momentum, honestly in any form of momentum, turn that into more momentum. I feel like that's the alchemy of being a startup founder. So that's been the biggest,

John Busch (21:51.33)
the biggest piece of advice for myself, but we've raised 350K to date, mostly from angels and friends, family rounds. And then we just got our first VC check last month. And so we've got some more momentum now and kicking it off to bring in some more.

Mat Sherman (22:12.051)
Congrats on raising some money. That's exciting. Every founder that has done it knows how hard it is to do because they've gone through that slog in the beginning. You mentioned something that I want to double click on. I can't believe I just said that phrase, but here we are. You said something like founders are the best founders. Turn momentum into more momentum. Can you just elaborate on that? Maybe give an example? Because I completely agree. I just want to hear your take on that.

John Busch (22:39.18)
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I, I, I largely think of the role of the founder in many things as to be a storyteller. And if you have, if you have a vision, then, you know, at, at the beginning, it's just simply going to be a vision. It's simply going to be a story. And then at the end, if it's successful, you can talk about the journey you went on and.

In order to get to be able to tell the story in hindsight, you just have to simply get wins on the board. so wins in any form, whether it's, you know, we just picked, we just picked the name for our company. We just mocked up our designs. We've got 500 people on our wait list. Like that's even.

That's even like wins to even like get a call. And then eventually you get like one investor and then they intro you to 10 more. You get a second and then you launch the products and then you get feedback and then your MPS scores at eight and then you increase it to nine. You launch your AI feature. That's getting good feedback. Then you ask for intros. you see investors and you you just have to keep pushing. You have to keep

making the right moves that hopefully can either you can either find out quickly that that's a dead end or there's momentum here. And if you can keep racking those up, it just gets easier and easier to finally make a big ask like I want 10 million dollars from you. But that's something that would that takes years of momentum building to be able to make that ask and to be able to get it.

Mat Sherman (24:18.292)
I love that, it's so true. I wrote a blog post at some point in the last few years called the Shot Multiplication Effect. And the idea is exactly what you just said. It's like, you might get a shot when you're in high school to get a meeting with a mentor in town that's a hot shot. You're like, my god, I made it. And then in college, maybe you get a chance to pitch up your first investor. And you're like, my gosh, this is so cool. And the shots keep coming. You just get used to them as they get bigger and bigger and bigger.

John Busch (24:37.654)
Yeah.

John Busch (24:43.924)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Mat Sherman (24:47.531)
And that's just, that's what happens when you stay on the path and you don't get off.

John Busch (24:51.018)
Exactly, Yeah. So if you keep sticking with it and you keep, you know, finding ways to like, don't, don't get too frustrated if something doesn't work out, you know, you know, there's always new ways to find momentum. I'm confident in that. And as long as you stick it out and you have a cohesive vision and you can tell the story of your momentum, then there's, then you've got something.

Mat Sherman (25:14.604)
Totally. Just a couple more questions for you. I think it's a really good piece of advice, like momentum that gets at momentum. Is there any other advice on any fronts that you would share with maybe a founder listening who's maybe just got an idea for the first time and they want to go down the startup road that you kind of learned through your journeys?

John Busch (25:33.101)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I would say so many, there's so many misconceptions about entrepreneurship and especially like tech startup entrepreneurship. I would say one of the biggest ones is people think that it's all about building a product and product innovation, but business model innovation. And it's like the way that you, and.

I could talk about business model innovation for a while, but business model innovation and the growth innovation are just as important, if not more important, than your product innovation. You can go pretty far with a product that's slightly better if you have vastly superior growth and business model economics. so those things you really have to think through. And I would argue, I mean, you should have...

probably several variations running through your head of how can I monetize this business, how can I grow this business besides the product.

Mat Sherman (26:36.694)
Yeah, if you love to build and you love building things and you only love to build, maybe don't raise money, you know? Like maybe just maybe just bootstrap, that's completely fine. You gotta love other stuff if you're gonna raise money and try to build one of these things.

John Busch (26:46.264)
Totally.

Totally.

Absolutely.

Mat Sherman (26:53.908)
Where can someone kind of engage with Iliad now? Is it an app? If I have an iPhone, can download it in Android? Is it a web app too? How can someone try it out if they're listening to this and they want to give it a shot?

John Busch (27:02.743)
Yeah.

John Busch (27:09.218)
Yeah, so the app is live right now on the app store, both for Apple and Android. It's called the Iliad Books app. And then we've got our website, Iliad.co, which tells you more about the different features we have live and part of our curator network and some of the other fun things that are coming. We're also on Instagram and TikTok and X at Iliad Books. And you can always reach out to me, DM me.

I'm fairly active there at John Bush VI. And yeah, I'm happy to talk with anybody who loves books and wants to help solve this problem of book recommendations.

Mat Sherman (27:47.305)
Love it. And I think for my last question, I'd be remiss to not ask, what's your favorite book? Or maybe a better question to ask is what's a book that comes to mind now when thinking about books that you like or that you've read that you think fondly of? Because I know picking favorites is nearly impossible.

John Busch (28:05.666)
Great. I mean, great question. You had you had to ask it, of course. I mean, the the so two books from last year, I'll pick one fiction, one nonfiction, The Godfather book.

Mat Sherman (28:08.971)
I did have to ask it.

John Busch (28:19.436)
was insane. I loved it. I loved the movies. I even watched the TV show about the offer, which is about the making of the movie. The book was even better than the movie. I didn't think that was possible. Highly recommend that to really anybody. And then in terms of nonfiction, I've been getting into a little bit of philosophy and I read this book called Ask Aristotle's by a friend of mine who runs an independent publishing company.

And it's basically, the concept is hysterical. It's like a modern day conversational introduction to Aristotle. And the main character in the book takes shrooms and starts going down a bad trip and starts freaking out and having a bad trip. And they call their wiser friend for questions on like, what am I doing in my life? I want to live a better life. the book just kind of...

is a conversation through Aristotelian philosophy. And I found it to be just one of the best books I've ever read. And it's only 87 pages long. So that book is Ask Aristotle. Highly recommend it. And then lastly, the book that changed my life and it really made me want to be a founder was Zero to One. So got to give a shout out to that one. It's just it's a classic. It's probably the

philosophy of innovation book and just that just I've read it more times I can count. It's incredible.

Mat Sherman (29:48.816)
It's a great book. Peter Thiel is always a step ahead, maybe 10 steps ahead. And it shows just based on his results. And when he talks, he's always, he's just easily, if I ever got a chance to like shake that guy's hand or like have a conversation with him, I would take that in a heartbeat over probably any other investor on the planet.

John Busch (29:54.253)
Mm-hmm.

Mat Sherman (30:08.274)
That'll be my last question and then we'll wrap it up. If you could sit down with one investor, maybe living or dead, why not? But they have to be like a startup investor type person. So this chat not pitch, like let's say they won't invest in your startup. So that dynamic is off the table just like to learn from. Who would you sit down with and maybe why?

John Busch (30:08.492)
Agreed.

John Busch (30:12.343)
Mm-hmm.

John Busch (30:28.75)
Peter Thiel would be at the top. Naval would be near the top. And then I'll pick someone that's probably less well known. Nick Konis, who is the co-founder of...

Mat Sherman (30:31.537)
Yep.

John Busch (30:44.854)
Alinea group, the restaurant group out in Chicago. And then he was a he was an options trader before that. And then he was the founder of Talk. They were like a Yelp competitor. He sold that to Squarespace. Nick is just a very well-spoken, well-read individual who is one of like secretly like one of the best business people in

in the game today and I find him to be incredibly insightful. So those three would be near the top.

Mat Sherman (31:20.171)
Thanks for sharing and we will end it with that. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

John Busch (31:25.006)
Thank you.