THE THING WE BUILT:

Notion to Book

This newsletter series has surfaced a handful of hard-earned lessons about AI and product development. We believed in them enough to turn the work into a book.

It’s called Just Enough AI. We’d love for you to give it a look.

While this newsletter edition is absolutely being used to shill the book, We Built a Thing is what got us here. We built. We learned. We shared what we could along the way.

Eventually, our gut said these newsletters might make a good book. But long before we could create a book, or even upload them to the LinkedIn servers, the text lived elsewhere. In Notion. In Markdown files.

Which was a good start.

But then we remembered that books require formatting.

And pagination.

And proper typography.

And page numbers.

And chapter breaks.

And all the things that make a document feel like an actual book instead of a really long Google Doc.

Traditional page layout tools are complex and time-consuming. Most markdown-to-PDF converters give you a document, not a book. They miss the subtle art of making text flow across pages like it belongs in your hands.

We wanted to turn this into a real, print-ready book. But we didn’t want to spend weeks wrestling with layout software.

So we built a thing.

After you see how we did it, download a copy of the book here

How It Works

1. Write your content in Markdown (ideally, the same format you’re already using for documentation, notes, or newsletters). In case you didn't know, Notion naturally writes in Markdown.

2. Add a few simple styles and tags that define where chapter breaks happen, where images go, and the size of your book.

3. Run a single script that converts everything to print-ready HTML. The script automatically handles chapter detection, page breaks, typography, etc.

4. Open the generated HTML in your browser and export to PDF using the print dialog.

5. 💫 Voila! A properly paginated (in this case, 5×8 inch) book ready for printing or digital distribution.

No page layout software required. No manual formatting. Just Markdown and a script.

Notes from Building

Markdown is the perfect authoring format. We write everything in Markdown anyway: documentation, communication, newsletters, etc. With this tool in our toolkit, we could focus on content, not formatting. The text itself provides the structure. Way better than clicking a Word dropdown to mark something as Header 1, Header 2, etc.

Typography matters. This is a book, after all. I’ve designed a lot of books in my life (perhaps surprising, but very real). It’s not lost on me the time and effort that goes into getting a book ready for print. So when it came time to get this book from Notion to print-ready, a wave of panic washed over me. The hours of line edits, ragging… it all flashed back. There had to be a better way. Obviously, this tool can’t do everything a great book designer can, but I picked a few battles and tried to do them well enough:

• Page numbering

• Proper page breaks

• Preventing as many widows and orphans  as possible

Keep it simple. (And also: I’ll never generate a PDF if I don’t have to.) This tool is basically a Javascript file that reads Markdown files and converts them. It's output is HTML, not a PDF. We only need to reinvent one of the wheels here. The browser handles the final PDF export with “File->Print-> Save as PDF.” One less thing to build.

So I’m going to send this PDF off to print. In the meantime…

We’d love to give you a digital copy of the book

Read it. Skim it. Tell us we got it all wrong. Tell us we’re geniuses.

Our honest hope is that it gives practical, tactical, in-the-weeds learnings and recommendations for how to build with AI. It’s a snapshot of what we learned in 2025, a pivotal year for AI. Will it still be right at the end of ’26? Maybe. Hopefully. Read it and let us know 🙂

Click here to get a digital version.

And if you sign up, we’ll let you know when the print edition is ready.

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