> Do you want to build a profitable business or do you want to theorize how to build one?
I was part of a startup with an inexperienced angel who insisted on bringing in a CEO. The CEO made a good pitch to me that we would adopt the lean startup model, so I went along with it.
Anyway the moment he started, the book went out the door. We didn’t have time to discuss things like strategy and market positioning and hypotheses (though he used the word at every opportunity) but we had plenty of time to have risk assessment meetings and road maps and CRM system integrations (zero customers mind you), monthly 3 hour board meetings and weekly 2 hour “senior executive meetings”. The board and executive was larger than our headcount. I had brought an experienced team into the business with me and they were just flown into the ground with this inanity. (It turns out that despite what I’d been told, CEO had only ever been in corporate settings and had basically no experience with starting a business).
Anyway the outcome was as expected. I’ve been in startups my whole professional life and this was easily the worst experience of career.
The moral of this story is that building a business is hard and none of the books are going to tell you how to do it. So I agree with the parent comment. Pick a couple of books, read them, and get going. If things don’t work out, read a couple more.
But for God’s sake, keep your eye on the prize - have a clear vision, execute an early version of it, find some customers, iterate.
I used to read these types of books (including the most popular of the bunch listed here) years ago. I had this idea that if I just kept reading this stuff, I would eventually just "get it". (I never did. I "got it" much faster by reading individual comments from select people, and trying things out by myself)
The thing is, it seems to me that many of these books are just extremely information-sparse. Very very lengthened ways of making a small set of points. And because of that, I don't particularly remember the lessons learned from the lot.
200 pages to tell you to talk to your customers? 300 pages to explain that you should focus on your core business and not get sidetracked?
Here's a challenge to those who have read books in that list. Pick one you've found useful, and tell me how it changed you. Then look at your comment and decide whether the book could have just made that same point in that many words.
Ive read most of these books over my career. There is absolutely a plateau of learning.
I find the value in continuing to read these books is offering a new perspective (or at least new wording) on a topic I’ve lost touch with over time.
For example, I don’t really get much out of re-reading “the lean startup “. I know the core principles by heart. I do however tend to forget them over time. They get lost in the noise of my day to day. However, simply re-reading the same book doesn’t bring them back sharply. I find, instead, that reading a similar book helps bring back the vividness.
Oh cheers! I read The Lean Startup and due to my leaky memory I remember nothing! But it's as you say: 200 pages to tell "iterate more often on product updates". Hell yeah.
I am perfectly content with my current learning strategy, it got me this far in life. However I'm open to new things, and I enjoy reading people's open opinions first. Even if I were to try it myself, I may have a different experience depending on my expectations of it.
> The thing is, it seems to me that many of these books are just extremely information-sparse
I too have most of these books on a shelf. I’ve found most of them can be skimmed and if they have descriptive chapter naming , just skimming the TOC is enough to get the gist. They rarely go into much detail on execution and generally just talk about a couple business cases as examples of the topic in action. But these usually don’t help on your specific business other than making you aware of the topic. If you’re already interested in business and know some of the lingo these are mostly useless. There’s a lot of blogs and content online I’ve read over the years that is significantly more helpful but I could see how given the state of blogs and content how this could be useful for someone young and/or relatively new to business in general.
I've only read some of these books, but the ones I've read had 20 or 30 points or pieces of advice that took a few pages each. One of them would put just a few sentences on each page. If it takes you a long time to read the sentences that expand or illustrate the idea, learn to skim.
If you get stuck in some parts such as Market Validation, then picking up the recommended book will be useful. It's easier to learn after failing.
I used to take months thinking about idea, market validation, half-decent codebase. Nowadays it's more of build in a day and try the best marketing channels according to the product. Then onto the next one. Improved "Turn Around Time" really helps in increasing number of iterations.
If it's loved(tolerated) in its worst possible self, then it has a chance.
What would help me is a guide for all the non-core product considerations - legal compliance (gdpr, insurance, etc), and then non-core stuff like how to best implement costings (maybe $99 price tag sells >1% better than $100, etc). I’m not really sure where to look for this kinda stuff, maybe these books?
Legal compliance is something you want to hire a professional service for. It changes too much. They can educate you on the risks of your specific field.
Pricing is a massive question with infinite possibilities. It usually needs to be tested, continuously. Or just locked in and changed on a regular cadence. A lot of it is going to do with you users and the value your product adds, or how that value is perceived. No book is going to answer this for you, just give you ideas of things to think about. Half of which will likely be N/A to your business.
Ignore ideas, notice problems. If you focus on that, profitable startup ideas will come from noticing small, repeatable annoyances.
Cool ideas are the bane of startups. What you need are problems that lack sufficient solutions. Sometimes a solution does exist but not for certain groups or only at certain budget levels - that's a startup! Flow like water to fill gaps in the market.
Try to do any task on a computer and you'll find 95% of existing things suck and can be improved. You can sell these improvements. Don't worry about competition, that just means your idea has been validated. Make stuff you want to use yourself, that way even if you fail to sell to others, you're not at a complete loss. Plus you do not need to repeatedly iterate with a customer if you are the customer.
This is where some acknowledgement of the fact a lot of low hanging fruit has been eaten at this point is in order. I feel like more game changing products of this decade are not going to be Uber for X type apps but more original creations.
You might have ideas, but don't write them down because you don't think they're profound enough (yet). In that case, I'd suggest to track those ideas in an app or book. This gives you something to play with and reflect on, find patterns.
If you actually have few ideas. then that is also fine. Why do you think you need ideas? You can think about or work on other people's ideas.
The Mom Test, mentioned in the post, have a good templates on how to do research on problems your potential clients might have. First 3 chapters are good to read because they explain what should be focued on and what's artificial.
My first thought was '20 books on starting a profitable SaaS business that were all actually written by ChatGPT'.
I'm guessing if the 20 books are actually written by people in all seriousness and the belief that they understood and cared about the subject, they're probably still going to be better than what we'll have in ten years, which is 200 books all of which are echoing voids of ChatGPT.
It'll be a lot cheaper to produce such books and put them into the marketplace if you don't actually have to write, learn, or know anything: so much cheaper that it'll become untenable to write 'real' books.
Which mostly means 'marketplace' will stop meaning anything. Knowledge will still mean something but we'll have to arrive at it and disseminate it in different ways that don't resemble the commercial marketplace, as that will not stand up against the cheapness of AI labor.
I read a lot of startup books. The value is spending time in these books to really internalize them.
Summarization tools have existed for a while. They don’t take off because they can solve the core problem of deep learning. It takes time to reshape how you think. Reading some summaries won’t do that.
The one book I’ve “quizzed” GPT4 on, it gave sufficiently good answers to convince someone they understood the book but actually missed almost everything salient about it.
Not super relevant but this was Henry George’s Progress & Poverty, so a pretty well-known book with fairly detailed arguments.
Let's say I want to know better about X. You can submit these prompt to chat GPT.
- Can you explain me X in simple terms?
- Explain me different between the items 1 and 2 in your response and provide example?
- Could you show this in a tabular form? or tree from using markdown
with chatGPT you have access to elaborate knowledge in the most suibitable way for you. You can learn faster. If you prefer an information in a tabular form, you can do it. You can ask differences between concepts and get examples.
In a book you can only learn something written by the author.
Do you want to build a profitable business or do you want to theorize how to build one?