Name: The Startup Owners Manual
ISBN: 9780984999309

The Startup Owners Manual

"The Startup Owner's Manual is what it says: a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to getting startups right. It walks entrepreneurs through the customer development process that gets them out of the building, where customers live, to develop winning products customers will buy"-- "More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups. The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it's taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why? 'The Startup Owner's Manual' guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, acknowledged catalyst of the 'Lean Startup' movement, and tested and refined by him for more than a decade"

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muzaniSep 2024

The startup playbook. All the basics: https://playbook.samaltman.com/

The Startup Owner's Manual: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/09...

Nobody seems to recommend this because nobody has finished reading it, but it's meant to be acted on, not finished. There are literally checklists. It's also hard to get a soft copy, but th soft copies are useful for printing out the checklists. Paul Graham has changed the definition of a startup, but I still love the one from here - the goal of a startup is to have a scalable and repeatable business model.

Startup=Growth, by Paul Graham https://paulgraham.com/growth.html

I'd recommend the whole site, and many do. But start here. Many don't understand that startups are about growing assets, not revenue. And exponential is a funny word for "very slow". If you wanted to grow to a million dollars, do anything but a startup and don't raise VC money. But this shows how the math works.

High Growth Handbook: https://growth.eladgil.com/

And this is what you read after you get past 10 employees. Who to hire next, how to manage. There are tons of people who talk about how to get Product Market Fit, but few who talk about how to build an engine to turn PMF to money. There's tons of podcasts but consider this book a collection of the best ones.

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WheelsAtLargeJun 2023

You won't unless you have the money to hire one. Most experienced or want-to-be CEOs will want to be paid very well in addition to getting a big chunk of the company. What you need to do now is look for investors so you can build out a skeleton upper management rung, as needed, and get some employees.

The product is just the start. Now you have to build a company around the product. You'll need to get someone to increase demand thru marketing, someone to manage production and on and on. I bet you can do that yourself. Once you have a stable company then you can start to look for a CEO that may be able to help grow the company. If you were able to get the product to market, i bet, you can certainly build the company around it to move it further.

Read up on the process. Here are 2 books that will get you started:

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About...

https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step-ebook...

Good luck

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collin128Mar 2023

Steve Blank's blog (not a book, I know) + The Startup Owners Manual also by Steve Blank.

Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen.

The two helped me understand what it meant to 'get out of the building'.

7 Powers + Good Strategy Bad Strategy helped me think long term about the business model and evolution of the company.

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muzaniAug 2022

IMO the theory is what gives you the confidence. You know it works, that the actions taken are repeatable.

The basics of how to start a startup: https://playbook.samaltman.com/

Growth. Or figuring out when your startup is doing well or poorly, runway, why it takes so long: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

I think when people criticize a startup's profitability, they don't really understand that the goal of a startup is to grow assets, not earn money, and then then sell those assets to someone who can make more money from it.

A very different book to the usual, Startup Owner's Manual: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/09...

It's a good book on validating what works and how ambitious to be. Much of it is in the form of checklists, which help you decide the next step. It's not a boring book, though. I haven't read through the whole thing as we got off the ground before finishing the book. It's the book that got my ex-co-founder away from more traditional businesses and into startups.

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webmavenMay 2022

You're basically trying to de-risk the idea before committing to execution. You can't do this completely, but you can do it progressively. Without going into too much detail, I suggest reading "The Lean Startup" by Eric Reis and "Running Lean" by Ash Maurya. Optionally (especially if you intend to go the enterprise route) include "The Startup Owners Manual" by Steve Blank.

Your first step will be to validate user demand. Make one or more landing pages, using your guesses about who would be interested and of compelling features, and see whether people even try downloading or registering for the (currently fictional) app. Iterate on this until you get a good idea of what users find compelling enough to try downloading or signing up. Follow up with surveys or questionaires to refine your target market and the value proposition they find compelling.

You'll find more detail on this process and the next steps in the works I've pointed you toward. At each stage your goal is to learn whether you should continue by eliminating the biggest risk (Maybe people aren't interested in alternatives? Maybe people aren't willing to pay? Maybe they want different features than you thought? Maybe they sign up but don't actually use the solution? Maybe they use it so much you can't cover costs with what you're charging? Maybe getting more users by buying ads is too expensive? Maybe users don't ask their friends or colleagues to sign up?).

Good luck!

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jkartchnerApr 2021

I recommend you read the first four chapters of The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. In those chapters, they talk about the importance of understanding your users, not “build it and they will come.” I think if you understood people’s response to what you’ve made very well, you would know a few things to tweak to fix a lot of concerns.

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