Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2007–2020years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Link dead for me. Found the list republished here: http://thenextbigtechthing.com/10-books-every-entrepreneur-s...
"The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law" -- LLC vs C-corp vs S-Corp? Founder’s vesting? Liquidation Preferences? Equity vs Debt financing? This book will educate you enough to be able to answer these and many other important questions.
"Bootstrapping Your Business" -- From the founder of RightNow. The amazing story of how a geographically-challenged (Montana) entrepreneur built a world class business.
"Purple Cow" -- Dead simple premise, the key to marketing is to build something remarkable.
"The Art of the Start" -- The Art of Pitching, Marketing and Funding your Startup.
"The Innovator’s Dilemma" -- If your startup beats all the odds and becomes hugely successful prepare yourself for the innovator’s dilemma, cannibalize your product before someone else does.
"The E-Myth Revisited" -- How-to create a business not a job.
"Permission Marketing" -- The greatest marketing asset your startup can build is the permission to market to your customers and prospects.
"Growing a Business" -- Sincere advice for creating a company culture that your team and customers will love.
"The Cluetrain Manifesto" -- Successful marketing is a conversation.
"Bottom-up Marketing" -- Pure bottoms-up execution. Marketing tactics to grow your business.
- (This review is about the "lean methodology" in general, not the book).
I would like to echo and add to some of the criticisms here.
I've attended a few lean startup conferences and read several articles by Mr. Ries as well as Mr. Blank's book. While I believe there are some interesting ideas here and there and also generally a lot of societal value in encouraging entrepreneurs to mitigate risks early on, I think these guys are trying too hard to create a "methodology" out of thin air.
Once you get past the few interesting ideas you can borrow for your business, the whole thing just sounds like wishful thinking peppered with pseudo-science.
(The difference between pseudo-science and science is rigor and empirical evidence; many things in life "make sense", but don't stand against scrutiny or empirical validation).
For example, while it sure sounds reasonable to quantify feature/product usage and quickly respond with rapid product iterations or maybe even a "pivot", in practice you can never determine if the reason people are not using your feature/product is because its execution sucks, or because people don't care about it in general. In scientific terms, correlation isn't causation, and it's really tough to resolve the two. Get these mixed up and you might kill a potentially big product/feature because you didn't try hard enough in the execution.
More importantly, to the best of my knowledge none of the giants in the tech world followed anything close to the lean methodology. That includes the founders of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Great entrepreneurs have and probably will always be fueled by their beliefs, period. It's hard to imagine Steve Jobs being lean about iPods, iPads, etc. He's failed before, sure, but he's also pushed forward at full steam some of the most awesome and successful products I've ever seen.
Perhaps after young Mr. Ries runs an Apple or an Amazon, or after he can back his distracting jargons with empirical evidence I'll pay closer attention to the movement as a general methodology. Until then, I'm perfectly happy with simpler, more down-to-earth precedents like Greg Gianforte's "Bootstrapping your business" (incidentally, Mr. Gianforte has founded and run a billion-dollar company).
- I am a corporate generalist who is transitioning to software sales with no real experience in the field. The only thing I really understand is what our clients want because I was one of them. Don't categorize yourself. If you are passionate about a startup, it will show, and you can sell it. I would take the advice of noahc and start pitching your idea to companies who would want it, ask how much they would be willing to pay for it and hold them to it. "Bootstrapping your business" is a good book and describes how Greg Gianforte sold a product before he had one.
- I'm a big fan of bootstrapping, and I highly recommend the following books:
http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Your-Business-Successful-Company/dp/1593373872/
http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Lessons-Learned-Building-Successful/dp/0971187304/
And here's a good intro article to bootstrapping:
- My apologies, the book's actual title is
"Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money",
NOT
"Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with No Money".
The book title exceeded the max length of HN's article title by 5 characters; I decided to delete "Almost" to make it fit... if this inconveniences anyone, then you have my advance apologies...
