Stats for nerds
5recommend
6mentions
6people
2018–2024years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- >The sort of skills that would eventually allow me to run my own company/team/org.
These are different things. Running your own company more often than not implies you have started the company, and the skills you need to start and run a company are different in and of themselves, let alone the fact they're different from running a team in an established company/organization where you never think about how the power is still on.
In smaller companies and startups, the opportunity to learn is yours if you want it and the incentive to do so is survival. The company is small enough that you can, if you're so inclined, be involved in and learn about everything.
I answered a few questions on some topics you might find relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482961
There are a few replies there about communication and alignment. More (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25288605)
A FAANG is so large that the acronym is just five letters, and procuring whiteboard markers to them could be the biggest contract another company ever had.
What you want is to expand the spectrum of your involvement or "ownership". One way of doing that is to learn to sell into the enterprise.
Imagine you are a startup and you want to sell your product to [insert your company]. How would you go about it? It teaches you many things: What problem does it solve? For whom is it a problem? Why is it a problem? Why now? Are they aware it is a problem? Have they tried solving that problem? What outcome and why wasn't it solved? What does winning look like (success criteria)? For whom? Who are the owners and stakeholders? Who has the budget? Who is the competition [it could be internal competition]? Will this make or break someone's career if it's a success/failure? Who can torpedo the effort? Who's green-light do you need? Who's non red-light do you need? How does that align with the company's strategy? How do you scope that solution? What features are table stakes? How do you manage the product's roadmap (what not to build and what to build and why)? Does everyone know why they're doing what they're doing and can they make decisions unsupervised? What's important for each one at the table (legal, security, IT, infra, finance, sales, marketing, etc.)? You'll learn how to reason from each one's perspective (even make their own case for them) in order to orchestrate and find ways to drive the effort forward.
All these will be really useful because, even if you are still at that company, you'll have to learn how to do it to get buy in for whatever project or product or project you're working on or direction of the product you think is right, to get the resources you need, get the people you need (or to prevent adding more people, both are important).
Do you hang out with people starting start-ups? They surely talk about the problems they're facing and you could learn a lot brainstorming with them? Talking with people starting different startups exposes you to a variety of problems, solutions, and thought processes. You could notice patterns.
A few books that could come in handy:
- "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" - Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo's founder).
- David Skok's "For Entrepreneurs" - https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/ and https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/zero-to-100/
- "The Lean Product Playbook" - Dan Olsen
- EnterpriseReady - https://www.enterpriseready.io/#features
- "Lean B2B" - Étienne Garbugli
- "High Output Management" - Andrew Grove
- MEDDIC sales (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify/Implicate the pain, Champion). That's a known sales framework
- Michael Dearing on Pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20160318134158/https://www.heavy...
- "Predictable Revenue" - Aaron Ross
- "Founding Sales" - Peter Kazanjy (I haven't read that one but I've heard good things)
- "When software and people mix" - Gail Goodman - Business of software 2012 (https://vimeo.com/54076835)
- "Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business" - Jason Cohen at Microconf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw
- How to Build a Startup - Steve Blank on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAwxTw4SYaPnxzSuovATB...)
- Marc Andreessen's archive, but start with this: "The only thing that matters". https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html
Whatever you do, you know the whole customer development and product market fit and ensuring there's a market and that you have distribution? Most people know that and still, the temptation to build before is strong. That's why I started my list with Gabriel Weinberg's "Traction".
All the best. Happy to exchange throughout your quest.
- 1. Leaders Eat Last Deluxe: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't
We gave this to every employee at the business, as it models the type of culture and leaders we wanted to grow. For me personally, it put down on paper what I had been trying to do for years. It was something I reread often to try to improve my manager/leadership skills. This type of thinking helped me become a better CEO (it wasn't instant).
2. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
Great books on tactics and strategy; it helped me improve why we did things and created a much better approach to problems.
3. 4. Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want and The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
Totally changed how I approach building solutions and testing ideas. I learn how to do customer dev interviews and go from learning to testing what problems I am hearing and so on. I’ve flipped through each of them 50+ times as I construct the next interview or so on. I particularly like the Product Playbooks method to evaluate different problems and the value individuals put on them. They have been helpful as I’ve started to learn, and I’ve got a long way to go.
I wish I had these 10 years previous; it would have saved a lot of money.
- You go to where your customers are. If you’re building for yourself, find people like you. If you’re building for someone else, reach out to them cold, then ask them to refer you to people like them. If you’re building something they want, they will refer their friends.
The best book on the subject is the “Startup Owner’s Manual.” If you’re starting a B2B company, try “Lean B2B.”
- Best business books:
-Secrets of Sandhill Road
-Hackers and Painters
-The Great CEO within
-Venture Deals
-Predictable Revenue
-Zero to One
-The Hard Thing About Hard Things
-Lean customer development
-Lost and founder
-Lean B2B
-From Impossible to Inevitable
-Traction
Best computer science books:
-Competitive programming 3
-Structure and interpretation of computer programs
Best for fun (non-fiction):
-Meditations
-Sapiens
-How to win friends and influence people
-A brief history of time
-Self-reliance
-Frente a la estrella polar
- Why Nations Fail (amazing!)
Chimpanzee Politics (interesting)
Corporate Confidential (paranoid, but worth a read)
Developer Hegemony (red pill for developers!!!)
Bargaining For Advantage (reasonable)
Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision Making (abstract as hell but rewarding)
Thinking Fast and Slow (loved it)
The Elephant In The Brain (seriously underrated)
The Brain That Changes Itself (inspirationally freaky)
The Power of Habit (good!)
The Secret Barrister (mildly disturbing)
Thinking In Systems (huge fan of this book!)
A Short History of Truth (meh...)
Man's Search For Meaning (brooo... I am so sorry)
Thinking In Bets (meh.. really meh)
The Road To Ruin (alright. Interesting even.)
Lying For Money (lots of fun!)
Great Answers To Tough Interview Questions (what it says on the tin)
Traction (good overview of marketing tactics)
Lean Customer Development (pretty good)
The Mom Test (eye opening)
Lean B2B (solid playbook)
Principles (instant classic)
- I've read a couple of books that say the same thing, of these books are: "The millionaire fast-lane", "Lean Start-up", "Zero to One", "Lean B2B" and "Makebook.io".
They talk about eating your own dog-food, and observing around you to find problems other people have.
non of this advice worked for me. I'm searching for unpopular opinions on how to launch new SaaS.
I've found 30x500 by amy hoy, she stresses her sales safari, which is going around the internet and lurking around communities in a specific manner to find real pains.
Do you know any other unpopular opinions about finding business ideas that work?
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