Ready, Fire, Aim
Whether you're thinking about starting a new business or growing an existing one, Ready, Fire, Aim has what you need to succeed in your entrepreneurial endeavors. In it, self-made multimillionaire and bestselling author Masterson shares the knowledge he has gained from creating and expanding numerous businesses and outlines a focused strategy for guiding a small business through the four stages of entrepreneurial growth. Along the way, Masterson teaches you the different skills needed in order to excel in this dynamic environment.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
17mentions
7people
2008–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "Ready, Fire, Aim" by Michael Masterson. It's a bit cheesy, but it has a publishing industry slant which suited me and enough things resonated that filtered into decisions I made that I'm thankful for it. I never went it past the first half of the book as you're meant to be doing $10m revenue before you move on ;-)
- “Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat”
This book helped me a lot, to know what need to prioritize for my business
- Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson is a good read. I got this and read through it. Teaches how to prioritise sales over everything else. If You want to listen to his talk; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvVSVe57gV0
Moral of the story, its way important to start selling even before You write a line of code!. Sounds totally non-intuitive but without actual sales, how will Your MVP be funded.
- Lots of good advice from a wide spectrum of HN. I am currently going through this as we speak. I am at the very early stages of Customer validation phase. I have mouths to feed and and hence need my job to keep me alive while I go through the whole startup phase. If you can get your hands on these two books, can’t recommend them enough; Ready Fire Aim- teaches you the mantra about selling first right from the get go. Also lays down actionable strategies to find your customer, how to sell them, how to price your product. Running Lean-Ash Maurya. Think of it as an amalgamation of Lean startup by Eric Ries and 4 steps to Epiphany by Steven Blank. Again the emphasis on customer development aka idea validation. You need to solve a problem that is worth solving. If you don’t have a problem that a customer wants solved, you don’t have anything to sell. Simple. The guy offers a lean canvas which you can use to develop your business model. Worth checking out.
Beyond these books, a few resources worth following are GetLatka, product habits by Hiten Shah and anything by Patio11 who was doing SAAS way before SAAS was even a term. One of the very early advice that Ash Maurya gives in his book is tat all the early stages of the startup phase can be done while being fully employed. ESP, the product/solution fit. Once you have validated the problem after countless customer interviews, you can start working on the actual solution to the Problem that you just validated and iterate on the build, measure learn loop. By the time you get to this stage, you are already a team of 2-3 early cofounders working out of an office space and ready to take in some external funding. When you get to this stage you can confidently quit! Good luck. EDIT MVE- minimum viable employment. Find a place that can employ you for your existing skills, pay market which provides you with the necessary resources(time) while you are involved with customer validation(problem/solution fit).
- I started out like you. Here's how I learned to make money. I started a small business tech firm and just went out and asked businesses what their problems were and came up with ideas on how to solve them. You've taught yourself code, now teach yourself how to make a business. "Ready, Fire, Aim" and "Emyth" are great books to start. What I've learned in following this path is that there are three things to quickly generate skill-based income: 1. a list of businesses with discretionary budget to spend (leads). Companies will drop $1,000; $5,000; $10,000; or about $35,000 on an experiment (you) depending on their size. Enterprise environments (200 knowledge workers or more) have more structured problems, smaller ones tend to have problems that also involve sales/marketing- consider learning about both from Hubspot Academy. Create a speadsheet of 1,000 leads. Then you know you can't run out of business opportunities. 2. create a path to your potential customer making a purchase. once you have a lot of leads you have to learn what people want to be pitched. as an engineer, you want to solve real problems. that's awesome, it's also how you create real value, get referral clients, and generally just get to do cooler things for more money. But it's too much friction for someone to take a risk on a new relationship and change their entire way of thinking. Change one way they think about their situation. Read "the challenger sale." You are inventive, that's why you love to code. That's a skill that makes you better than any other type of sales person. 3. build systems for yourself. if you do the first two you will get relationships. relationships take management and people feel about you however well you manage that process. scrap together systems that make you an automatic boss at things like follow up, meetings, and showing your clients what you are doing and how you have helped them. zapier, trello, hubspot crm, boomerang for gmail. it's ok to use your coding skills to smooth out the integrstion of these systems, but resist the urge to reinvent them. use them as the scaffolding that let's you build for your clients.
Finally, have an answer for your age (tell them what motivates you) but don't bring it up. You run your own business, people pay your business. If you have a trusted adult, google how to DIY forming an LLC in your state and make it official.
I have seen many unexpected setbscks in my life. the ability to create a business from nothing enabled me to overcome them all.
- I look forward to giving some of these a crack! One I wanted to recommend though, which isn't on the list, is Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. It had a big impact on me in the early days and had me thinking about minimal viable products (and businesses) before that was a thing of its own.
