The books included in this list are ones that I found useful when thinking about the reasons why one should start a company. They’re all quite different in tone and content, but they’re all backed up by experience, data, or science (or some combination thereof).
You’ll find this book on many lists like these. And rightfully so – it’s an excellent resource for anyone who wants to have a successful startup. There are plenty of lessons here to take inspiration from, which you can use to guide your own efforts. One of my favorite parts of the book is how it talks about people doing things because they want to win rather than because they care. It’s an important distinction – particularly if you’ve ever started a company because you wanted to make a lot of money or be famous. Know about the Full Form Of IXPRL.
Startups are hard, and there’s no guarantee you’ll win no matter how good your product is. And if you’re doing it because you want to win, then at least partially, that effort will be hampered by the fact that you don’t care about what you’re building. There’s probably something else out there that would intrigue and excite you more than whatever it is that you’re currently working on. So take some time to think about why exactly it is that *you* want to start a company.
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries
This might have been written for startups, but the Lean Startup method can be applied at any scale. It’s an incredibly practical, hands-on approach to problem-solving that you’ll find valuable in pretty much every domain of life (and yes, that even includes education).
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek
The premise of this book is a very simple one: People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. So before you go and try to sell some product or service, make sure that it’s actually something worthy of being sold. If your efforts are driven by anything other than a genuine desire to provide people with value, then there’s little chance of it actually succeeding as a business. It’s a good reminder to always make sure that what you’re working on is something you actually care about. Don’t be one of the entrepreneurs who say “I’m in it for the money” – because chances are, your company won’t survive very long if this is true.
All Marketers Are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works–and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing – Seth Godin
One thing I’ve noticed over the past few years is that marketers aren’t respected as much as they used to be. And while there’s a lot of blame to go around for this (particularly in Silicon Valley), part of it has to do with marketers lying. It’s fairly easy these days just by getting to know your customers – or even just by asking them – to figure out what it is that they’re actually trying to accomplish. If you can do this, then it becomes very easy to market directly towards what people are looking for.
Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers – Seth Godin
Back when I started working on Summize, I was blown away by how much better good search results were than the bad ones, and so I set out to replicate this behavior in a way that other developers could benefit from. The end result was POSS, which provides API marketing strategies for doing a full-text search over Twitter. And one of the things that really impressed me about it was that all of its features were driven by use case – as opposed to some arbitrary notions of how the search engine should work.
How popular is each search term? What countries are your users from?
This book deals with a lot of behavioral economics and touches on the idea of social norms and how they relate to happiness. It’s also a great way to get people talking about market research and why it’s important to actually talk to customers. And if you want something simpler, here’s an older post I wrote about 7 Things Marketers Need To Do before Launch.
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries
A classic by now, this book outlines the fundamental components of managing a business as an experiment. It’s another great example of why it’s important to always be learning and keep thinking about how you can improve what you’re doing.
Conclusion:
One of the most important components to having a successful business is being able to learn from your mistakes. In order to do this, you need to be as honest as possible with yourself about what those mistakes are and how to avoid them in the future. It’s why I try so hard now, for example, not to compare my startup’s growth curve against that of others – because it prevents me from thinking about what we can do differently going forward.
Author Bio
My name is Danny Hales and I am a technical and contributor writer. My expertise in writing is Technology, Finance, and Business.
