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Recommended Startup Books

There are a trillion gazillion books on startups out there, so which ones should you read when you’re setting out on your startup journey? Should you actually read any books at all, or they just a waste of time, full of shameless self-promotion or simply cashing in on the celebrity status of their authors?

I’d recommend that you read this small set of startup books to begin, which I think is just enough to get you going without being overwhelming or distracting. I’m not just going to throw out book titles and affiliate links (although, for full disclosure this article does contain affiliate links) but rather explain exactly why I think you need to read each book.

Righto, let’s crack on.

Rob Fitzpatrick

120 pages. Couple of hours reading at most.

Start here. This should be your first port of call at the beginning of your startup journey. Important note: the title is awful and sounds sexist, but you’ll have to get past that impression — the book is excellent.

The Mom Test is all about how to talk to potential customers and users to evaluate your ideas effectively, in order to understand their real needs rather than the ones you imagine they have. It’s crucial to realise that you’ll probably start out talking to people about your ideas in the wrong way, and you need to be open minded enough to absorb Rob’s lessons and correct course. So many founders are rigidly set on their vision that they’re in danger of building a passion project and not a business: that is, something they enjoy building rather than something financially sustainable. It’s very easy to build something neat, show it to friends or relatives, or ask other people if they think it’s a real problem and if your solution is great; this can be an excellent road to self-deception.

In practice, it doesn’t matter what you or I or your friend or the bloke in the pub thinks of your idea or your product: all that matters is what the market thinks of it. This book will change your mindset and help you gain clarity and develop an objective approach to gathering feedback that is essential to building a successful business. These skills are not just for startups — a manager in an established tech company recently told me that this book has reshaped their process for innovating and creating new products. Taking the lessons of “The Mom Test” to heart will stand you in good stead throughout your career, no matter where you end up.

Essentially, the book explains how to listen rather than pitch, how to ask questions and test hypotheses without biasing the answers, and how to pull the product from the market rather than trying to convince the market of what it needs. This is a lesson I’ve somewhat painfully learnt myself, and it’s often the case that this realisation comes in concert with one or more pivots in your business model. Save yourself time and pain: learn the lesson now. This is the book all entrepreneurs should begin with.

Ash Maurya

There are plenty of books with the same message as Running Lean, and I recommend this one simply because it’s short and to the point. It’s a quick way to gain an overview of how the lean startup approach works in practice. It covers key topics that you’ll encounter again and again — fundamentals like the business model canvas, the importance of experimentation, and the centrality of interviews in discovering problems and shaping solutions. The examples in the book are a little thin on the ground, and Ash might not be as experienced as some other authors, but the book is such a good short summary that it’s invaluable when starting out. You’ll quickly understand the essential language of startups, which will enable you to contextualise the guidance advisors and other founders are giving you.

The book presents a somewhat “paint by numbers” process, which is obviously unrealistic, but having a precise flow presented to you that you can adapt to your current situation at least gives you some grounding and guidance when you first step out into the abyss and ask yourself “what the heck am I supposed to be doing right now?” This book will give you an outline of the startup landscape, and some concrete advice when you need to know what to do next.

Rob Walling

Rob is an absolute hero; he is behind the excellent “Startups for the Rest of Us” Podcast, has a ridiculous amount of startup experience, and more recently has founded TinySeed. If you’re thinking about a SaaS product, Rob is your man.

This book is more down to earth, into the nitty gritty, navigating the weeds, Google-trends-building-mailing-lists-ground-level-view rather than a high level startup process manifesto. It’s firmly targeted at those interested in a lifestyle business rather than founders taking the funded VC route, although TinySeed actually somewhat straddles both those worlds.

The book is somewhat dated, so be prepared — it’s essentially the synthesis of a set of blog posts published a decade ago, but its ethos, the hacker and hustler mentality, the focus on personal freedom and especially the hands-on pragmatic nature of the advice is just invaluable and refreshing. Rob has been considering a revision of this book, which is definitely overdue and would be immensely helpful to founders everywhere.

In a world of pitchdecks and cap tables, this book will bring you back to earth with its discussions of pricing plans, marketing funnels, and SEO. If you’re a bootstrapper, you should read this book right away. If you’re not, then you should still read it at some point for the perspective it provides.

Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom

This book was recommended to me by a former founder who had taken his SaaS to profitability; he saw me making the same mistakes he had made at the beginning and told me this book would get me on track. There is a good deal of similarity between this book and “Running Lean”, but NITSI is a little more academic and research-based rather than anecdotal.

The killer takeaway from this book is “Don’t build anything!” or at least “Don’t build anything until you absolutely must!” or to put it another way: a startup is all about searching for a real problem and solving it, rather than simply building a product. It emphasises the use of the scientific method in a similar way to “The Lean Startup” — the idea that everything you think you know to begin with is actually just a guess, which should be formulated as a series of hypotheses and each one tested. Once the book has hammered home these fundamental concepts, it then follows a similar track to “Running Lean”, with a more systematic approach.

This is good startup advice no matter which path you choose to follow.

Noam Wasserman

450 pages and heavy going. A big read full of advice grounded in solid data that covers almost every decision of the early startup journey.

More of a reference book to fall back upon at crucial junctures rather than bedtime reading, what’s refreshing about this work is the sheer volume of data that has been compiled to address key questions. The book sets out in crystal clarity the paths available to founders, the trade-offs, the issues that you’re going to encounter — things like when to found a business; the skills that different founders can bring; the pros and cons of VC vs bootstrap; how to divide equity between founders. It’s worth a read at the early stages to get a good idea of the problems a startup may face, and how to develop an objective mindset about those problems.

It’s not an easy read, it’s not something you’ll breeze through, but I’d say — take a quick read, deep dive on subjects that interest you, maybe skip parts that aren’t so relevant, but at least be aware of what’s in the book, and how it develops solutions to some of these big problems. After that, you’ll have an essential data-driven founder’s toolbox sitting on the shelf and you’ll know exactly where to go when you hit some of these bumps in the road.

Eric Ries

300 pages. An absolute classic that is essential reading due to its popularity alone, but also somewhat dated.

In practice of course every company is different and you’ll borrow bits and pieces from different approaches, but many people see this book as the “one true way” and you’ll need to be fully versed in it to work with them.

I think this book is somewhat dated now; the focus on MVPs is probably somewhat off the mark, as testing prototypes directly with users is a quicker way to get feedback (especially with the tools we now have for rapid prototyping). The expectations of most users are far higher than they were a decade ago, and as such they expect a much more polished product.

The emphasis on speed and the application of a hypothesis-testing iterative approach is timeless and heavily influential. Read this book because everyone else reads it.

Peter Thiel

200 pages in well-spaced essay format — a quick read.

This is a totally different kind of startup book. It’s a high-level philosophical essay rather than a guide to launching a company. This book is imbued with Thiel’s signature contrarianism, which is both refreshing and instructive; to be a great founder and discover ideas and problems that others cannot see will require a truly independent mindset. This book is ideal for cultivating that approach, and can be challenging for those convinced that capitalism is solely about competition and creating the best product.

For some this book can be an inspiration to dream big, but its author also wants us to substitute the word “plan” for “dream”. Thiel lays out a more optimistic and definite way of viewing the future, insisting that “you are not a lottery ticket”, which can be highly motivating to new startup founders. And honestly, with all the challenges a startup encounters and the difficulty many founders have to facing up to those challenges, you’re going to need as much inspiration and motivation as you can possibly muster. This book is the perfect place to start.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

300 pages, but mostly pictures.

“Rework” is an excellent counterpoint to Thiel’s book. From the founders of Basecamp, this book is the poster child for the bootstrap work-life-balance work-smarter-not-harder approach to creating a business. Whilst the advice is usually seen as somewhat controversial, particularly to young founders, this book is full of insights and should provide at least some thought-provoking material when you’re first working out how you want to approach a startup: decisions around the path you wish to take, the company culture you’d ideally like to build, and how you might be able to accelerate progress by sheer focus and delegation

Read this book around the same time you read Thiel, and you’ll span the full spectrum of thinking around startups.

There are many many other books I could have added to this list. I’ve read most of the well-known general startup books, but the above are those I’ve returned to time and time again. There are other books on topics like company culture, product design, and agile approaches that I would also recommend, but I’ll save those for another time.

If you are (like many/most startup founders!) short on cash for books, I’d recommend ordering them from your local public library where possible — you’ll not only save money, but also do a valuable service to other potential startup founders in your area.

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