Validate, validate, validate. "That's really cool" is not validation from a customer. "That's really cool. I want it. How much does it cost?" is validation from a customer.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/up...
"Start marketing" - Rob Walling (https://robwalling.com/assets/ebook.pdf) I recommend the article on "Why Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books" ;)
(don't know where I got this...)
Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
Explanation:
AWFUL IDEA -1
WEAK IDEA 1
SO-SO IDEA 5
GOOD IDEA 10
GREAT IDEA 15
BRILLIANT IDEA 20
NO EXECUTION $1
WEAK EXECUTION $1000
SO-SO EXECUTION $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION $10,000,000
The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.
The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.
That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas.
I’m not interested until I see their execution.
However, you can read a dozen books and still be stuck in the research phase. Reading alone doesn't create your startup. If you understand The Mom Test and apply its knowledge, you're ready to start.
Be cautious of advice from people who have read hundreds of books on starting a startup - they may not have had the time to actually create one.
Go validate your idea, and (hopefully) start building. Good luck!
I would not want to go through life not having read those -- much less run an early-stage company!
This one-pager guide never fails to set me straight whenever I feel like I've lost my way.
If you have more time - I recommend reading everything Rickover has written, it'll serve you throughout life.
This is probably one of the best
Shoe Dog - Phil Knight. A great read about the struggles of how Nike started. But was left unsatisfied as the book ends with the company going public but doesnt cover its ascension in the late 80s/90s and how that went down.
And for a bit of different approach, Make by Pieter Levels. This also recommends trying a lot of ideas and seeking what sticks, but perhaps with a more straightforward approach.
In general anything on Human Centered Design could be useful.
The only knowledge that matters at the end of the day is experiential: the kind that is learned by doing.
The kid who ships a product to a dozen users, learns and iterates with determination and focus, will have learned far more than the intellectual reading and waiting for the right opportunity to strike.
Of course there is value in intellectual knowledge, but most are far from the optimal balance - too skewed towards the intellectual vs. engaging with, and learning from, reality.
Someone in your startup needs to have read this. It’s a discussion of the different sales channels.
If you just sit and think about that, it encapsulates almost everything that is important about a business: To sell, people need to know about the product/business (marketing), you have to build it (development) and you have to sell it (sales). But you put good people in those roles and they will do their jobs but still not make much money. Why? People need to want to buy it and the main driver for that is a balance of a Customer-focussed Product Manager as well as a DNA of what the company is about and what it is offering. You want to make things customers want but they don't always know what they want and you might be selling something different, in which case your marketing message might be off.
The books might say "Always be closing" or "Marketing is everything" or "Deliver junk and iterate" and these are all partial truths but they can also come at a cost to other more effective parts of the business.
As the CEO, your job is to supervise those various levers/teams/departments so you need to know enough about them to understand if they are working, if the person running them is the right person and whether the changes you need to make are big and small!
p.s. I enjoyed the Mom Test but I think if you have an open mind, a lot of that stuff you would work out just from experience.
Good luck.
I feel like I would have saved myself a lot of stupid conversations if I had the context this book provides.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61403389-the-power-law
Too many founders get wide-eyed by the structure-less nature of building a startup and try to look for adult supervision, either from mentors, advisors or books. Be your own mentor and trust your own judgment. Always take outside advice but never let it override your internal compass. At best, a book will give you a minor nugget and is usually not worth the time and attention.
> Pretotyping is a set of tools, techniques, and tactics designed to help you validate any idea for a new product quickly, objectively, and accurately. The goal of pretotyping is to help you make sure that you are building The Right It before you build It right.
https://www.unchartedblue.com/how-to-kill-your-tech-company-...
pretty much a Free MBA / Founder school.
The Startup Owner's Manual: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/09...
Nobody seems to recommend this because nobody has finished reading it, but it's meant to be acted on, not finished. There are literally checklists. It's also hard to get a soft copy, but th soft copies are useful for printing out the checklists. Paul Graham has changed the definition of a startup, but I still love the one from here - the goal of a startup is to have a scalable and repeatable business model.
Startup=Growth, by Paul Graham https://paulgraham.com/growth.html
I'd recommend the whole site, and many do. But start here. Many don't understand that startups are about growing assets, not revenue. And exponential is a funny word for "very slow". If you wanted to grow to a million dollars, do anything but a startup and don't raise VC money. But this shows how the math works.
High Growth Handbook: https://growth.eladgil.com/
And this is what you read after you get past 10 employees. Who to hire next, how to manage. There are tons of people who talk about how to get Product Market Fit, but few who talk about how to build an engine to turn PMF to money. There's tons of podcasts but consider this book a collection of the best ones.
There’s good advice in this thread that is cautioning about getting stuck in research mode. There’s only so much you can get from books. You need to try and fail at some point.
My recommendation to this point is to not treat the books as a set of “how tos”, instead use them to develop a model of the world to test your instincts against.
> before investing in your idea, talk to potential customers to see if anyone wants it or not.
I would reframe this a bit, otherwise someone not familiar with the book will take from your quote the exact opposite lesson from the one taught in The Mom Test. I believe the main lesson from the book is:
- Don't talk to people about your ideas
- Ask people about their actual use cases and frustrations
- Figure out where they're struggling, investing effort and money. Let them talk
- Don't ask people about your idea and don't ask them if they want it or not. You're only trying to validate the problem.
Questions to ask:
[0]: https://www.onetake.ai (an autonomous AI video editor for SMBs)