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Ask HN: Must-Read Books for Startups?

126 points by dmazin ↗ HN
I recently read The Mom Test, and I learned something critical: before investing in your idea, talk to potential customers to see if anyone wants it or not.

While this might seem obvious, it wasn’t to me. The first time I started something in my 20s, I was so enamored with the idea and its potential that I didn’t validate it!

So, The Mom Test is obviously crucial reading.

There are so many other books and resources out there. Which of them would you consider crucial? Which contain crucial lessons?

74 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] thread
qprofyeh
On my phone but: The Business Model Canvas, Getting Real.
anssip
I would recommend The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It’s a classic that introduced the MVP concept to the world.

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.

sebastiennight
I was going to mention The Mom Test when I saw the title of your Ask HN, so I'll dive a bit deeper because it's IMHO the most important book I read when starting my current startup[0] and it's what took us to first sale before the MVP was even available.

> 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:

    What's the hardest thing about [doing this thing]?
    Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem...
    Why was that hard?
    What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem?
    What don't you love about the solutions you've tried?
[0]: https://www.onetake.ai (an autonomous AI video editor for SMBs)
inapis
>don't ask them if they want it or not

After reading the book my understanding was to not even ask this question. See if they have already tried to solve the problem by looking for another app or going to excruciating lengths to solve it another way. If yes, then they will probably buy your product.

brumar
I second this recommendation for early startups. We learn from tons of lean books that customer discovery is crucial to not build the wrong thing, but this book gives very practical ways to do that well. Most recent useful read for me. Still in the lean canon, a great complementary read could be lean marketing, as validating your sales channel is of an equal importance of validating your PMF.
atoav
Not knowing the book, but this sounds a lot like a scientific mindset where people try not to bullshit themselves.

This is good advice, many people who start out only see what they want to see. Yet, this can go into the other direction as well, where people tie themselves to the result of one poll or survey as they have lost touch with their customer base completely.

As always: if people tell you about their problems aand things they dislike those things are real even if they don't make sense. If they tell you how to solve it they are most likely wrong.

smogg
Strong +1 - the book is also very concise and full of practical advice. I wish we've put the learnings into practice even earlier in the process of building fragmentapp.io
code_biologist
The first 25 pages of Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany (here's a PDF for some Stanford class [1]). Sounds very similar to The Mom Test, but presented from a much different angle. It diagnoses the startup failure mode of excessive focus on product over customer understanding. It hit me like a freight train after my first startup failed. His detailed examination of downstream consequences in other areas of the business, like sales and marketing, are just uncannily accurate to how they played out in my business.

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...

treme
startup owner's manual should cover 80% of what you need to know
mumer101
Yes and the book is like 800 pages
jmrobles
"Fall in love with the problem and not the solution", Uri Levine (founder of Waze and Moovit)
statictype
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz

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.

Toine
0 to 1
mumer101
I read it very long ago. However, my feeling was that it's for VC funded companies and only companies who are looking to become a billion dollars corporation whereas personally, I would have been happy with the multi-million business
gary17the
"If you like that, you're gonna love this." (Private Hudson in "Aliens", 1986) - Ash Maurya, "Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works". Try to get your hands on a preview of the upcoming 3rd edition (10 years newer than the 2nd edition).
huijzer
Listen the Founders podcast. Then you can learn from multiple great business books.
mklepaczewski
It depends on your startup's stage. If it doesn't exist yet (and based on your submissions, it doesn't), you can start after reading The Mom Test. You might also want to read The Lean Startup.

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!

Etheryte
Yeah, you can think of running a company like playing sports of some sorts. You can spend all your life reading about it, but if you don't go out and practice vehemently, you're not going to be any good.
atomicnature
Doing a Job by Admiral Rickover: https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm

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.

l5870uoo9y
I recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport and while it isn't specifically about startups it does offer a crucial insights into doing work that is valuable (potentially also monetary valuable). Startups can be run in 1000s different ways, in particular solo-startups, but common for them is that they solve a difficult problem, and that requires deep work.
omeid2
It is a must read in my opinion.

Having seen so many waste away their time chasing the dream without little knowhow, I can't recommend this book enough.

lbriner
I think you need to be careful thinking that the books will be the most valuable input you can get as a Startup. The most basic skill of any business is to "Sell what people want to buy", as Paul Graham puts it.

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.

sdoering
I‘d recommend 'the right it' by Alberto Savoia [1].

> 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.

[1] https://www.pretotyping.org/

te_chris
Crime and Punishment and Machiavelli
nprateem
Just study an MBA.
mumer101
Probably the worst advice in the whole thread
nprateem
LOL. You think business is so easy you can pick it up in a weekend from a couple of books?
motoxpro
It's just a ton of opportunity cost (50-80k + multiple years) and irrelevant skills at the early stage. It's not like an MBA makes you 100% successful (or even a lot more likely). So the common wisdom is you might as well take that time and money and just do it.

If your ultimate goal is to be a startup founder, there is no reason to put that as a pre-requisite. If it is to "be in business" or to have a backup plan, then sure.

nprateem
Part time remote it's more like £10-15k.

The point is so you don't waste your time because you've got no idea about strategy and end up building things with no real potential.

It's easy to waste multiple years on side projects that are fundamentally flawed from the start.

Of course an MBA is no guarantee of success, but why do we bother with any education? Hopefully to learn skills and make better decisions.

It's funny how few people here would say a CS degree is a waste of time, but apparently studying business is.

It seems to be some special kind of hubris many programmers have. They're the "clever ones" because they do the building, and sales, marketing, strategy, etc is all so easy or irrelevant it's not worth studying.

Still, ignorance is bliss. You don't know what you don't know.

motoxpro
The question is not whether education is important. It's not even about whether an MBA is important or useful. It is: Is an MBA the best education for a company with 1-3 people for an extended period of time? Many of the organizational design tools, finance, accounting, etc., you learn there are, again, irrelevant for a period of time until the company reaches some sort of scale, which most don't.
nprateem
If you lack the skills to determine a strategy then yes, it's important. Do you need to study it all before starting a business? No. That's why I recommend a self paced part time course where you can choose the most useful modules first.

Strategy, marketing and entrepreneurship are, judging from the posts on here, most lacking. Study those then get started. Study the other modules as you go.

motoxpro
Which I guess was the point of the post, that those "modules" can also be books on those topics from the professors that teach classes at the best MBA schools in the world.

10-15 pounds instead of 10k-15k pounds. If you are the kind of person that needs to be in a (remote) classroom to learn and that is worth 1000 times more, then great. Whatever one needs to do to achieve the goal.

The worlds information is all on the internet. If you don't need the credential, the connections, or the learning structure, everything is free and can be consumed in a perfectly personalized way.

Personally, I would argue that, after a certain point, if you need to pay to get access to that sort of structured environment to learn it's going to be pretty hard to start a company that is, by definition, purely in unstructured space. Also continue to learn because knowledge in those areas is not static, and the things that are just basic foundational info.

kqr
A bit unconventional, but I think Wheeler's Understanding Variation followed by Deming's A New Economics teach people how to interpret past and future in a way that makes both exploration and exploitation more effective.

I would not want to go through life not having read those -- much less run an early-stage company!

yas_hmaheshwari
The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen, if your startup idea is in the "networked product" domain. I have re-read that book 3 times now, its that good
FarhadG
This. A friend recommended it and it was SUPER insightful
submeta
I highly recommend "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries, which offers good insights into building a successful startup through continuous innovation.
mumer101
It's good to get a mindset but it's not enough on its own. It doesn't offer practical guidance
dzonga
just read Jason Cohen's blog - asmartbear.com.

pretty much a Free MBA / Founder school.