Startup Books

Most startup books aren't helpful. There isn't a repeatable solution to how to succeed at a startup. While I worked for my startup I read ~30 general startup books to see if I could tease out applicable nuggets of wisdom. Most of what I found was too general.

Startup books are like the self-help book industry. They aren't helpful because the problem at hand is difficult. It requires a solution that's very localized to your problem and can't just be generalized into a silver bullet solution.

They feel like consultants trying to push some overly-complex "system" for developing a successful business. The "solutions" are complicated enough that you'll need to buy multiple books and subscribe to their talks just to understand what they're trying to push. It's great for the authors since they make more money and get consulting gigs, but not so great for yourself…

Here are the books that I found actually helpful. It's geared toward initial product development because that's what I did.

startup founder books:

• UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products
• The Founder's Dilemma

Yup, it's a tiny list but out of all the books those are the only ones that I would recommend without reservation.

UX Strategy teaches you how to apply UX research so you can build the right product. You'll learn how to do basic things like validating prototypes, cooking up a business model, and running a competitive analysis.

As a software engineer with no previous background doing this sort of thing, I found it invaluable. It shaped how I approached coming up with ideas and testing them throughout the early part of the startup.

The second book, The Founder's Dilemma, is a reference book of the major problems that the majority of startups go through. Each startup may be building unique stuff but the process of building a startup is 99% similar across companies. The book is detailed and dry so it's not one to read through in one sitting.

It starts at the beginning problems you'll face pre-founding and goes through later issues that span the life of a startup. The author measured the choices that many real life startups made for each problem and plots their results, so you get to see real-life data about this. Having something grounded in statistics instead of just talk was refreshing.

Every few months I'd have to re-open this book because I'd hit one of the problems and things would go haywire. This made it a perfect reference book for deciding what to do for hard problems.