 Several fellow founders recommended to me the book The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea When Everyone is Lying to You by Rob Fitzpatrick. It's all about how to run customer conversations the right way, and it really opened my eyes to many things I could improve and many pitfalls that are so easy to make. It also reminded me of some of the lessons in Dale Carnegie's classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People, such as asking questions about the other person and focusing on them instead of you/your ideas. I also loved the lessons about keeping conversations casual and serendipitous and finding secret learning opportunities.
i highly recommend it for any founder who needs to talk to customers and verify if what they're building is what people actually want or need. My main notes and takeaways on the book are below.
0 Comments
 I just finished reading The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup by Noam Wasserman. It was a helpful synopsis of many of the biggest decisions that founders need to make throughout the life of their startups. I enjoyed the various specific case study examples as well as the decision flow charts throughout the book. It was nice to hear what the stats/research say in terms of how various decisions affect various things and what the breakdown of results is, and I appreciated that it was evidence-based. At a high level, many of the dilemmas revolve around the rich vs. king tradeoff, and it was interesting to see how this affects decisions around founding, team (relationships, roles, rewards), investors, hires, and exits.
Below are my main notes and takeaways from the book.  A while ago, I heard a fellow founder recommend Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup by Bill Aulet, and I just finished reading it. The author teaches entrepreneurship at MIT and wrote a no-nonsense, direct, clear book about the exact process that helps go from 0 to 1 and de-risk a new venture. It built on and referenced many other classic books on the subject and reminded me of Steve Blank's Startup Owner's Manual.
I recommend it as a great starting point when considering and researching a new idea as it will provide a great structure and many relevant points to research and hone from the beginning. Below are some of my main notes and takeaways. |
Archives
July 2024
Categories
All
Subscribe |
RSS Feed
