Hot answers tagged books
16
Both their books are quick reads and worth the couple hours you would invest. That said, you likely aren't going to come away from either with a profound new understanding of anything.
You could wrap both up into a couple bullet points.
Keep things simple. It will save you time, money and make your customers happier.
Work within and embrace your ...
12
There's a quote that goes something like "perfection isn't reached when there's nothing left to add but instead when there's nothing left to remove". Search engines used to look like the Yahoo homepage and then Google removed every feature they could and I think they were just left with the search bar. But less features doesn't mean less capabilities; it's ...
11
I file everything by 37signals under the "potentially quite helpful, but take it with a handful of salt" category, the same place I put Seth Godin.
At times they have some really lucid and sensible insights but a lot of the time their cocky attitudes make their thoughts unpalatable.
You'll take the bad with the good, but are their books worth reading? ...
8
Start with a few real classics:
1) Zig Ziglar - Secrets of Closing the Sale
2) Tom Hopkins - Mastering the Art of Sales
Some more modern books:
3) Seth Godin - Small Is the New Big: And 193 Other Riffs, Rants
4) Rich Dad's Advisors: Sales Dogs
5) You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself
Blogs:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
...
8
Was there a question in there? I'm going to assume it was: How can people sell eBooks when the same information is available from a few hours of searching?
Because paying $10 for the answers instead of 2 hours of searching means you value your time greater than minimum wage.
Because you can't trust random info you find on the Internet, but generally ...
8
I can relate to you, and understand exactly what you are talking about. I was in the same boat as you when we first started our business. We had an idea, and knew that we could execute it technically, but we had absolutely no clue on how to start and run a business. And we didn’t know anyone that had started a business, so we couldn’t ask people we knew. So ...
8
Anything on Lean Startups would be helpful, especially for new technology companies:
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
(http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311585707&sr=8-1)
Do More Faster by Brad Feld and David Cohen
...
6
I think the biggest challenge starting up is managing your time. The 4-Hour Workweek is one of the best resources for time management that I have ever found. In it, you will learn to focus on the following: "Is it worth doing? Will it matter in the long haul? What was my impact?"
6
Google Apps (Email, document sharing, hosting, forms)
FreshBooks (Invoicing)
MailChimp (Email marketing)
Unbounce (Landing pages)
Skype (Video calling, online phone)
Express versions of Visual Studio and
MS SQL (Development tools)
Getting Real (Book from 37 signals)
SurveyMonkey (Surveys)
All of the tools above are offered free, some of them have a more ...
6
If you need pragmatism, inspiration, and business all wrapped into a single book, I cannot recommend more highly The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It.
This book has done more for my business than any single business book. I read about one to two dozen business books per year for the last 4 years, but this is a ...
6
I know you only asked for one...but here are my Top 6 books, read in this order for these reasons:
Founders at Work -> To learn what you'll go through and decide if you're up for it
Do More, Faster -> Bootcamp for a new entrepreneur
Inbound Marketing -> So you can figure out how to get customers
Rework/Getting Real -> A reality check for once you're deep ...
6
I've read almost everything in this thread and they are all good books for the entrepreneur.
However, since you say you are a technical guy (I consider myself the same) I strongly suggest you read whichever book, blog, or article that addresses the biggest business challenge you currently face.
Since you are feeling a bit overwhelmed E-Myth and The ...
6
I recommend reading How To Read A Book by Adler and Van Doren. In it they describe a process for quickly analyzing a book and deciding whether to read it in detail - and if you do - how to get the most out of the information presented.
With this technique you can better decide what to read and when to commit to reading.
If you are browsing books at a ...
5
Well, since you asked :), let me plug my own book that came out in July:
The Web Startup Success Guide (http://www.amazon.com/Web-Startup-Success-Guide/dp/1430219858)
The publisher, Apress, makes Chapter 6: Social Media and your Startup available free at: http://apress.com/book/view/1430219858
5
Great salespeople aren't born, they are created. None Of us likes rejection, and that is what defeats most folks from being successful in sales.
There are a number of widely available sales training programs. Sandler Sales Training, a franchise, has incorporated most of the basics and is available almost everywhere, but there are others.
Just keep in mind ...
5
There are lots of helpful and motivating books, but here it is some of the free, nice stuff one can read online:
Getting Real
Paul Graham's essays
Guy Kawasaki's The Macintosh Way.
Joel Spolsky's articles. Not exclusively on entrepreneurship, but for a software startup is very helpful and inspiring reading indeed.
5
I think they are very useful, as long as you don't spend all your time reading them instead of getting the job done. There is a lot of innovation in the way businesses are run, and it's great to see what people are doing these days.
If they aren't interrupting your productivity, they are great, if they are, well you need to find a way to block them out and ...
5
An overdose of anything is crazy... You'll become a "cookie cutter" entrepreneur and will loose all hope of innovation because you start to believe you have to follow the gurus.
Radical advice: Throw all you business books, audio and video away... Clear your mind... Sit in a closed room for a week - no telephones, no internet, no mobile... and then after ...
4
For me the most influential book to read was the The Mythical Man-Month. Yes, the book is more than 30 years.
The most important for me was to realize that even though the tools and the hardware are changing almost every day, there are still a lot that stays the same. I also realized that there are experience out there and that it is stupid not to read some ...
4
Paul Graham's essays - try
What Start-ups are Really Like
or
How to Start a Start Up
I think all his essays are required reading.
4
Paying an attorney to cover the basics of business law is an expensive education; you need to know at least the basics.
Gene Landy, the IT/Digital Companion is the book you want. http://bit.ly/aEcGl6
It covers Business issues like employing contractors, IP issues like trademarks and copyrights and IT business issues like strategic agreements. And it has ...
4
The 4 Steps to the Epiphany - Steven Blank
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705
This is the how to guide for building a start up and one of the foundation's of the "lean startup" movement. The premise is simple, dont build out your product until you have verified that people will buy it first. Not so simple in practice of ...
4
Some essential tools:
http://dropbox.com (storage)
http://markup.io (screen shots)
http://screenr.com (screencasts)
4
Free books:
Hubspot's internet marketing eBooks
Unbounce's conversion optimization eBooks: 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips, Using Twitter to enhance, promote and measure your landing page campaigns
Neil Davidson's software pricing eBook (highly recommend)
IRS Publications (You need to know what you are looking for on the IRS website, but for a more ...
4
For a recent book that's broad, engaging, and gives enough guidelines, checklists, and action points to be immediately useful, I'd recommend Zag: The #1 Strategy of High Performance Brands. It is much more enjoyable to use than marketing textbook-classics like Kotler's, though you may want to read those too if you need to talk to business-school people.
...
4
Kellog on Branding by Tim Calkins and Alice Tybout is a branding classic, along with the already mentioned Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout.
A less known marketing book that I can't say enough good things about is Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers, by Gerald and Lindsey Zaltman. This book had me thinking much ...
4
It's a snake-oil.
Of course you need to set goals and think hard about how to achieve them. But seriously, that's not news to anyone, is it?
Read this more well put criticism about the book.
If you need a good self help book, I recommend How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie, Winning by Jack Welch or anything by Peter Drucker, ...
4
If you haven't done this before, then I would recommend:
"The Web Startup Success Guide" by Bob Walsh. It's about ~400 pages of practical "what to think of" advice, with helpful resources (an example could be links to free privacy policy builders) and interviews with other entrepreneurs who have been doing the same thing.
"Start Small, Stay Small" by Rob ...
4
'Getting Real' is good book, heavy on substance, but heavy on hype and over-simplification too.
People love to quote famous writers and throw stuff like 'fewer is better', 'small is beautiful'.
More is Actually Better
As you have probably noticed, quite often, more is more. What a surprise. That is why Microsoft Office, while considered bloated by many, ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
