The Best Business Books To Help With Your Startup
Todd Sattersten
Bard Press helps authors publish books that grow their businesses—one author a year, building their book into a global bestseller.
I get a lot of questions from people about what business books they should read. Most of time, it is easy to direct them to the list we created for The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.
Yesterday, Quora sent me a query asking - "What are the best business startup books?"
I have been watching this category grow for almost a decade. I think it is one of the most exciting genres in business books as entrepreneurship starts to be treated as a business practice and practitioners have responded by sharing what they have learned.
To start, I suggest reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. They are two very different kinds of books but they are both general in their approach to the topic of startups. Ries uses a tech approach; Guillebeau uses a lifestyle approach.
If you are working on your value hypothesis (aka is anyone interested in my idea):
- Jobs To Be Done by Anthony Ulwick
- Competing Against Luck by Clay Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David Duncan.
- You should also check out The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick and Talking To Humans by Gift Constable for great advice on getting useful feedback to prospects and customers.
If you are working on your growth hypothesis (aka how to I find more customers):
- Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
- Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown.
If you are working on your business hypothesis (aka how do I make money):
- Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Osterwalder.
Other important books in the innovation space include:
- Made to Stick by Dan Heath and Chip Heath - judge all your idea by their framework.
- Influence by Robert Cialdini, Contagious - does your marketing engage in each way?
- The Art of the Start 2.0 by Guy Kawasaki - great utility on pitching.
- The Innovator's Hypothesis by Michael Schrage - proof that you need more experiments to get more proof.
- and anything by Geoffrey Moore, especially Crossing the Chasm and Inside The Tornado.
I hope we'll continue to see more books written and published in the startup genre.
Enjoy!
P.S. Are there any titles I missed that have helped you?