Lean Startup Books

Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

What is the goal of the CEO? Bring in new customers? Keep employees happy? Maximize shareholder value?

According to Warrilow, the goal of the CEO should be to make the company sellable.

In other words: the company should be built as a wealth generating system detached from the founders. The task of the CEO is to build this system.

This book has the same underlying message as a true classic:
The E-Myth Revisited. It is written in the style of a story about an entrepreneur running an advertising agency. I’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs with small consultancy businesses will recognize themselves in the story.

The book contains many nuggets of wisdom and is written in a style that makes it an easy read. Highly recommended.

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The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Life and Work

This book has got some rave reviews on Amazon and it popped up in the recommended reading section for my profile. I was slightly disappointed, though.

The author takes you on a journey together with a man who is low on motivation in his work and is given a two week vacation to get it back. The journey becomes a search for Purpose which the man finds through the help of a mysterious farmer figure in a maze. There’s a little too much mystisicism and spirituality in the book for my taste but that’s not the biggest problem. The problem is that it just lacks depth. I never really felt for the character as he was searching for his Purpose and I didn’t learn very much from the quest either.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t buy the whole premise of each person having a predefined “Purpose”. I believe in Sustainable Quality of Life, which is more of a process or a melody with multiple layers that have to play in tune. I think the whole you-have-a-Purpose line of thinking limits you more than it expands you. That’s why The Seed only gets 2 stars from me.

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The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur: The tell-it-like-it-is guide to cleaning up in business, even if you are at the end of your roll.

What’s this? A business book with poop humor? Well, not quite. Or, almost. Actually, I’m not sure where to put Mike Michaliwcz’s book. It’s en entertaining read, for sure, but I can’t shake the feeling that the only reason I’m reading it is the title. It doesn’t contain any specific insight that I haven’t got from other books.
The good parts include the three pieces of paper you need (no, not toilet paper, strategic documents): your long term vision (“Prosperity Plan”), your quarterly goal and your day to day task list. The author emphasizes how important it is that your business is driven by your own, personal goals. The business is you. This is an important insight.
Mike has tried to write a “no nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is”-book about entrepreneurship and he has wrapped it in toilet paper to do so. I’m not sure that was the best strategy, but the book is worth reading none the less.

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Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

This is an amazingly beautiful book. It’s a pure joy reading it. Not only does it look good, it has brains too!

Business Model Generation introduces the Business Model Canvas, a simplified way to build a business plan. Simplified, but not simple. The Business Model Canvas gives you a much better overview of your business than what a business plan document can ever give you, but it contains more or less the same information.

This makes it much more agile to work with, which is one reason that the Business Model Canvas is considered a cornerstone in the lean startup process.

The book also contains an overview of other agile business development tools and processes, but it’s the canvas that makes the book worth buying. And buy it you should. You will use this book, I guarantee it.

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The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime.

This is not directly a lean startup book but it gives a good framework on how to think when it comes to doing a startup vs making your money in an ordinary job.

The book contains lots of useful models for evaluating ideas and markets. Like this one, a few simple questions to ask yourself before starting your company. Is it worth it, getting in to this market? Will my startup scale?

You should read this book before you start your lean startup. It will help you decide if entrepreneurship is for you and if your idea has what it takes. Yes, even though “ideas are worthless”, the market you’re targeting has certain characteristics and so does the idea (such as: is it easy to copy?). With The Fastlane Millionaire you will get mental models that help you pick the strong ideas from the weak ones.

The writing style is somewhat provocative and direct but it’s an entertaining and good read. I would recommend it as inspiration as well as for the models it gives you.

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The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

This book is more or less the must have bible of the lean startup movement. Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur who after 20+ years doing startups retired and “…moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program” (his own words).

This book is basically the teaching material he is using for his courses.

The Customer Development process is based on the insight that a startup is fundamentally different from an established company. A startup is in an exploration phase where both the product and the market are unknowns. That is why a startup has to put at least as much focus on developing the customer as on developing the product.

This is in fact true of any organization building something new for an untested market, not just startups.

As the book is more or less a collection of notes the readability could have been better. It’s a fairly dense read but very rewarding. If you’re serious about doing a lean startup this book is a must-read.

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