What books would you recommend to early stage (bootstrapped) SaaS founders?
What books would you recommend to early stage (bootstrapped) SaaS founders?
What books would you recommend to early stage (bootstrapped) SaaS founders?
Great question!
Marketing and general growth
'SaaS Marketing Essentials' by Ryan Battles is a great primer covering essential marketing strategies and tactics with concrete, actionable examples.
'Traction' Gabriel Weinberg introduces a great framework for exploring and testing different traction channels (best complemented by this talk by Brian Balfour http://www.coelevate.com/growth-machine)
Through the Indie Hackers podcast I found Julian Shapiro's growth handbook which is the most information dense resource I have yet come across: https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/
Another good marketing book is 'Smarter, Faster, Cheaper' by David Siteman Garland.
If you are pre-launch I also highly recommend 'Launch' by Jeff Walker (you'll need to cut through the fluff though)
For Sales there is 'Predictable Revenue' covering the process side of outbound sales which can be the best channel when you are starting out, because it is controllable; if you email 100 people per week and talk to 5 -10 there will be results. To know how to best talk to them read 'Spin Selling' by Neil Rackham or even better the 'The Spin Selling Field Book'.
On the operation and process side I have only one book torecommend and that is 'Scaling Up' by Verne Harnish.
Great answer, thank you!
I have ready many business/startup/bootstrapping books and honestly the best resource I have found for early stage advice for bootstrapped people is just reading the Indie Hackers interviews. In addition to that, the Indie Hackers podcast and the Startups for the Rest of us podcast have helped me a lot.
I think that learning is important, but I have come to believe in Just In Time Learning. Just learn whatever you need, right when you need the knowledge, rather than get deep into books about a certain topic. Otherwise, we can procrastinate the actual making of our projects.
That said, to get to your actual question. If I had to pick one book it would be Rob Walling's book: http://www.startupbook.net/ Some of the advice is outdated, but the core ideas still hold. The book is well organized so you can skip over the outdated things or those that do not apply to you.
https://github.com/mezod/awesome-indie#books :)
This is a great list. Thanks! :)
"The Mom Test" (my summary: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/dailynotes/note/b4u674cvj43jdajdsukg-summary-of-).
It's about the right way talking to people in order to validate your idea.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Click: The Forces Behind How We Fully Engage with People, Work ...
The Innovator's Dilemma
Four steps to Epiphany from Steve Blank is a definitive must read for any project related to software.
https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705
'Rework' by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
'The 4 Hour Workweek' by Tim Ferriss
'Tools of Titans' by Tim Ferriss
Hello everyone! Thanks for all the book suggestions, there are some great resources in there. Rob Walling's Start Small Stay Small felt like a great book to start with.
I would second the recommendation of the book Traction. Marketing is something I tended to not think about till after launch, but it is something you should be working on in tandem with building something.
Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen (same author as The Innovator's Dilemma) et a., which introduces the concept of jobs-to-be-done – radically different to the traditional market segmentation and customer personas and makes you think about the jobs your customers will hire your product to do.
Lots of great resources here. Definitely any of the books from Intercom and Close.io if you're into sales and or product management.
These are my book recommendations - https://www.highlyreco.com/usr/alexjv89
Right now I am reading - Start small stay small - A developers guide to launching a startup by Rob Walling(https://www.highlyreco.com/book/4129/start-small-stay-small-a-developers-guide-to-launching-a-startup-rob-walling-mike-taber). It is damn good. Will write a review as soon as I am done. It looks like that book is probably exactly what you are looking for.
Disclosure - highlyreco.com is something that I build :)