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Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

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Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#21
Traction by Weinberg. Understanding the distribution of your product, how to think about it and how much resources to devote to it was a missing piece for me as a technical founder. I easily fall into the fallacy of "build it and they will come" even when I don't think I do.

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#22
Traction, by Weinberg.

It goes over the various sales channels. How you get customers should really be the #1 priority for your startup.

Building stuff is easy. Getting customers is hard. And "if you build it they will come" doesn't really work most of the time IRL.

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#23
The E-Myth - creating systems and processes

The Personal MBA - crash course MBA

Founders At Work - understanding how different startups survived

Buy Back Your Time - management and delegation

The Charisma Myth - to help w/ charm for sales

SPIN Selling - this + The Charisma Myth more than doubled our sales conversion rate

These books were the most crucial for me

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#25
The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank

The Discipline of Market Leaders - Fred Wiersema and Michael Treacy

It's Not the Big that Eat the Small...It's the Fast that Eat the Slow - Jason Jennings

Mastering The Complex Sale - Jeff Thull

How To Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#27
Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection by Jia Jiang

Highly enjoyable read! This book really captures the entrepreneurial experience of interviewing for insights while focusing on the fear of rejection, which is a major problem that isn't typically found in most other books on entrepreneurship.

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#28
post #23

The E-Myth - creating systems and processes The Personal MBA - crash course MBA Founders At Work - understanding how different startups survived Buy Back Your Time - management and delegation The Charisma Myth - to help w/ charm for sales SPIN Selling - this + The Charisma Myth more than doubled our sales conversion rate These books were the most crucial for me

+1 for mentioning Neil Rackham's (1988) classic "Spin Selling".

Got it recommended from a friend after his exit (and after buying a French mansion from his share of the proceeds) when I asked him what he can recommend on understanding sales, in particular sales of (complex) technology. It's indeed a marvel for people new to selling.

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