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Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

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Re: Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

#11

Post by scrollaway »

dizzydes wrote: post #6
scrollaway wrote: post #4

I used to read these types of books (including the most popular of the bunch listed here) years ago. I had this idea that if I just kept reading this stuff, I would eventually just "get it". (I never did. I "got it" much faster by reading individual comments from select people, and trying things out by myself) The thing is, it seems to me that many of these books are just extremely information-sparse. Very very lengt…

This. Maybe reading a few on Blinkist initially but all one really needs: - is repeatedly trying (even on a side project) - first principles thinking/common sense Why? Because: - all those books are repetitive - we learn faster by doing - problems a given project faces at a given time are highly situational

Yeah I really like the idea of Blinkist but I never tried it. Have you?

Re: Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

#14

Post by 1123581321 »

scrollaway wrote: post #4

I used to read these types of books (including the most popular of the bunch listed here) years ago. I had this idea that if I just kept reading this stuff, I would eventually just "get it". (I never did. I "got it" much faster by reading individual comments from select people, and trying things out by myself) The thing is, it seems to me that many of these books are just extremely information-sparse. Very very lengt…

I've only read some of these books, but the ones I've read had 20 or 30 points or pieces of advice that took a few pages each. One of them would put just a few sentences on each page. If it takes you a long time to read the sentences that expand or illustrate the idea, learn to skim.

Re: Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

#15

Post by wg0 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #8
scrollaway wrote: post #4

I used to read these types of books (including the most popular of the bunch listed here) years ago. I had this idea that if I just kept reading this stuff, I would eventually just "get it". (I never did. I "got it" much faster by reading individual comments from select people, and trying things out by myself) The thing is, it seems to me that many of these books are just extremely information-sparse. Very very lengt…

There's no way 20 books are necessary. You can achieve near expertise in many domains with 2 or 3 really good books, what do the remaining 17 add?

Not every book is worth reading. There's only one or few original works and rest is always commentary or reaction, rejections and impressions.

Re: Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

#16

Post by ethanbond »

marcopicentini wrote: post #2

Nowadays, you could learn more and faster using Chat GPT-4 rather of reading such books.

The one book I’ve “quizzed” GPT4 on, it gave sufficiently good answers to convince someone they understood the book but actually missed almost everything salient about it.

Not super relevant but this was Henry George’s Progress & Poverty, so a pretty well-known book with fairly detailed arguments.

Re: Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

#17

Post by hackernews333 »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #3

Any books on generating ideas? I feel like im stuck on step 1.

Try to do any task on a computer and you'll find 95% of existing things suck and can be improved. You can sell these improvements. Don't worry about competition, that just means your idea has been validated. Make stuff you want to use yourself, that way even if you fail to sell to others, you're not at a complete loss. Plus you do not need to repeatedly iterate with a customer if you are the customer.

Re: Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

#18

Post by SkyPuncher »

marcopicentini wrote: post #2

Nowadays, you could learn more and faster using Chat GPT-4 rather of reading such books.

I read a lot of startup books. The value is spending time in these books to really internalize them.

Summarization tools have existed for a while. They don’t take off because they can solve the core problem of deep learning. It takes time to reshape how you think. Reading some summaries won’t do that.

Re: Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

#19

Post by JimtheCoder »

hackernews333 wrote: post #17
aleksiy123 wrote: post #3

Any books on generating ideas? I feel like im stuck on step 1.

Try to do any task on a computer and you'll find 95% of existing things suck and can be improved. You can sell these improvements. Don't worry about competition, that just means your idea has been validated. Make stuff you want to use yourself, that way even if you fail to sell to others, you're not at a complete loss. Plus you do not need to repeatedly iterate with a customer if you are the customer.

To add to this, the bigger the improvement you offer, the easier it is to sell.

Selling a 10% improvement it hard, selling a 10x improvement is much easier...

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