Book driven startup
6 weeks, 6 challenges, 6 books.
I identified a pattern quite effective in the way I tackled the first 6 weeks of my startup project. That might help you as it helped me.
Book driven startup
I’ve been working on my startup project full time for 6 weeks now and each week was full of new challenges, most of them far outside the skillset I developed in my previous jobs. I am a tech guy with a bit of entrepreneur knowledge but no hands-on experience on creating a business. I had to:
- Create a startup strategy (ie try to know where we would go in the next N weeks and how)
- Do some customer discovery
- Understand our business domain
- Learn some product management
- Create a prototype
- Networking
Like a writer or a movie director could have a specific song to boost his creativity, I used books to help me avoid really obvious mistakes and get a better understanding of any of these areas. I found myself repetiting the same pattern week after week and I managed to get some good things done thanks to the newly called Book Driven Startup process.
- Work on something I am not an expert in. This method focus on not being rubish on something, not on becoming an expert.
- Lose time, think hard on your project and lose time again. I noticed I use to spend around a full week (monday to friday) unless when I had completely no idea what I have have to do. In that case I would go to the next step quickly.
- Look at what I did during this week, what struggled me, what I should do better.
- Find a good book for my kindle about the struggling domain, read until I find the solution (over the weekend).
- Fix my plan / action / way of working next week.
There is obviously nothing too fancy in this way of working but it had quite positive effects for me over theses 6 weeks. The only thing worth mentioning (for me) is the week of failure is quite important in the process. You have to understand what you are looking for and you need to spend some time thinking about it by yourself before somebody give you the holy grail.
Books I read
for Startup strategy
Steve Blank’s book The startup Owner's Manual. Gave me a better understanding of lean startup.
for Customer discovery
Steve Blank book is great but lacks practical examples about the first step, finding what your customer wants. I finally found some worthy HOWTOs on The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer, Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits.
for Business domain
We are working around the PDF format and we need to learn more about it. PDF explained by John whitington gave us a really good overview of it.
for Product management
The only deceiving read. Not much learned from this book. Not worth mentioning.
for Protype
Even if I am tech guy, there is few things I had to learn technically. Few pages of Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools gave me great insight of how to implement that better. Written by Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman.
for Networking
I had no clue how to do that before I read Networking for the Introverts by Rob Brown.
As my 7th week is almost over, I am reading Restul Web Services Cookbook to be sure I would have the basic REST recipes before jumping on writing thousands line of codes.
Books helped/helps me, you might ask them for help too.