Entrepreneurship

A refreshing approach to entrepreneurship centered on staying small and avoiding growth - maximizing happiness, sustainability and profitability.

Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high-profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output and more growth.

In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can do the same, including:

• Planning to set up
• Determining desired revenues
• Keeping clients happy
• And, of course, doing all this on your own.

Written by renowned data science experts Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett, Data Science for Business introduces the fundamental principles of data science, and walks you through the "data-analytic thinking" necessary for extracting useful knowledge and business value from the data you collect. This guide also helps you understand the many data-mining techniques in use today.

Based on an MBA course Provost has taught at New York University over the past ten years, Data Science for Business provides examples of real-world business problems to illustrate these principles. You’ll not only learn how to improve communication between business stakeholders and data scientists, but also how participate intelligently in your company’s data science projects. You’ll also discover how to think data-analytically, and fully appreciate how data science methods can support business decision-making.

• Understand how data science fits in your organization—and how you can use it for competitive advantage
• Treat data as a business asset that requires careful investment if you’re to gain real value
• Approach business problems data-analytically, using the data-mining process to gather good data in the most appropriate way
• Learn general concepts for actually extracting knowledge from data
• Apply data science principles when interviewing data science job candidates

Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren't born with something special - they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply.

You will learn:

• Why the "F" word - focus - is crucial to a startup's success
• Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face - and how to overcome them
• How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd - it's not just about technology

Whether you're a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want.

Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The beating heart of any product or service business is returning clients. Don't let your hard-won customers vanish, taking their money with them. In Fighting Churn with Data you'll learn powerful data-driven techniques to maximize customer retention and minimize actions that cause them to stop engaging or unsubscribe altogether. This hands-on guide is packed with techniques for converting raw data into measurable metrics, testing hypotheses, and presenting findings that are easily understandable to non-technical decision makers.

This book will show how generative technology works and the drivers. It will also look at the applications – showing what various startups

and large companies are doing in the space. There will also be a look at the challenges and risk factors.

During the past decade, companies have spent billions on AI.  But the focus has been on applying the technology to predictions – which is known as analytical AI.  It can mean that you receive TikTok videos that you cannot resist. Or analytical AI can fend against spam or fraud or forecast when a package will be delivered. While such things are beneficial, there is much more to AI.  The next megatrend will be leveraging the technology to be creative. For example, you could take a book and an AI model will turn it into a movie – at very little cost. This is all part of generative AI. It’s still in the nascent stages but it is progressing quickly. Generative AI can already create engaging blog posts, social media messages, beautiful artwork and compelling videos.

The potential for this technology is enormous.  It will be useful for many categories like sales, marketing, legal, product design, code generation, and even pharmaceutical creation.

What You Will Learn

• The importance of understanding generative AI
• The fundamentals of the technology, like the foundation and diffusion models
• How generative AI apps work
• How generative AI will impact various categories like the law, marketing/sales, gaming, product development, and code generation.
• The risks, downsides and challenges.

Who This Book is For

Professionals that do not have a technical background. Rather, the audience will be mostly those in Corporate America (such as managers) as well as people in tech startups, who will need an understanding of generative AI to evaluate the solutions.

We are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?

Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls “an intellectual Wild West.”

The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

How do successful companies create products people can’t put down?

Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.

Eyal provides readers with:

• Practical insights to create user habits that stick.
• Actionable steps for building products people love.
• Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.

Whether you're a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry or an entrepreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest challenge is creating a product people actually want. Lean Analytics steers you in the right direction.

This book shows you how to validate your initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetize your business, and how to spread the word. Packed with more than thirty case studies and insights from over a hundred business experts, Lean Analytics provides you with hard-won, real-world information no entrepreneur can afford to go without.

• Understand Lean Startup, analytics fundamentals, and the data-driven mindset
• Look at six sample business models and how they map to new ventures of all sizes
• Find the One Metric That Matters to you
• Learn how to draw a line in the sand, so you'll know it's time to move forward
• Apply Lean Analytics principles to large enterprises and established products

More people than ever want to be their own boss, but venturing forward with your own business can be hugely intimidating. Are you investing effort in ideas that have no basis in customer demand? Are you shying away from even considering starting your own business? Noah Kagan knew this feeling all too well, but has since discovered how to banish the one simple thing holding aspiring entrepreneurs back, to become a 7-figure founder.

MILLION DOLLAR WEEKEND offers an into-the-deep-end process for overcoming fear and perfectionism and making the business of your dreams a reality. Step-by-step, Noah shows what it takes to oust fear and build the "ask muscle", and shares practical advice that every entrepreneur needs to master. By demystifying what it takes to start a business, turning risk into realistic action and fear into fun, this is the beginning of your journey to successful entrepreneurship.

And the best part? You can kickstart this process in a weekend.

Start Small, Stay Small is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-funded startup. If you're a desktop, mobile or web developer, this book is your blueprint to getting your startup off the ground with no outside investment.This book intentionally avoids topics restricted to venture-backed startups such as: honing your investment pitch, securing funding, and figuring out how to use the piles of cash investors keep placing in your lap.

This book assumes:

• You don't have $6M of investor funds sitting in your bank account
• You're not going to relocate to the handful of startup hubs in the world
• You're not going to work 70 hour weeks for low pay with the hope of someday making millions from stock options

There's nothing wrong with pursuing venture funding and attempting to grow fast like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. It just so happened that most people are not in a place to do this.Start Small, Stay Small also focuses on the single most important element of a startup that most developers avoid: marketing. There are many great resources for learning how to write code, organize source control, or connect to a database. This book does not cover the technical aspects developers already know or can learn elsewhere. It focuses on finding your idea, testing it before you build, and getting it into the hands of your customers.

Learn how to stay sane and ensure both you and your business thrive for years.

You run a business. And running a business is hard. It can ruin your health. It can ruin your relationships. It can ruin your life.But only if you don’t equip yourself for the journey.The responsibility, stress and loneliness of being an entrepreneur are a far cry from your friends who work salaried jobs. The path of least resistance is to let the stress and isolation of starting, running and growing a business infiltrate most aspects of your life.

Over and over we’ve watched our fellow entrepreneurs succumb to the mental toll and chaos of running a business. We’ve also experienced it firsthand as we’ve launched and grown our own businesses.

Odds are good that you’ve been overwhelmed at some point. Maybe you’ve read self help books only to find that books about stress management typically don’t take into account the unique experience of entrepreneurs. Or they’re ‘lifehacks’ written by a blogger with no formal training, offering advice based on anecdotes.

Why do I need this book?

• You want to invest in yourself (and consequently, your business).
• You want to learn proven strategies, tactics and techniques to overcome the challenges that cause you heartburn and headaches.
• You want to get off the treadmill of stress, anxiety and isolation that entrepreneurship brings.
• You want to prevent burnout, depression, isolation, and the emergence of damaging coping strategies and self-sabotaging choices.
• Every aspect of this book is a pairing of psychological expertise with decades of entrepreneurial experience.

• 💡 Idea: Get an idea from problems in your own life. If you don't have problems that are original enough, become a more original person. Don't build products that are solutions in search of a problem.
• 🛠 Build: Build your idea with the tools you already know. Don't spend a year learning some language you'll never use. Don't outsource building to other people, that's a competitive disadvantage. Build only the core functionality. The rest comes later.
• 🚀 Launch: Launch early and multiple times. Launch to famous startups websites (like Product Hunt, Hacker News, The Next Web), mainstream websites (like Reddit) and mainstream press (like Forbes). But more importantly, find where your specific audience hangs out on the internet (or in real life) and launch there. Launch in a friendly way, that means "here's something I made that might be useful for you", instead of acting like you're some big giant new startup coming to change the world.
• 🌱 Grow: Grow organically. A great product that people really need which is better than the rest will pull people in. You don't need ads for that. Don't hire people if there's no revenue yet. Don't hire many people if there's revenue either. Stay lean and fast. Do things yourself.
• 💰 Monetize: Monetize by asking users for money. Don't sell their data. Don't put ads everywhere. Don't dilute your product. Be honest that you need money to build the product they love and they'll be fine paying for it.
• 🤖 Automate: Automate by writing programs that do stuff that you do repeatedly. Only automate if it's worth the time saved. For stuff that's too hard to automate or not worth it, hire contractors. Let them work as autonomously as possible. Where possible let robots manage them (for example by giving them alerts when things happen in your product). This lets you take time off, or work on your next business.
• 🚪 Exit: Exit by not putting your company for sale, but letting buyers come to you. Filter out the majority of buyers that aren't serious. With the serious buyers left, negotiate a price by valuating your own company. Price it agressively high. Always keep the bargaining power on your side of the table. Get paid in cash, not stock and don't fall for the trap of earnout bonuses. Make sure you're prepared for the emotional fallout of selling (and missing) your business.

A revolutionary roadmap for building startups that go the distance

Now more than ever, you don’t need a fancy office, Ivy League degree, or millions of dollars in venture capital to launch a business that matters for the communities you care most about. Software, the internet, and remote work have made it possible for entrepreneurs to start for free, make a customer of anyone, and grow a profitable, sustainable company from anywhere.

Packed with hard-won, battle-tested lessons from Lavingia’s own journey of building Gumroad, a platform for creators to sell their work, The Minimalist Entrepreneur teaches founders how

• start then learn
• build a community, then solve a problem for them
• charge for something even before you’ve built anything
• avoid running out of money and, more importantly, energy
• run a tight ship amid the rise of the gig economy and remote work
• own a business without it owning you back.

The Minimalist Entrepreneur is the manifesto for a new generation of founders who would rather build great companies than big ones. This is essential knowledge for every founder aspiring to build a business worth building.

The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right .

Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.

Do you want to build a software product that people want and are willing to pay for? Do you dream of growing the kind of company that employs smart, creative people? Are you tired of waiting for investors to fund your startup?

You don’t need venture funding, and you don’t need permission.

With nearly two decades of experience as a serial entrepreneur, author, and investor, Rob Walling is one of the world's leading experts in SaaS. In this book, he shares little-known strategies that have been battle-tested by some of today's most successful founders.

Learn how to compete against large competitors and structure your pricing for maximum growth. Discover the four SaaS Cheat Codes that can dramatically accelerate your business's success. Learn how to avoid common mistakes that SaaS founders make and identify the right marketing approaches for your business.

In this book, you’ll find:

• Questions and processes to take you from product-market fit to scale.
• New ways to compete and differentiate yourself in crowded marketplaces, and how to react when someone copies you.
• Pricing tactics, and the pitfalls to avoid.
• Real examples from software companies that are operating today.
• Whether you're a seasoned software developer, a no-code enthusiast, or you’ve never written code in your life, this book will walk you through the most actionable tactics to bootstrap a multimillion-dollar SaaS business.

Why do so many startups fail? According to entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, most failed startups make the fatal mistake of putting all their effort into perfecting their product at the cost of reaching out to potential users.

Instead, they should be putting half their resources into getting traction. Traction is the essential guide for any startup looking to stay ahead of the curve and start building a user base early in the game. The book offers no one-size-fits-all solution: every startup is unique, so no single method is guaranteed to generate traction. Instead, the authors identify nineteen different traction channels, from viral marketing to trade shows. They offer insights on how to exploit each one to its fullest potential, and provide a framework to test various channels and identify the best one for any startup.

What valuable company is nobody building?

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there.

Zero to Sold is a comprehensive and actionable guide through the four stages of a bootstrapped business: Preparation, Survival, Stability, and Growth.

From your first idea to successfully selling your business for life-changing amounts of money, this book will help you become a world-class entrepreneur. By focussing on your niche audience, finding their critical problem, and solving it with a product that your customers can't resist to pay for, you will learn how to create a recurring revenue engine that will make you financially independent.

It's easy to build software products. The hard part is turning them into viable businesses that stand the test of time. If you want to build a business that survives, you have to know what challenges you will encounter. Zero to Sold tells the story of a sustainable, bootstrapped software business that grew to thousands of customers before it was acquired.

Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur who has accomplished just that. He co-founded and grew an online teacher productivity SaaS business called FeedbackPanda to $55,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, just two years after founding the business. Arvid writes on The Bootstrapped Founder blog.

In Zero to Sold, Arvid shares his experiences, learnings, and insights from building a Software-as-a-Service business from start to finish. He shows what worked and what didn’t work. If you want to build your own bootstrapped business and stay sane while doing it, Zero to Sold will be your guide.

You will learn how to:

• explore and validate your idea before you jump into building a prototype that no one needs.
• find a well-defined audience, locate their critical problem, envision a solution that fits into their workflow, and build a product that makes them want to pay. Then, build a repeatable process of selling your product: a business.
• grow your business sustainably and make it sellable, even if you want to keep it forever. Or sell it for a life-changing amount of money. Either way, you can prepare.

Zero to Sold is the ultimate business documentation: a memoir, a manual, a journal, and a guide. It will help you validate your ideas, build your products, and grow your businesses, whatever stage you might be at right now.