项目作者： charlax
项目描述 ：
A list of articles, books, videos related to entrepreneurship
高级语言： Shell
项目地址: git://github.com/charlax/entrepreneurship-resources.git
Entrepreneurship resources
Table of Contents
Introduction
This repository offers a list of resources (books, articles, videos, etc.) related to entrepreneurship.
Items:
- 🧰 : list of resources
- 📖 : book
- 🎞 : video/movie extract/movie/talk
- 🏙 : slides/presentation
- ⭐️ : must-read
Generic resources
Books and playbooks
Articles
- 12 Things I Learned from Chris Dixon about Startups
- The 10 most common entrepreneurial mistakes I’ve seen students make
- Not really getting what a startup is
- Focusing on a junk market
- Why aren’t you starting TODAY?
- Pirates are in rare supply these days
- You have to put in more intensity
- Alter Ego vs. Alter Zero
- True fans vs. Too good friends
- Good money vs. bad donations
- Do you really want to be mentored? Incubated!?
- Is a startup really what you want right now?
- Product lessons from Dan Robinson (ex-CTO of Heap)
- You need to determine whether the pizza is burnt (e.g. did you execute poorly) or if the pizza was a bad idea.
- You should only do two things at your startup: “write code [and] talk to users.”
- The best way to build a useless product for months is by letting your excitement influence the conversations you have with users.
- Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy, Jason Cohen
- Didn’t talk to customers (and listen)
- No market need / Bad market
- Did not select a target audience, and clearly communicate the value proposition to them
- Too many things had to go right
- Founders / investors broke up
- Had no differentiation in the market
- Refused to seek the truth / refused to see the truth / refused to learn
- Launching too early / Launching too late
- Premature scaling
- Selling to the Enterprise before $20M ARR
- Unworkable business model / cannot be profitable
- Writing code instead of winning customers
- Expanding the target market before winning the target market / moving too quickly to the second product
- Lack of passion / endurance
- “Y Combinator’s pocket guide”
- Launch now
- Build something people want
- Do things that don’t scale
- Find the 90 / 10 solution
- Find 10-100 customers who love your product
- All startups are badly broken at some point
- Write code - talk to users
- “It’s not your money”
- Growth is the result of a great product not the precursor
- Don’t scale your team/product until you have built something people want
- Valuation is not equal to success or even probability of success
- Avoid long negotiated deals with big customers if you can
- Avoid big company corporate development queries - they will only waste time
- Avoid conferences unless they are the best way to get customers
- Pre-product market fit - do things that don’t scale: remain small/nimble
- Startups can only solve one problem well at any given time
- Founder relationships matter more than you think
- Sometimes you need to fire your customers (they might be killing you)
- Ignore your competitors, you will more likely die of suicide than murder
- Most companies don’t die because they run out of money
- Be nice! Or at least don’t be a jerk
- Get sleep and exercise - take care of yourself
Topics
Acquisition
Analysis
Attention to details
Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder
Attitude
B2B
Bootstrap
CEO
See also the section about founders
Communication
Compensation
Competition
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
Henry Ford
Customer obsession
Data (analytics)
Data-driven
See also the section about OKR in my engineering-management repository.
Decision-making
Design
Tools and resources:
Patterns:
Disruption
Culture
Entrepreneur
Ethics
Being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world
– G. K. Chesterton
Execution
- Building Faster
- Force Clear Priorities
- Focus on what will and won’t change
- Don’t think too far ahead
- Try Order of Magnitude Timeboxing
- Debug The Never-ending Tasks
- Clear Goals for Code Review
- Notice when you’re talking past each other
- Pick the right tools
- Things you’re allowed to do
Experimentation
- Experiments at Airbnb: a classic article about A/B testing
- The outside world often has a much larger effect on metrics than product changes do.
- How long do you need to run an experiment?
Financing
- The 40% Rule, AVC: “your annual revenue growth rate + your operating margin should equal 40%”
Focus
- Why Evernote Failed to Realize Its Potential
- In 2011, Evernote started dispersing itself with irrelevant products (e.g., Evernote Food, Moleskine partnership).
- In contrast, the main app was plagued with bugs.
- Before Growth
- I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?”
- Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target.
Founders
See also the section about CEO
- What We Look for in Founders, Paul Graham
- Determination
- Flexibility
- Imagination
- Naughtiness
- Friendship
- What we learned in studying the most effective founders, Google
- Treat people like volunteers
- Protect the team from distractions
- Minimize unnecessary micromanagement
- Invite disagreement
- Preserve interpersonal equity
- Keep pace with expertise
- Overcome discouragement
- Climbing the wrong hill, Chris Dixon
- Founder Mode, Paul Graham
- Coaching Founder Mode, SVPG
- Founder mode does not mean hands-off delegation, but it also does not mean micro-managing. It is a manifestation of the passion for the customer and the problems to be solved, with the goal of collaborating closely with product teams to discover and deliver winning solutions.
- The key to scaling successfully for a product model company is to have strong, founder-mode leaders that work to develop other strong, founder-mode leaders.
Finding an idea
- How To Decide What To Build, Daniel Gross (partner at Y Combinator).
- Are you put off building something because it already exists?: a great discussion on HackerNews. * “Next time you come up with that great idea, don’t Google it for a week. Let your mind fester on the idea, allow it to grow like many branches from a trunk.”
- Startup idea checklist
- First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge
- Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis.
- A common way that people limit what’s possible is to tell themselves that all the good ideas are taken. Yet, people have been saying this for hundreds of years — literally — and companies keep starting and competing with different ideas, variations, and strategies.
- The iPhone wasn’t first, it was better. Microsoft wasn’t the first to sell operating systems; it just had a better business model.
- Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible. * Many people mistakenly believe that creativity is something that only some of us are born with, and either we have it or we don’t. Fortunately, there seems to be ample evidence that this isn’t true.
- Don’t think to write, write to think
- Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”, HBR, Clayton M. Christensen
- Creativity faucet: Increase your creativity
As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
— Harrington Emerson
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
– Steve Jobs
Funding
Money is like gasoline on a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.
Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media founder, and CEO
Growth
Handbook
Hiring
Checkout the hiring section on my charlax/engineering-management.
Investor relations
IP (Intellectual Property) and patents
Learning
It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
– Elon Musk
Marketing
Check out the Sales section as well.
Resources:
Mental models
- Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
- Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to? Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend?
- The most satisfying thing about being an entrepreneur is that you can do what you think makes sense. That doesn’t mean don’t get advice. But get advice from people who know you, who you know, and most importantly, learn how to apply that advice.
@awilkinson: “Here’s the number I used to win the lottery” – Entrepreneurs giving advice
Metrics
- Success & Velocity
- You need two kinds of metrics in your business: success and velocity.
- Success metrics tell you whether you hit your goals
- Velocity metrics tell you how likely you are to hit future goals
- Selecting the right product metrics, Jason Cohen
- See example framework here: https://longform.asmartbear.com/product-metrics/007e7325.svg
- A product sits in the middle of a chain of events. Start by plotting those events in time, by actor, and the so-called “value” we might measure
- Distinguish between metrics you are satisficing (“guardrails”, e.g., cost, uptime, MTTR, etc.) vs. maximizing (e.g., NPS, usage, DAU/WAU, features)
- It can be a good idea to work on satisficing KPIs only when it slips in violation territory (e.g., outside of SLA error budget).
- Putting metrics in context solves the debate between metrics that the team can impact immediately, and the one business stakeholders care about. Revenue remains (usually) the most important metric, but it’s clearer that it can lag by a few weeks or months (Blackberry’s revenue continued increased for two years after the iPhone launched).
- A team must honestly and clearly measure both direct results and lagging outcomes. Not yet achieving the outcome is not a complete failure (luck is always involved), but a learning that will shape future work.
- The diagram makes clear that there should be a balance between customer-visible work (creating value through new features) and invisible ones (tech debt, reliability, security).
- If the customer’s business doesn’t thrive, they’ll stop paying for your software, no matter how good the software is. While of course the customer’s business is again a multi-factor, lagging metric, where nearly all the factors are outside of your control, it’s still ultimately the greatest form of value. Even if you can’t control it, you can notice the attributes of customers who tend to thrive, and direct your marketing, sales, and features towards that subset of the market, yielding higher growth and retention, and likely higher profitability.
- Do You Have Lightning In a Bottle? How to Benchmark Your Social App
- WAU, DAU, DAU/MAU ratio
- L-ness curve
- Measure what matters. Even if you don’t fully control it
- Do You Have Lightning In a Bottle? How to Benchmark Your Social App, Andreesen Horowitz
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.
— Eric Ries, Lean Startup
MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don’t need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.
— Eric Ries, Lean Startup
Mindset
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Mistakes
Pitch decks
Pivoting
Predicting the future
- Navigating the unpredictability of everything, Jason Cohen
- A strategy is required, even when it’s wrong
- The customer (behavior) is always (directionally) right
- Build a moat
- Have more than one way to succeed
- Bet on what will not change
- Decide quickly → get customer reactions quickly → learn quickly → make new decisions quickly.
Pricing
Prioritization
See also the Prioritization section on my engineering-management list
Processes
- Startup bibles: curation of internal processes and resources that successful companies have publicly shared, including pitch deck.
Product Architecture
- Modularity Theory - Christensen Institute : Christensen Institute
- Modularity standardizes the way by which components fit together — physically, mechanically, chemically and so on. The parts fit and work together in well-understood, crisply codified ways.
- Interdependency between parts requires the same organization to develop both components if it hopes to develop either component.
Product management
- Free Resources for Product Management
- Don’t trust agile alone to build successful products, UI patterns.
- Too much focus on what and when to build without asking why, creates tunnel vision.
- Shape Up: free book about product management from Basecamp.
- Building Products
- A product succeeds because it solves a problem for people. This sounds very basic, but it is the single most important thing to understand about building good products.
- Scaling Product Delivery: The “Dirty” Secret of High Performing Product Teams
- My favorite product management templates
- Effective Product Management
- Top 10 Reasons for Slow Velocity, Silicon Valley Product Group
- Lack of strong product owners
- Lack of strong project management
- Not including lead engineers during product discovery
- Lack of product vision and focus
- Inflexible product architecture / technical debt
- 50 Short Product Lessons
- Simple Product Management Tricks
- Perform an effort/impact analysis
- Timebox hard-to-estimate work
- Write playbooks before automation
- Product-Driven versus Customer-Driven
- How to develop product sense
- Observe people interacting with products
- Deconstruct everyday products
- Learn from great product thinkers
- Be curious about changes in technology and your domain
- Product development guiding principle: Use quality to generate speed
- “Elon Musk explains the 5-step process he tries to implement in his companies to ensure efficient engineering: 1. Make your requirements less dumb 2. Try very hard to delete parts or processes 3. Simplify/optimize 4. Accelerate cycle time 5. Automate
- Also in Musk’s 5 Step Design Process
- “Your requirements are definitely dumb, it does not matter who gave them to you”
- “If you’re not adding things back in at least 10% of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough”
- “Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimise a thing that should not exist”
- “If you’re digging your grave, don’t dig faster”
- As a user, I don’t want to.
- “As a user, I want to login.” The biggest user story lie every told.
- Startups don’t need product managers who are visionaries, VentureBeat
- How to Hire a Product Manager: the Classic Essay, Ken Norton
- Product Principles, The GitLab Handbook
Product managers:
- A Letter To A New Product Manager, The Coinbase Blog
- Forget the MBA. Here’s the fastest way to become a product manager
- What distinguishes the Top 1% of product managers from the Top 10%? (Quora)
- How to Hire a Product Manager, Ken Norton (and its 10th birthday look back)
- Startups don’t need product managers who are visionaries
- Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling Applied to Product Managers & UX Designers
- @markusmuller89/decoding-product-management-a-skill-matrix-to-grow-coach-assess-and-hire-world-class-pms-a385a4476866">Decoding Product Management — A skill matrix to grow, coach, assess, and hire world-class PMs
- Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager, Ben Horowitz.
- PM Starter Pack: how to get started in product management
- A pause to revisit: What’s the Product Manager’s role?
- The Product Manager’s ultimate responsibility is to create a solution that is valuable, viable, feasible, and usable.
- The Product Manager’s role is to understand customer problems very well, rally the team to build the winning product, and then iterate until it gets it right.
- @talraviv/7-uncommon-opinions-after-10-years-of-product-management-b3b5e69c255e">7 uncommon opinions after 10 years of product management
- The Lindy PM Standard of Performance, Florent Crivello. Started as a PM job description, ended up as an amazing set of advices and product principles.
Product-market fit
If a person does not already believe they have a problem, they will not be surfing the Internet looking for a solution, and even if they happen upon your website somehow, you cannot get them to spend money to solve a problem they don’t think they have.
– Jason Cohen
Product marketing
Prototyping
Rituals
Sales
- The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen
- Three Sales Mistakes Software Engineers Make
- How Jeff Johnson sold Nike’s first shoes
- Every time Johnson sold a pair of shoes he’d create an index card for that customer. He’d jot down all manner of minutiae details: shoe size, shoe preference, favourite distance, etc…
- Johnson used this handcrafted database to keep in touch with customers. He’d send birthday cards, training tips, notes of encouragement before big races.
- 23 rules to run a software startup with minimum hassle
- Recurring revenue is the way to go
- Stick everybody on a month-by-month plan
- Don’t do freemium
- Don’t apply for grants
- No patents
- Don’t do trade shows/conferences
- A Simple Sales Methodology for B2B SaaS Startups
- Five ways to build a $100 million business, The Angel VC
- Growth Handbook: How startups run B2B sales
- 🎞 Enterprise Sales Basics, Y Combinator
- 🎞 B2B Sales Q&A: B2B, B2B Sales, Y Combinator
- Why Big Deals Are Bad for Startups, Y Combinator
- 🎞 Enterprise Sales Basics, Y Combinator
- How to sell a B2B product
Check out those list of resources:
Scaling the business
- Scaling to $100 Million
- ARR is the North Star
- Win by Wide Margins
- Know Your Worth
- Plot Your Way to the Next Milestone
- Run the Public Playbook
Scaling the team (org & management)
Slack & comms
Security
Software as a service (SaaS)
Speed
Stories of startups
Strategy
- A New License to Future Proof the Commoditization of Data Integration lays out the rationale behind Airbyte’s business model and open sourcing strategy.
- If it helps individual contributors or small teams, then it should be free and open source; if it serves an organization’s needs, then it should be monetized.
- They use the Elastic License v2 (ELv2) to prevent “some huge companies [from taking] the Airbyte project and start offering a clone of Airbyte Cloud”.
- Value disciplines explained with examples: pick one of customer intimacy, operational excellence, product leadership
- Kung Fu, Jason Cohen
- I don’t like freemium; I want to learn from people who care enough to pay, not from the 20x more who don’t.
- “MVPs” are too M to be V. They’re a selfish ploy, tricking people who thought they were customers into being alpha testers
- A startup has to be so excellent at one or two key things, that they can screw up everything else up and not die.
- If you have more than three priorities, you have none.
- Your values are tested only when the decisions are tough
- Pricing determines everything else
- Price so that 100-200 [clients] is enough for all the founders to work full-time.
- Early on, your job is to validate that there’s a business, not to validate that your idea is good or that a pain exists
- People don’t value their time. They will do crazy things to save $2
- If you can’t double your prices, you’re in a weak market position
- A good strategy is to be the System of Record for something
- It’s more powerful to be 10x better at one thing, then to shore up ten weaknesses.
- Design is important, yet many of the $1B+ SaaS public companies have poor design. So, other things are more important.
- The only cause of Writer’s Block is high standards. Type garbage. Editing is 10x easier than writing.
- “Everyone thinks of changing the world. No one thinks of changing themselves.” —Leo Tolstoy.
- The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategies, Jason Cohen
- Reversing weakness is hard, painful, likely to result in something merely neutral, not great, and is at high risk of failing completely
- Leveraging differentiated strengths
- Leveraging durable differentiated strengths
- What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround?
- In Defense of Strategy
- How to Help Your Company “Speak” Strategy
- Speak the unspoken strategy
Support
Surveys
Teams
UX
UX Design
See also the relevant section on my professional-programming list
- Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes, Nielsen Norman Group
- Jakob Nielsen’s Ten
Usability Heuristics (PDF) and article, 1994
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
- Help and documentation
- A comprehensive (and honest) list of UX clichés
- Why Everyone Should Read Customer Support Emails
- 4 Rules for Intuitive UX
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example
- 10 Usability Heuristics Every Designer Should Know
- 📚 Selected Books on Design, User eXperience, Mobile, Accessibility & more, Stéphanie Walter. Includes books about UX research, UX design, psychology, information architecture, content strategy, web design, typography, methods, collaboration, mobile, accessibility…
- BATUX - Using a UX process to redesign Batman’s classic outfit: a very engaging way to learn about the UX process.
- Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool
- Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit
Resources:
- UX Frameworks: A resource to find and share frameworks for design research, synthesis, and ideation.
UX Research
Velocity
- How to ship fast
- Protect momentum
- Beware of prioritization
- Stay close to the design
- You should be wrong sometimes
- Only doers can plan what you work on
- Always plan the How
- There is no quality vs. speed tradeoff
- Capture inspiration
Wireframing
Writing
See also my other lists.
Other lists
My other lists
