Sunday, November 16, 2014

The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch

The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch

It's getting faster, cheaper and easier to start a bootstrapped business all the time.  This book pushes the concept even further with the idea of launching a business in a week.

To be blunt about it, I think Rob Walling's Start Small, Stay Small is the book to beat in this space, and I'm not sure this one does - Robs seems to have more specific, tactical advice.  However, 7 Day Startup does have a lot of useful suggestions, it's a quick read, and it's a bit more up to date than Rob's book, so overall I thought it was pretty good.  Another plus is that it really is meant for people interested in bootstrapping a company from nothing, rather than the VC-funded Silicon Valley types, who are operating on what seems like another planet, at times.  There are fewer books aimed at the bootstrapping crowd.

One thing I liked about this book is that it mentions a lot of Dan's failures. Actually, I don't like the fact that he failed, as he seems like a nice guy, but some people tend to only include the positive bits of their story, making it look like they moved from success to success.  You get to thinking that they're not normal and were destined for success, so maybe their advice is not that useful to a regular guy such as yourself.  A lot of the things he worked on that were not successful are very illustrative of things to avoid as a bootstrapper.

At $4, the book is worth it if it saves you even a few hours of hassle or problems.  I liked the bit about problem customers:
My team prides themselves in sniffing out potentially difficult customers prior to sign-up and scaring them off.
He doesn't, however, give specific advice on how to do this, or even how they do it in their particular business.

Additionally, he has a bunch of resources associated with the book here:

http://wpcurve.com/the-7-day-startup-resources/



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