The best books for first-time founders

If you read one book before starting a company, read this one. Ries's definition of a startup as a search under uncertainty replaces the plan with a loop, and his vocabulary, validated learning, the minimum viable product, vanity metrics, the pivot, is the language every other book on this list assumes. Its method is simple to state and hard to follow: write your riskiest assumption, test it with the smallest possible product, measure by cohort, and decide on schedule whether to pivot or persevere.

Its weakness is that it is a book about process, and a founder who has never talked to a customer will find it abstract until they have. Read it first, then read The Mom Test, and the two together become concrete.

The shortest book on this list and the one with the highest ratio of use to pages. Fitzpatrick's three rules for customer conversations, talk about their life instead of your idea, ask about the past instead of the future, and talk less, are the difference between a founder who collects compliments and one who collects facts. His test of a good conversation, whether the customer commits something that costs them, is the only honest signal a pre-product founder can get.

It is deliberately narrow: it will not tell you what to build or how to reach customers, only how to find out what is true. That narrowness is why it works, and why it belongs in the first week, before any code exists.

Thiel's book supplies what the process books leave out: where the idea has to come from. His contrarian question, what important truth do very few people agree with you on, is the test of whether a founder has a secret or a copy, and his rule to start with a market small enough to own completely is the most practical advice in the book. His economics, that competition destroys profit and that valuable companies escape it, will annoy some readers and change how the rest think about markets.

It is a book of claims rather than a method, and it is best read alongside the Lean Startup rather than instead of it; Thiel tells you what kind of idea to look for, Ries tells you how to test whether you have found it.

The book that answers the question first-time founders ask too late: how will customers find this? Weinberg and Mares found that almost every failed startup had a product and lacked a channel, and their book catalogues the nineteen ways a startup can reach customers and gives a method, Bullseye, for testing three cheaply and committing to the one that works. The fifty percent rule, half your time on traction from day one, is the single change of habit most likely to save a first company.

The channel chapters are case studies plus mechanics, and some of the specific tactics have aged; the method has not. Read the first third carefully and the channel chapters as a reference.

Rework is the corrective on this list: a collection of short, blunt chapters arguing that most startup advice, about planning, funding, scale, features and meetings, is wrong. Its useful ideas are subtraction, planning is guessing, constraints are an advantage, build half a product not a half-assed one, underdo the competition, and launch now, and they are exactly the ideas a founder in the build trap needs to hear.

It asserts rather than argues, and its authority is its authors' own small, profitable, independent company, which not every founder wants to build. Read it when you catch yourself adding one more feature before launch.

The one book here about what founding feels like rather than how to do it. Horowitz ran a company through the dot-com crash and wrote down the things the management books leave out: the Struggle, the period every founder hits when nothing works; the advice that nobody cares why, so play the hand you were dealt; the rule that a company must be able to hear bad news; and the priority of people, then products, then profits. First-time founders should read it before they need it, because in the Struggle there is no time to read.

It begins where the other five end, after the search has produced a company, and it is the book on this list most likely to be reread.