Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Chris Anderson - 2009
Reveals how to run an online business profitably in spite of the Internet's inherently free culture, disseminating the principles of a ''priceless economy'' in six categories that pertain to advertising, labor exchange, and advanced-version fees.
One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
Richard L. Brandt - 2011
It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: "Buy now with one click."Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.Richard Brandt charts Bezos's rise from computer nerd to world- changing entrepreneur. His success can be credited to his forward-looking insights and ruthless business sense. Brandt explains: Why Bezos decided to allow negative product reviews, correctly guessing that the earned trust would outweigh possible lost sales. Why Amazon zealously guards some patents yet freely shares others. Why Bezos called becoming profitable the "dumbest" thing they could do in 1997. How Amazon.com became one of the only dotcoms to survive the bust of the early 2000s. Where the company is headed next.Through interviews with Amazon employees, competitors, and observers, Brandt has deciphered how Bezos makes decisions. The story of Amazon's ongoing evolution is a case study in how to reinvent an entire industry, and one that anyone in business today ignores at their peril.
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
Ashlee Vance - 2015
Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits. Vance uses Musk's story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the nation of inventors and creators who led the modern world for a century still compete in an age of fierce global competition? He argues that Musk is an amalgam of legendary inventors and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs. More than any other entrepreneur today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as the visionaries of the golden age of science-fiction fantasy
Startup Playbook
Sam Altman
Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies.Then we thought we should just give it to everyone.This is meant for people new to the world of startups. Most of this will not be new to people who have read a lot of what YC partners have written--the goal is to get it into one place.There may be a part II on how to scale a startup later—this mostly covers how to start one.
TOP 101 Growth Hacks: The best growth hacking ideas that you can put into practice right away
Aladdin Happy - 2015
First growth hacks I was compressing into a short form and keeping in a private document. And then the crazy idea hit my head — establish an e-mail subscription service, that sends every day one short growth hack. This is how growthhackingidea.com was born. After 3 weeks there were 1700 subscribers ($0 marketing cost). I was reading, choosing tasty growth hacks, I eager to test and implement. After 3 months there were 17 000 subscribers ($0 marketing cost). People from companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, TechStars, Hubspot, Coca-Cola, Indiegogo, Disney, 500 startups, LinkedIn, Adobe became our subscribers. After reaching this milestone I decided to put the best collected growth hacks into a book + add a portion of exclusive growth hacks, never released on GrowthHackingIdea.com. This book consists of two parts: 1. Introduction, how GrowthHackingIdea.com started (+ bonus growth hacks) 2. A list of TOP 101 growth hacks. Divided into AARRR+ sections: Before Product-Market Fit, Hustling, Copywriting, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral: Before product/market fit #1. Hack your mindset with CEO of Pinterest #2. How to get your first customers #3. Are you sure about your product/market fit? Hustling #4. Leveraging dead competitors #5. Get emails of followers of your competitors #6. Tinder`s early days growth hack #7. Become an alternative to your competitors #8. The TechCrunch journalists` emails #9. Find journalists for your startup instantly #10. Pre-heat the journalists #11. Hack the Press #12. Hack Product Hunt #13. How a $2B company gained its initial users Copyrighting #14. A copy that converts #15. 9 cold emailing rules #16. 7 engaging storytelling formulas #17. 7 perfect headline formulas #18. The magic of headlines #19. Hack persuasive copywriting #20. Copywriting tip to quadruple conversions #21. Replace one word to get 90% more clicks Acquisition #22. Parasite SEO (white hat) #23. A real keyword strategy #24. Hidden early stage growth hack of Airbnb #25. Turn LinkedIn contacts into a list of emails #26. I hardly forced myself to share this hack #27. 200K users a month from long tail phrases #28. Boost conversions of your Tweets #29. How to collect emails on Twitter #30. Hack Twitter #31. Creating Pinterest pins that drive results #32. Best growth hack by Laxman Papineni #33. Which ads perform best for your competitors? #34. Piggybacking tweak to earn a ROI #35. Hack ideas for the 2nd largest search engine #36. Hack Facebook ads #37. 5 SEO hacks for the 2nd largest search engine #38. Disrupt the cost of YouTube video marketing Activation #39. Easy to understand tutorials via email #40. Boost your email opt-in rate by 22% #41. Little trick increased conversions by 26% #42. Evernote’s onboarding framework #43. Increase email opt-ins by 70% in 5 minutes #44. Quiz your audience #45. Drawbacks & competition increase conversions #46. Negative social proof for persuasion #47. 10-second trick #48. How I doubled my app downloads #49. How typography affects conversions #50. Save your bounced visitors #51. Turn invisibles into leads #52.
The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
Scott Belsky - 2018
Creating something from nothing is an unpredictable journey. The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go. We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood. Broken into three sections with 100+ lessons, this no-nonsense book will help you: • Endure the roller coaster of successes and failures by strengthening your resolve, embracing the long-game, and short-circuiting your reward system to get to the finish line. • Optimize what’s working so you can improve the way you hire, better manage your team, and meet your customers’ needs. • Finish strong and avoid the pitfalls many entrepreneurs make, so you can overcome resistance, exit gracefully, and continue onto your next creative endeavor with ease. With insightful interviews from today’s leading entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and executives, as well as Belsky’s own experience working with companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, and sweetgreen, The Messy Middle will outfit you to find your way through the hardest parts of any bold project or new venture.
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
Michael Lewis - 1999
He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. Lewis also found much more, and the result—the best-selling book The New New Thing—is an ingeniously conceived history of the Internet revolution.
BYJU's Miracle Journey: from 8 Students to $8 Billion (Indian Unicorns Book 1)
ABHISH B - 2020
3 Months to No.1: The "No-Nonsense" SEO Playbook for Getting Your Website Found on Google
Will Coombe - 2017
The same ones he used to build a Top SEO Agency in London. 7 Years & 500 clients later, he hands you the Playbook."SEO For 2020 Onwards"Is This You?Total SEO Virgin?Entrepreneur?Business or Blog Owner with Big Plans?Or Perhaps THIS is You...Mom & Pop store ownerHard worker in need of technical knowledgeFrustrated Google Ads spenderSEO professional looking for time-saving hacksAffiliate marketerSEO forum & blog reader in need of some structure...If So, This Book Was Written For You"Features FREE Video Series + SEO Blueprint"What Does This Book Deliver?Over 3 hours of invaluable 'walk through' video tutorials to SHOW you what to do, as well provide you with a step-by-step, week-by-week SEO Blueprint and Checklist.If you've got a solid work ethic, you're eager to learn, and your business model is sound, '3 Months to No.1' will give you all the tools and know-how required to get your website to the very top of Google where the profit is. Through a refreshingly no-nonsense plain English approach to SEO, successful London SEO Agency owner Will Coombe unveils how to...Discover SEO's greatest secret - that it isn't rocket science!Save thousands by doing SEO yourself, or with your in-house teamFilter profitable traffic to your siteLearn what on earth to do with your social mediaEffectively direct and monitor people doing SEO for youGain the industry knowledge to call out anyone full of 'BS'Who is Will Coombe?Before co-founding a successful Digital Marketing Agency in London over 7 years ago, Will Coombe flew passengers round the world for a living. Working for a major UK Airline he helped over 250,000 people reach their final destination. In the end though, his was Google. Now a professional speaker on the subject of making businesses profitable through SEO, Will reveals how and why he went from 'airline', to 'online'; and how you too can leverage his years of experience getting clients' websites to the very top of Google.He may have hung up his wings, but Will's years of experience making technical jargon easily accessible to anyone who entered his cockpit is put to good use in '3 Months to No.1'."Learn. Take Action. Get Results."A Carefully Curated SEO Guide for 2020 OnwardsThis book doesn't hold 'secrets' you can't find scattered throughout the Internet. Instead, it cuts through the noise and guides you to the ultimate return on time investment for SEO. It tells you what to focus on and when. '3 Months to No.1' finally gives you a step-by-step Playbook. One with the fresh and down to earth approach of someone who came from no background in SEO or digital marketing at all."How High Will Your Revenue Go in 12 Weeks?"You'll Discover...- Online marketing 101- Personal advice for your business- How to uncover money-making keywords- Configuring WordPress for SEO success- How to nail the technical elements- How to win links- A crash course in content marketing- Social media account use (finally!)- SEO if you're a local business- eCommerce SEO (inc. Shopify, Magento, & WooCommerce)- Google penalty diagnosis & avoidance- Why it's quicker to go 'white hat' and not try to cheat Google- + more..."Grab a Copy Now..."
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Jessica Livingston - 2001
These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do--create value--more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.
Lean Inception: How to Align People and Build the Right Product
Paulo Caroli - 2018
The Lean Startup movement is very promising, but for many teams it ends up translating into an important question: ”Yeah, but what to build ?” “In ThoughtWorks, our response has been a process called an inception. We gather together a good sample of the people who will be affected by the product and have an intensive session to set an initial direction, using a series of exercises focusing on collaboration and the capture of broad goals. We don't attempt a detailed specification, as that is exactly the kind of thing that becomes out of date as soon as code hits production. But we do want to understand what kind of outcomes we are hoping for, the features that we think will drive these outcomes, and how to assess the effectiveness of our product. With The Lean Inception, Paulo has captured his experience in running these inceptions over the last decade. In particular it's focused on his work to boil the inception down to its essence, concentrating the activity on a single, if very intensive, week of work. Paulo shares how he makes this work, through writing a product vision, capturing personas, understanding the user journeys, and developing high-level features. The result isn't a detailed plan of work, which we find quickly rots into irrelevance. It is a guiding set of goals to set us off in the right direction. It doesn't plan out a final product, with all the features that our users will need, instead it focuses on an initial product that we can release and learn from - the Minimum Viable Product. “ – Martin Fowler, Chief Cientist at ThoughtWorks
The Cult of We: Wework, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
Eliot Brown - 2021
Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion--at least on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the 6-foot-five Neumann, who grew up in part on a kibbutz, looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation, with its fluid jobs and lax office culture. He called it WeWork. Though the company was merely subleasing amenity-filled office space to freelancers and small startups, Neumann marketed it like a revolutionary product--and investors swooned.As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann's ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn't just an office space provider, he boasted. It would build schools, create WeWork cities, even colonize Mars. Could he, Neumann wondered from the ice bath he'd installed in his office, become the first trillionaire or a world leader? In pursuit of its founder's grandiose vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital. In late 2019, just weeks before WeWork's highly publicized IPO, a Hail Mary effort to raise cash, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company--but still was poised to walk away a billionaire.Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork's extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks, from a Japanese billionaire with designs on becoming the Warren Buffet of tech, to leaders at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs who seemed intoxicated by a Silicon Valley culture where sensible business models lost out to youthful CEOs who promised disruption. Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley unicorns? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive account of WeWork's unraveling.
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
James C. Collins - 1994
It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary products or visionary market insights. Nor is it about just having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies." So write Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in this groundbreaking book that shatters myths, provides new insights, and gives practical guidance to those who would like to build landmark companies that stand the test of time.Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?"What separates General Electric, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and Philip Morris from their rivals? How, for example, did Procter & Gamble, which began life substantially behind rival Colgate, eventually prevail as the premier institution in its industry? How was Motorola able to move from a humble battery repair business into integrated circuits and cellular communications, while Zenith never became dominant in anything other than TVs? How did Boeing unseat McDonnell Douglas as the world's best commercial aircraft company -- what did Boeing have that McDonnell Douglas lacked?By answering such questions, Collins and Porras go beyond the incessant barrage of management buzzwords and fads of the day to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished out-standing companies. They also provide inspiration to all executives and entrepreneurs by destroying the false but widely accepted idea that only charismatic visionary leaders can build visionary companies.Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the twenty-first century and beyond.
Product Strategy for High Technology Companies
Michael E. McGrath - 1994
More than 250 examples from technological leaders including IBM, Compaq, and Apple--plus a new focus on growth strategies and on Internet businesses--define how high-tech companies can use product strategy and product platform strategy for competitiveness, profitability, and growth in the Internet age.
The Seven Figure Agency Roadmap: How to Build a Million Dollar Digital Marketing Agency
Josh Nelson - 2021
Increase your income, work when and how you want, get your clients get incredible results...... and live your desired lifestyle. The Seven Figure Agency is designed to solve these issues you may be experiencing such as: • Too many agencies hit an income ceiling, and never make the kind of money (or the kind of impact) that they are capable of. They get stuck at one of the 3 plateaus: Startup, Struggle or even Success • Most agencies blame themselves, and try to work on their MINDSET — But nothing changes because it’s not your mindset that’s the problem. It’s the MODEL that needs to change. • The model that you bought into when you started your agency business is completely unscalable (Manual prospecting to get a few leads, chasing prospects down rather than getting them to come to you... and living off of project revenue so there’s never consistent income or time for you). • For the last 5 years, the author has been working with a select group of agencies, taking them from Struggle to Success, Scale and Significance. Josh Nelson has a very new approach and he shares the very best of what is working in his business & for the agencies he works with to build million dollar agencies. This book is essential reading for agencies of all types and experience-levels and is of particular value for anyone looking to start a digital marketing agency to short cut growing pains and accelerate their growth to Seven Figures & Beyond. Forget the old concept of a general, digital marketing agency that takes years to establish - there’s no need to wait when you have The Seven Figure Agency Roadmap. Whether your dream is to control your schedule or earn six figures in a month, The Seven Figure Agency Roadmap is your manual. This set of turn-by-turn directions to building a digital agency teaches: • How Josh went from virtually bankrupt to running a hypergrowth agency that made the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing companies in the Untied States 4 years in a row • How to build the team that will manage the day-to-day operations • How top agency owners grow to seven figures within a year • How to add $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue to your agency every single month • How to rapidly establish authority in any niche, so clients ask to work with you When you purchase the book you get access to a workbook that help you put the ideas into action: • Multiple case studies & long form interviews with members of Seven Figure Agency Coaching who have grown their revenue to seven figures, hired teams to replace themselves, or sold their agencies for a nice profit • Josh’s templates you can copy for setting goals, designing your marketing, and tracking performance • How the Seven Figure Agency principles create a life shaped to your goals