The book has a rich mix of illustrations and anecdotal stories that tells you how you can become an entrepreneur even if you are a student, home-maker or have a full time job and if you are risk-averse.Read this book if you are about to launch your first start-up, or if you’re thinking of doing so.The road-map explained here will:- Tell you how you can realize your dream of being an entrepreneur even if you have a full-time job- Provide you with a widely tested and proven methodology that will dramatically reduce your risk of failure- Help your offering to sell and be profitable before any significant investments are made- Rapidly increase the valuation of your start-up before you take outside funding- Help you create a start-up that YOU would enjoy building — one that’s aligned with your goals in life and leverages your personalstrengths

    You can get a cup at any caf, sandwich bar or restaurant anywhere. So how did Starbucks manage to reinvent coffee as a whole new experience, and create a hugely successful brand in the process? The Starbucks Story tells the brand's story from its origins in a Seattle fish market to its growing global presence today. This is a story that has unfolded quickly - at least in terms of conventional business development. Starbucks is a phenomenon. Unknown 15 years ago, it now ranks among the 100 most valuable brands in the world. It has become the quintessential brand of the modern age, built around the creation of an experience that can be consistently reproduced across the world. Originally published in 2004 as 'My Sister's A Barista: How they made Starbucks a home away from home', this new 2012 edition has been updated to bring the brand up to date.

    

    Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, often the more elaborately crafted a business plan, the more likely the venture is to flop.Why? Most plans waste too much ink on numbers and devote too little to information that really matters to investors. The result? Investors discount them.In How to Write a Great Business Plan, William A. Sahlman shows how to avoid this all-too-common mistake by ensuring that your plan assesses the factors critical to every new venture:· The people—the individuals launching and leading the venture and outside parties providing key services or important resources· The opportunity—what the business will sell and to whom, and whether the venture can grow and how fast· The context—the regulatory environment, interest rates, demographic trends, and other forces shaping the venture's fate· Risk and reward—what can go wrong and right, and how the entrepreneurial team will respondTimely in this age of innovation, How to Write a Great Business Plan helps you give your new venture the best possible chances for success.

    Writing in their trademark witty, fast-paced style, advertising gurus Ries and Trout explain how to:Make and position an industry leader so that its name and message wheedles its way into the collective subconscious of your market-and stays therePosition a follower so that it can occupy a niche not claimed by the leaderAvoid letting a second product ride on the coattails of an established one.Positioning also shows you how to:Use leading ad agency techniques to capture the biggest market share and become a household nameBuild your strategy around your competition's weaknessesReposition a strong competitor and create a weak spotUse your present position to its best advantageChoose the best name for your productDetermine when-and why-less is moreAnalyze recent trends that affect your positioning.Ries and Trout provide many valuable case histories and penetrating analyses of some of the most phenomenal successes and failures in advertising history. Revised to reflect significant developments in the five years since its original publication, Positioning is required reading for anyone in business today.

    Thank you for your feedback and patience.From Andrew Warner:I first interviewed Paul Graham after I heard something shocking from Alexis Ohanian, a founder whose company was funded by Graham's Y Combinator. Alexis came to Mixergy to tell the story of how he launched and sold Reddit.If you're a founder, you know the kind of problems that founders have, right? Figuring out what product to create, how to build it, how to get users to try it, etc.Well Alexis didn't seem to have those problems, or at least they weren't as challenging for him as they were for most of the other 600 entrepreneurs I interviewed on Mixergy.Why? Because Paul Graham helped him launch his business.How did Graham make Reddit's launch easier and more successful than other companies' founding? How did he do the same for hundreds of other startups? And, more importantly, what can you learn from his experiences to grow your business?The book you're holding has those answers.Use what you're about to learn to build your successful startup. After you do, I hope you'll let me interview you so other founders can learn from your experience, the way you're about to benefit from Graham's.About Hyperink, the publisher:Hyperink is the easiest way for anyone to publish a beautiful, high-quality book.We work closely with subject matter experts to create each eBook. We cover topics ranging from higher education to job recruiting, from Android apps marketing to barefoot running.If you have interesting knowledge that people are willing to pay for, especially if you've already produced content on the topic, please reach out to us! There's no writing required and it's a unique opportunity to build your own brand and earn royalties.

    500 CEOs.An instant classic, this revised and updated edition of the phenomenal bestseller dispels the myths about starting your own business. Small business consultant and author Michael E. Gerber, with sharp insight gained from years of experience, points out how common assumptions, expectations, and even technical expertise can get in the way of running a successful business.Gerber walks you through the steps in the life of a business—from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed—and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether or not it is a franchise. Most importantly, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.The E-Myth Revisited will help you grow your business in a productive, assured way.

    The consensus is clear: MBA programs are a waste of time and money. Even the elite schools offer outdated assembly-line educations about profit-and-loss statements and PowerPoint presentations. After two years poring over sanitized case studies, students are shuffled off into middle management to find out how business really works.Josh Kaufman has made a business out of distilling the core principles of business and delivering them quickly and concisely to people at all stages of their careers. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. In The Personal MBA, he shares the essentials of sales, marketing, negotiation, strategy, and much more.True leaders aren't made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed. Read this book and in one week you will learn the principles it takes most people a lifetime to master.

    So what separates the startups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants?The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. The objective of Blitzscaling is not to go from zero to one, but from one to one billion -as quickly as possible.When growing at a breakneck pace, getting to next level requires very different strategies from those that got you to where you are today. In a book inspired by their popular class at Stanford Business School, Hoffman and Yeh reveal how to navigate the necessary shifts and weather the unique challenges that arise at each stage of a company's life cycle, such as: how to design business models for igniting and sustaining relentless growth; strategies for hiring and managing; how the role of the founder and company culture must evolve as the business matures, and more.Whether your business has ten employees or ten thousand, Blitzscaling is the essential playbook for winning in a world where speed is the only competitive advantage that matters.

    Whether your goal is to grow one of your side projects into a marketable business, to improve the revenues of your current brand, or to better the brand of the company you work for, The Marketing Blueprint is what you need. This step-by-step guide compiles all essential marketing strategies, such as: • How to market, from forming marketing strategies, to business development, to improving your selling skills • How to become a more efficient marketer, by understanding and using leverage effectively • How to market yourself and your brand's people, to ensure better business opportunities • How to create brands and products that make people talk and stay relevant for years To top it all off, this book has more than 30 lessons of practical content that you can use right away in your business. Longer hours and bigger textbooks aren't the answer to your success. By being the smartest marketer around, you can ensure you will grow your business' revenues. That’s exactly what The Marketing Blueprint is all about.

    In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

    Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips).   Award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz has interviewed more than 200 highly successful entrepreneurs to uncover amazing true stories like these. In How I Built This, he shares tips for every entrepreneur’s journey: from the early days of formulating your idea, to raising money and recruiting employees, to fending off competitors, to finally paying yourself a real salary. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting their own business or wondered how trailblazing entrepreneurs made their own dreams a reality.

    Under Andrew Grove's leadership, Intel has become the world's largest computer chipmaker, the 5th most admired company in America, and the 7th most profitable company among the Fortune 500. Few CEOs can claim this level of success. Grove attributes much of it to the philosophy and strategy he has learned the hard way as he steered Intel through a series of potential major disasters. There are moments in any business when massive change occurs, when all the rules of business shift fast, furiously and forever. Grove calls such moments strategic inflection points (SIPs), and he has lived through several. They can be set off by almost anything - by mega competition, an arcane change in regulations, or by a seemingly modest change in technology. They are not always easy to spot - but you can't hide from them. Intel's first SIP was when the Japanese started producing better-quality, lower-cost memory chips. It took Grove three years and huge losses to recognize that he had to rethink and reposition the company to become, once again, leader in its field.Grove extrapolates the lessons he has learned from this and other SIPs - for instance the drama of the Pentium flaw, and the SIP brought on by the Internet - to reveal a unique insight into the management of change. He recounts strategies from other companies and examines his own record of success and failure. Only the Paranoid Survive is a classic lesson in leadership skills that every manager in every industry will benefit from. Every manager must assume that something will change - very soon.

    Most importantly, it's about how to avoid making these same mistakes yourself.In The San Francisco Fallacy, serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jonathan Siegel looks at the 10 biggest fallacies that run through startup culture. Over his many years launching companies, he's fallen victim to what he now recognizes as a series of common errors, misconceptions that bedevil startups to this day. But he also learned how to sidestep and surmount many of these challenges.After multiple eight-figure exits and other startup successes, Jonathan began to see the deeper fallacies in which his failures took root. His biggest career successes, on the other hand, seemed to come when he and his teams went against the tide and did everything "wrong."This book is an examination of the popular belief system about startups. At its heart is a series of challenges to years of accumulated startup orthodoxy. What emerges is not just a critique but an inspiring call--to anyone trying to build a successful business--for a broader kind of critical thinking.

    Godin shows that winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt--until they commit to beating the right Dip.Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out fun...then gets really hard, and not much fun at all. You might be in a Dip--a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it's really a Cul-de-Sac--a total dead end. What really sets superstars apart is the ability to tell the two apart.Winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. If you can beat the Dip to be the best, you'll earn profits, glory, and long-term security. Whether you're an intern or a CEO, this fun little book will help you figure out if you're in a Dip that's worthy of your time, effort, and talents. The old saying is wrong--winners do quit, and quitters do win.