Book picks similar to
Pitching Hacks: How to pitch startups to investors by Venture Hacks
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The Starbucks Story
John Simmons - 2005
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.
The Innovator's Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization
Nathan Furr - 2014
But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice.Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovator’s DNA—which Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideas—this book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success.Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the “how”—how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use.Whether you’re launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.
The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed
Ash AliAsh Ali - 2020
An unfair advantage is simply the element that gives you an edge over your competition.This innovative book shows how to identify your own unfair advantages and apply them to any project. Drawing on over two decades of hands-on experience, includingas the first Marketing Director of Just Eat, the authors offer a unique framework forassessing your external circumstances in addition to your internal strengths.Hard work and grit aren't enough, so this book explores the importance of money,intelligence, location, education, expertise, status and luck in the journey to success.From starting your company, to gaining traction, raising funds and growth hacking, The Unfair Advantage helps you look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn't realise you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.
Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos - 2020
Spanning a range of topics across business and public policy, from innovation and customer obsession to climate change and outer space, this book provides a rare glimpse into how Bezos thinks about the world and where the future might take us.Written in a direct, down-to-earth style, Invent and Wander offers readers a master class in business values, strategy, and execution:● The importance of a Day 1 mindset● Why “it’s all about the long term”● What it really means to be customer obsessed● How to start new businesses and create significant organic growth in an already successful company● Why culture is an imperative● How a willingness to fail is closely connected to innovation● What the Covid-19 pandemic has taught usEach insight offers new ways of thinking through today’s challenges—and more importantly, tomorrow’s—and the never-ending urgency of striving ahead, never resting on one’s laurels. Everyone from CEOs to entrepreneurs just setting up shop to the millions who use Amazon’s products and services in their homes or businesses will come to understand the principles that have driven the success of one of the most important innovators of our time.
The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future
Chris Guillebeau - 2012
Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back. There are many others like Chris – those who’ve found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful. Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn’t depend on shelving what you currently do. You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful. In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he’s chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies. In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment. Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who’ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment. It’s all about finding the intersection between your “expertise” – even if you don’t consider it such -- and what other people will pay for. You don’t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees. All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid. Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick. Among Chris’s key principles: if you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish – sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins. In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold. Today, we know that it’s up to us to change our lives. And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs. This remarkable book will start you on your way.
Proven Billionaires' Formula
Adwa AlDakheel - 2013
Whether you were maturely young or immaturely old or a little bit of both, this book was written for you to understand that it is never too soon or too late to start your journey towards success.This is for the child you once were - when you believed everything was possible and nothing was out of reach; may this book be a leading factor in that child's rebirth.
Breakdown: The Inside Story of the Rise and Fall of Heenan Blaikie
Norman Bacal - 2017
When it collapsed in February 2014, lawyers across Canada and the business community were stunned. What went wrong? Why did so many lawyers run for the exit? How did it implode? What is it that holds professional partnerships together?This is the story of the rise and fall of a great company by the ultimate insider, Norman Bacal, who served as managing partner until a year before the firm's demise. Breakdown takes readers into the boardroom offices during the heady growth of a legal empire built from the ground up over 40 years. We see how after a change of leadership tensions erupted between the Toronto and Montreal offices, and between the hard-driving lawyers themselves. It is a story about the extraordinary fragility of the legal partnership, but it's also a classic business story, a cautionary tale of the perils of ignoring a firm's culture and vision.Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USJAX-NONE<!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment--><!--EndFragment-->
Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists)
Basil Peters - 2009
Very little has been written about exits - the emphasis is usually on starting, financing and growing technology companies.Most of the earlier books on exit strategies were written for business owners who wanted to retire. More recently, there have been a number of books written about exit transactions for venture capitalists. This is not surprising considering that most venture capital (VC) agreements give the VCs all of the control in deciding when and how all shareholders benefit from an exit transaction.This book is about the large number of other exits - the ones that are not driven by the VCs. Exit opportunities have changed dramatically in the past few years. Today, it’s more likely that a company will be sold without ever having an investment from a venture capitalist.Exits are also happening much earlier than before. The largest number of exit transactions today are in the under $30-million valuation range. These exits are often completed when companies are only two or three years from startup.The goal of this book is to help entrepreneurs and angel investors have more successful, more frequent and more profitable exits.
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.
Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret
Raymond Fong - 2017
Raymond and Chad's framework, the ASP(TM), is an easy to understand blueprint that empowers any business to apply growth hacking. The ASP(TM) was developed through their work in the tech community and used to produce high-leverage, scalable growth for companies in a variety of industries including several companies featured on ABC's TV show Shark Tank. If you're looking for creative, cost-effective ways to grow your business, then ASP(TM) is the answer.
Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process
Kenneth S. Rubin - 2012
Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin's experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum's roles, artifacts, and activities.
Essential Scrum
will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.
Startup Weekend
Marc Nager - 2011
Startup Weekend, the book, contains best practices, lessons learned, and empowering examples derived from the organization's experiences for individuals and small organizations to follow as they launch businesses. Each of the key beliefs outlined has been tested by Startup Weekend and has yielded powerful results.The principles described in each chapter will give any business idea a greater chance for success.Chapter topics include trust and empowerment, flexible organizational structures, the power of experiential education, action-based networking, and much more Describes consequences for startup development as entrepreneurs and founders begin doing much more, even faster Profiles successful Startup Weekend companies, including two powerful examples: Memolane, an application that captures a user's online life in one timeline making it easy for users to travel back in time and relive memories; and Foodspotting, a mobile and desktop app that allows users to find and share the foods they love Apply these simple actionable principles to launch your own startup revolution.