Which book has had the strongest effect on how you make products? And why?
André J
34 replies
Which:
"Free: The Future of a Radical Price" by Chris Anderson
Why:
Because it drives home the point regarding how the prices of digital services will go to zero. And how you can still make money. The freemium business model
What's yours and why?
Replies
Harun@hrnsvnc
"The Design Of Everyday Things" by Don Norman. It reminds me of how important it is to remember that your users are humans and they will make mistakes if you design badly.
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@tj_franco I have not read that book. I guess everyone around me has so in a sense I'm doing a lot of the things described in that book already. What's your best take-way from this book that works for you in your work?
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@tj_franco That's a good point! I guess it's an art tho, you want to channel that feedback into focused initiatives. As Naval Ravikant said “If you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone.”
@tj_franco Very impactful book! Wish I read it earlier and didn't make the mistakes I made in my first product
Losing My Virginity, Richard Branson. I read it at the age of 14, and I realized that I definitely don’t want to work for hire. At the age of 15, I launched my first startup. A very simple but very motivating book.
To be honest many books left an impression on me.
Those that I found to be most interesting are:
Paypal Wars by Eric M. Jackson
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
Data Smart Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
by John W. Foreman (
Marketing from A to Z
Philip Kotler
Why: it's a must for every indie maker, founder, marketer. The book is not new. But such books are usually called manuals.
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@anna_kasumova Adding it to my reading list! Have you read "maker book" by @levelsio ?
@levelsio @sentry_co no, do you recommend it?
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@levelsio @anna_kasumova Me and @levelsio have the opposite view of how to make a product in many cases. But I do agree with some of his philosophy. You can read some of it for free here: https://readmake.com
To be honest, I need to say "Rich Dad Poor Dad", while not exactly a business book. It's main premise is to not let yourself work for money but make money work for you. This message has stuck with me for years and has inspired me to dedicate myself to entrepreneurship, to hopefully make money work for me :)
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There's no single book I can recomment for building a poduct specifically. It requres understanding of your audience, needs, how the world functions, human psychology, etc. There are plantly you can pick to learn more in each direction.
I can recommend a book Shoe dog describing a product-centric approach of Nike's founder and his belief in what he was selling. Build something you belive in and and would use yourself. If you will love it there's likely somebody else in the world you would find it irreplacable too.
For me was Creativity inc.
Amazing book from founder of Pixar. Also has some interesting insights into Steve Jobs :)
“Obviously Awesome” by April Dunford
I reviewed everything I had been thinking about positioning. It is a big helper these days for me. “Think of your product as a fishing net”.
“Startup. Shift up. Screwup” by Jurgen Appelo
Modern practices on company building based on experience of various startup founders that Jurgen had interviews with. A bunch of new concepts like Innovation Vortex or business model as a family member.
100M Offers by Alex Hormozi. It tweaked the way I look at markets.
@mel3kings I feel the same way. Btw Alex Hormozi is releasing the follow up book this August: https://acquisition.com/leads?pv...
@codeminion yes that is already on my to-read list :)
A popular book in the field of product design and development is "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries. It has been influential because it promotes a scientific approach to creating and managing startups, emphasizing iterative development, validated learning, and continuous improvement.
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@realkunalmehta I was thinking about iterative development yesterday, and how we have not done it in our startup. Because we felt it made the product stiff and hard to manoeuvre as we built it. We just had a North Star and then just built towards that without any plan or any milestones. Sometimes we would rebuild the whole thing or parts of it. But now that we reached that North Star. We are definitely doing things more iteratively. As it has found its way sort of. I guess my point is, not all things can be built iteratively. Esp novel innovation.
There are two books I would absolutely recommend from a product management point of view.
"Inspired" from Marty Cagan and "Continuous Discovery Habits" from Teresa Torres.
Ideally start with "Inspired" and then continue with "Continuous Discovery Habits".
Why? IMHO the single most important thing you can learn from these book is how to interview users and how to derive guidance from these interviews (read: how to make insights actionable). We applied the techniques at our new startup. We ran 75+ user interviews so far to really understand our users, their problems and desires. We are using a template to structure the interview and the notes. You will end-up with tons of opportunities. It is totally amazing to see the patterns emerge from the interviews. Feed these opportunities in ChatGPT-4 and it will deduplicate and count them for you. This gives you a super nice ranking of what people actually need. It will help you to put the right stuff on your website and to build the right features into your product. You can of course also use these insights in your sales talks to break the ice and to demonstrate your domain knowledge.
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@daniel_rodler Very insightful. Thanks for sharing. Personally I try to talk to the experts. Quality vs quantity. I guess it depends on what you are making as well.
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, by Tony Fadell. Amazing lessons all the way from building a company, team and product.
For me, it has been
- Getting Real from 37signals, the makers of Basecamp
It reminded me that you need to focus on things that really matters
What was bad? i'm curious
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@martin_ratinaud I think their mindset is more for tech employees, rather than for the more entrepreneurial spirited. As an entrepreneur you need to take bold risks. I think they should write a book about working on concepts. Like hey.com the process leading to coming up with that. it's a bold move and must have been a lot of ideas on their table. It's a sort of divergence from their usual suspects. Maybe it will be their next book. Or maybe they dont want to spill their secrets 😸