Embarking on a new business venture? Equip yourself with the right knowledge. Dive into the essential literature for early business hires, a curated list that will guide you through the complexities of the corporate world and set you up for success.
An outline of the reading list
What Startups Want
- Why Customers Buy
- Crafting an Effective Message
- The Sales and Marketing Machine
- Metrics that Matter Getting Early Traction
- Next Steps: Learning the Tactics
- A few caveats about whom this list is useful for
- If you’re looking to join a B2C startup in a junior role, the last three sections will be less relevant for you.
Crafting an influential message
Focus on a specific customer segment and figure out what matters to them and how your product addresses their needs.
- Customers don’t care about your company or your product, they care about making progress in their lives. If your messaging doesn’t reflect that, they won’t listen.
Required Reading (1 hour 44 minutes)
Metrics track what matters to a startup
- One major reason startups fail is running out of cash
- How much a startup can spend on distribution depends on what it expects to make back in revenue
- Balance customer acquisition costs with monetization
- Complexity is okay if for high LTV customers, but problematic if you don’t end up making as much as you expected
- Causes of sales complexity and its impact on a company’s bottom line
- Churn is critical to manage in a SaaS business
Required Reading
Before your company finds product market fit, trying to grow too quickly can be a dangerous waste of money
- Your job is to bring in enough customers to meet investor expectations and keep the business afloat
- Cover the three types of leads that you’ll want in your sales pipeline
- Leads can come through many different acquisition channels
- Some involve paying for performance while others are unpaid
Recommended Reading
There’s a lot more to understand about the higher-level goals of a startup
Next Steps- Learning the Tactics
In order to help your company achieve meaningful traction you’ll need an arsenal of tactics including: Content Marketing and SEO, Paid Advertising, Landing Page Creation, Prospecting Lead, Nurturing, Onboarding and Customer Success, Copywriting, and Customer Development
- While these skills will take considerable effort to master, if you’ve gotten this far you’re probably ready for the challenge.
Required Reading (~7 hours 33 minutes)
Use the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to gain insight into why people choose to buy or not buy products.
- Human needs have stayed consistent even after thousands of years of evolution
- Cognitive biases warp our thinking and push us towards irrational decisions
- This framework distills 175 biases into a simplified framework
Required Reading (~1 hour 1 minute)
To build a large business, your company will eventually need customers to pay you
- 5 strategies for generating revenue
- Understand their buying process
- Design interventions to reduce friction in the buying process and convert customers
- Keep your customers happy and paying
What Startups Want
As an early business hire, your role is to bring people to your initial product so your team can learn what they need to do to improve the product
Required Reading
Startups are built for growth. Without a product that meets the needs of the market, growth can be a waste of money.
- A great market has lots of customers with intense urgency and large budgets. If a startup isn’t going after a good market, it may not be worth joining in the first place.
- All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10x Revenue Club by Bill Gurley
Recommended Reading
The faster you can get comfortable discussing metrics the more value you’ll provide to customers and colleagues
