12 Books EVERY SaaS Founder Should Read This Year...

books startup Founders love books the best startup Founders I know are Perpetual Learners and so it seems like we just can't get enough knowledge there's a reason I have 842 titles no joke in my audible account I'm asked all the time for recommendations for books that apply to SAS Founders because there are so many business books or entrepreneurship books that use examples that just don't apply to what we're doing so in this video I have 12 books for you that I think you should read this year this would allow you to read one book per month for the year and of course if you're like me and you listen to books at 2x speed you might get through a few more than that so I've curated a list of probably 50 or 60 books that I think every SAS founder should read down to these 12. I'm Rob Walling I've started six companies five of them bootstrapped I've written four books on entrepreneurship and I've invested in almost 150 startups so of the 12 books I'm about to run through the first six came from me and my my memory banks going through my audible account my Kindle account my bookshelf or a few physical books I have left and then the second six are from Twitter and I will call out the username of the person who suggested it when I do that now I've got a lot of suggestions when I ask for book suggestions so some were proposed by many people I heavily vetted all of these books these are all books that have had an impact on my career and for the most part I've read every word of every book on this list book number one is traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Maris I actually almost wrote a book just like this but I'm glad I didn't have to and that Gabriel came along and wrote this book instead basically each chapter focuses on a B2B marketing approach there are a few b2c thrown in there but they interviewed a different expert for each marketing approach such as email marketing or in-person events or pay-per-click advertising and it's almost like a buffet of options for you to look at when you're thinking about marketing your projects you might have heard me talk about my big five marketing approaches and I talk about knowing of 20 B2B SAS marketing approaches and frankly that list that I have started probably a decade ago when this book came out I pulled a few from traction now not all of them apply to B2B SAS but it is a nice overview of how to think about leveraging marketing approaches with some tactics and strategies mixed in I'll admit the book is a tiny bit dated now I say this as someone who has a 13 year old book that still holds up but has you know certainly Rough Around the Edges but traction is still a good read to get your head around marketing approaches it's one of the books I recommend most often to Founders who are struggling to really get their head around what marketing looks like book number two is founding sales by Pete kazanji and I'm gonna be honest I think this might be the best book I've read for Founders who don't know how to sell who want to learn to sell I came across Pete maybe four or five months ago I interviewed him on my podcast and I was shocked at the depth of founding sales covers everything from just the basic fundamentals of how to think about selling creating a demo to creating a slide deck to hiring sales people to managing sales people to scaling a sales team it's a 450 page book but you only need to read the pieces that you need it's like an amazing reference from a Founder's perspective because Pete was a Founder who didn't know how to sell and as he went through his process he documented it in this book I think it's one of the best books for founders of B2B SAS companies book number three is the mom test and while it's got kind of a funky title the idea is that it teaches you how to ask questions of potential customers as you're trying to figure out what to build in order to do customer development and build something people want and it teaches you how to ask questions such that even your mom couldn't lie to you that's where the title comes from because what a lot of Founders do is they'll go out and they'll say would you pay for this how much would you pay for this and unfortunately people accidentally lie to you they don't do it on purpose but they say things that aren't true and the mom test focuses instead of asking questions like that on asking questions like do you have this problem how much of a pain is it what have you done in the past to solve this pain right and if they say I haven't really done anything haven't even gone to Google to look for a solution that tells you that this isn't a huge pain point the mom test is a staple in the bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap SAS ecosystem highly recommended book number four is hello web design by Tracy Osborne Tracy Osborne happens to be the program manager of tinyseed she's written several books and hello web design is chef's kiss good for entrepreneurs who want to learn just enough design that they can either do simple designs themselves or better yet and the reason I read it is to better evaluate designs and give better feedback more helpful feedback to designers that you hire instead of giving them feedback like I really want this to pop can you make can you make this better right that designers hate that kind of feedback but if you read this Compact and relatively quick read you will fill your head with kind of the bare minimum that you should know about design if you want to be a web entrepreneur book number five is called who the a method for hiring and this book comes recommended to me and frankly to all Tiny Seed and microcomp Founders by a friend of the channel Reuben Gamez founder of sign well this is another one of those Best in Class books I think this is the best book I've ever read on the subject of how to hire including deep dives into job interviews and what questions to ask and just how to conduct an interview process I'll admit I do not follow this book to the letter because the interview process is six hours seven hours eight hours long over many interviews across weeks and I have a slightly modified system that I think is a little more efficient yet still works but I have borrowed heavily from this book and if you haven't read it and you're struggling even a bit with your hiring process can't recommend it enough book number six is the art of selling your company written by the great John Warlow John has written three books on maximizing the value of a sale should you decide to sell your company in my opinion this one is far more applicable and is the one that I would focus on if you're a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped software founder John has incredible knowledge on this topic of exiting he's been through exits himself he has helped people through many exits and this is about real businesses selling for real cash or real stock with real earn outs not the TechCrunch headlines where someone sells a company for a billion dollars to Mark Zuckerberg in a weekend it's about real companies that are doing a million five million 10 million dollars whether they're software companies some are manufacturing some are record storage brick and mortars all kinds of things and he dives into the tactics and the strategies and really the thought process you should be going through if you ever decide that you're going to sell your company and frankly as you know what I say everyone sells eventually so being prepared for that inevitable ability is always a good idea our seventh book comes recommended on Twitter from Nick Swann it's the one page marketing plan this book is really good for small businesses and good for small budgets so it applies to the kind of company you're going to be growing basically it helps you put together a nine quadrant one-page marketing plan this is similar to what I did for my SAS apps where I would keep it super simple in a Google doc I would use bullets instead of the quadrants but you keep it simple and you do the work and you execute on it and I like that it's not your traditional MBA Harvard Business Review thing about marketing it's such an astronaut view it's high level of this let's define what marketing is it's like no help me figure out what I should try first help me figure out how I should go about organizing my thoughts around Marketing in addition talks about one of my favorite topics of course raising prices you can obviously get similar info from a lot of books even at this scale but one page marketing plan is a nice compact version that can help you get your head around marketing and how it should work I found parts of it to be a bit heavy on the marketing speak but if you can get through that it's great content book number eight also comes from Nick Swann on Twitter and it's Dan Martell's buy back your time buy back your time just came out a few months ago I had Dan on my podcast and I was pleasantly surprised by the depth that this book goes into teaching entrepreneurs and Executives how to have more time in your day by finding people who can do things delegating but not just delegating in a I'd say a superficial way he really dives into what you should think about delegating how you should think about it who you should hire first and how you should hire more people to have more time in a day to do the things that only you can do he goes into great detail about organizing your inbox and how a virtual assistant or an executive assistant can use specific tags his process that he uses it's just really one of the better books I've seen in a long time about figuring out how to make more time in your day book number nine comes to us from Graham lipsman on Twitter and it is April dunford's obviously awesome this has become the Staple in our circles for getting your head around positioning what it is how to think about it and how to apply it to your company and it's a quick read and I say that with all positivity I love books that say what they came to say and then move on and they don't pad pages is such that The Binding of the book is wider on the Shelf at Barnes Noble it's a waste of time right obviously awesome does not do that April comes to teach she drops her knowledge and she gets out you can read this on an airplane three or four hours highly recommended book number 10 was recommended several times and I wasn't going to put it on the list because it's my book but several people mentioned it and encouraged me to put it on this list so Ross Simmons among others recommended my new book The SAS Playbook I just ran a Kickstarter for that it did a hundred and eight thousand dollars the book comes out in just a couple months it contains all the knowledge that I could instill into about 200 pages so similar to obviously awesome it's something you can read in just a few hours but I cover market and marketing hiring and growth mindset of being an entrepreneur it's kind of all the key topics that I feel like SAS Founders should know there's a reason that the subtitle is how to build a multi-million dollar startup without Venture Capital because that is the entire focus of every page of the SAS Playbook sasplaybook.com if you want to learn more book number 11 is suggested by Dean Leighton James on Twitter the book is deploy empathy by Michelle Hansen this is a very well written book about jobs to be done and really it's about talking to your customers to be honest but it's about which questions to ask how to have conversations with customers whether you are just getting started trying to figure out what to build trying to find product Market fit whether you are trying to make your support processes better your customer success processes better whether you're doing sales whether you're trying to just make your product better to grow your company it's written by a bootstrap SAS founder with bootstrap SAS Founders in mind so it's not a bunch of high-level theoretical jobs to be done stuff she throws in exact questions that you should think about exact templates for emails it really is a book I can't recommend enough book number 12 was recommended by Iron brands on Twitter and it's arvidcalls zero to sold Arvid bootstrapped the company and sold it a few years ago and now you've probably seen them on Twitter or maybe you've seen his books but zero to sold is a well-written tone that covers his journey and pulls out lessons for folks who want to bootstrap SAS companies he comes at it from a lifestyle bootstrapper who's looking to build a great business and quit their job and really give themselves a better life and at 450 Pages it covers a lot of ground there are more books where that came from but I'll stop at 12. we have videos coming out on this channel every week often twice a week and it's all about bootstrapping and mostly bootstrapping SAS companies it's about changing your life finding Freedom purpose and relationships through entrepreneurship if you like this video you should watch this other one on the channel from April Dunford she's the author of obviously awesome one of the books I mentioned just a few minutes ago thanks for watching

Channel: MicroConf

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Keywords: MicroConf, Saas, saas books, app books, books for saas, saas founders, books for app development, saas book list, tech books, tech books to read, entrepreneur books, entrepreneur books to read, saas books to read, app books to read, founders book, entrepreneur book list, leadership books, business books, self development books, personal development books, time management books

Id: -yZOeG5bqvI

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2023