A splash-in-the-face primer on how to start (or run) a business.
As the witches might say, Fried and Hansson have First Sight. They look around and say sensible things like:
- if you bring in investors, you will lose control of your company
- build the smallest product that can be sold, then leverage up to meet your master plan
- meetings are mostly useless
- having people in different time zones lets you work uninterrupted for most of the day
- your estimates suck so don’t plan around them
- press releases are spam — pitch to individual journalists
- stop putting ASAP at the end of everything, wanker [wanker added for emphasis]
I think my favorite is “your customers are probably wrong,” where they quote Henry Ford saying, “If I’d listened to my customers, I’d have given them a faster horse.”
A very quick read, and worth re-reading from time to time.
