Books Like The Lean Startup: Building Before You Are Ready

The Lean Startup is really a book about the cost of being wrong. Its answer is to be wrong earlier and more cheaply by treating a business as a series of testable assumptions. The books below share that instinct from different angles.

Two of them are about starting with almost nothing, one is about the reason anyone follows you in the first place, and one is a memoir about how nearly all of it went wrong. Between them they cover the parts of starting a business that a methodology cannot.

Six books, each condensed into a guide you can read in about 15 minutes.

Starting with almost nothing

The practical end: beginnings that did not require investors.

  • The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future

    Chris Guillebeau

    The most useful companion here. Case studies of businesses started cheaply by people who were not trying to raise money, which is the situation most people are actually in.

  • The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

    Guy Kawasaki

    A direct, unglamorous guide to the early mechanics: what to do first, what to postpone, and how to talk about what you are building.

Testing instead of guessing

The method, and the thinking behind it.

  • Thinking, Fast and Slow

    Daniel Kahneman

    Included because the failure mode in early businesses is almost always overconfidence in a story. This is the most thorough account of how that confidence is produced.

  • The Pomodoro Technique: The Acclaimed Time-Management System That Has Transformed How We Work

    Francesco Cirillo

    A deliberate inclusion. Early-stage work drowns in unstructured time, and the most transferable operational habit is finishing defined units of work.

Why anyone follows you

A business needs a reason, not just a method.

  • Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

    Simon Sinek

    The argument that people commit to a purpose rather than a product, and that clarity about the reason is a competitive advantage rather than a nicety.

  • Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

    Phil Knight

    A memoir, not a manual, and the best corrective on this page. Knight built one of the most recognisable companies in the world while being uncertain and nearly broke for years.

The starting shelf

The Lean Startup, The $100 Startup, Shoe Dog, Start with Why and The Art of the Start are together in the Entrepreneurship bundle.

Five complete guides, about 15 minutes each.

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The expensive mistake is the one you made confidently and late.