The 27 best Business books
Books about business.
1. Lost and Founder
2018Pages: 320 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.3
A painfully honest field guide to the startup world - from a founder who did it himself; growing a SaaS startup to $45M in yearly revenue. Hard-earned lessons on fundraising, building culture, and the emotional rollercoaster of being an entrepreneur.
Rand Fishkin
2. $100M Leads
2023Pages: 278 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.61
The playbook on how to get leads and get "strangers to buy your stuff". The frameworks Alex Hormozi uses to get 20,000+ new leads per day for his businesses that generate $200M per year.
Alex Hormozi
3. Think and Grow Rich
1937Pages: 320 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.2
13 steps to riches (financial, emotional, and spiritual). How to transform thoughts into riches. Including visualization, affirmation, creating a Master Mind group, defining a goal, and planning.
Napoleon Hill
4. The Simple Path to Wealth
2016Pages: 286 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.4
The simple approach to achieve financial freedom in 3 steps: (1) spend less money than you make, (2) avoid debt like the plague, and (3) invest everything that’s left over into index funds.
J L Collins
5. The $150M Secret
Pages: 222 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.3
How to bootstrap and sell a $150M company in 3.5 years. Practical tips - for example: screenshots of cold outreach templates to use, LinkedIn content plays, and learning from big startup failures. Finally, a hands-on guide on startup acquisition.
Guillaume Moubeche
6. Rework
2010Pages: 279 My rating: 4Goodreads: 3.98
How to become a founder that works smarter, not harder. And build a profitable business while your at it. You need less than you think.
Jason Fried
7. Magic Box Paradigm: A Framework for Startup Acquisitions
2023Pages: 284 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.57
Ideally, you should never sell a startup - you should be bought. The Magic Box provides a proven framework to make it happen. Also, with a fast track approach if you are short on time.
Ezra Roizen
8. The Mom Test
Pages: 136 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.4
How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. Here is a short summary of the perfect handbook for early stage startup founders.
Rob Fitzpatrick
9. $100M Offers
Pages: 164 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.7
This book teaches you how to craft a Grand Slam Offer in sales - an offer that is so different it will skip the explanations of why your product is different from everyone else's. Avoid being a commodity and competing on price. Enable your prospects to make value-driven purchases, charge premium prices and see vertical growth of your business.
Alex Hormozi
10. SPIN Selling
Pages: 197 My rating: 4Goodreads: 3.98
Sales are about asking the right questions. Spin Selling offers a quantative approach to larger sales, divided into the four types of questions of SPIN - Situational, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff questions. As deal size and complexity of the sale increase, the need for a consultative and benefit-driven approach becomes critical.
Neil Rackham
11. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
Pages: 400 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.47
The transparent story of how one of the world’s most famous and profitable companies, Nike, was formed - told from the founder's perspective.
Phil Knight
12. Way of The Wolf
2017Pages: 240 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.02
Everyone can become master closers with straight line selling. Follow the straight line methodology to achieve the shortest path to a closed deal. By using trivial psychology and methods such as object handling you can increase emotional and logical certainty of your prospects. Build trust in the 'three tens' - the product, the company and the seller - and you will close deals.
Jordan Belfort
13. Growth Hacker Marketing
Pages: 56 My rating: 3Goodreads: 3.77
How to use a creative hacker mindset together with your product to grow beyond what’s possible in traditional marketing channels. 'A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising'.
Ryan Holiday
14. The Marketing Psychology Playbook
Pages: 53 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.53
How to use marketing to connect with potential customers in a more trustworthy way, and avoid common mistakes.
Becky Davis
17. The SaaS Playbook
2023Pages: 201 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.7
How to build a lean million-dollar SaaS, market against large competitors, and use your position as underdog as an unfair advantage.
Rob Walling
18. The Lean Startup
Pages: 304 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.1
How to ignite a network from zero, and use network effects in a product to scale rapidly.
Eric Ries
19. The Transparency Sale
Pages: 175 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.23
Sell more by using transparency and honesty to build trust and credibility with clients. 'How Unexpected Honesty and Understanding the Buying Brain Can Transform Your Results'.
Todd Caponi
20. The Cold Start Problem
2021Pages: 386 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.2
How to ignite a network from zero, and use network effects in a product to scale a startup rapidly.
Andrew Chen
21. Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
Pages: 258 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.12
Explains the framework successful companies have used to find traction and how you can do it to.
Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
22. Contagious: Why Things Catch On
Pages: 256 My rating: 4Goodreads: 3.97
Understanding the WHY behind word of mouth and mastering virality to make your product spread.
Jonah Berger
23. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Pages: 255 My rating: 5Goodreads: 4.1
Art is about being inspired by others and remixing their work to create something new, discovering your style. '10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative'.
Simon Sinek
24. Steal Like an Artist
2012Pages: 160 My rating: 4Goodreads: 3.96
Art is about being inspired by others and remixing their work to create something new, discovering your style. '10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative'.
Austin Kleon
25. Obviously Awesome
Pages: 202 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.3
The most essential activity in a company is positioning your product and business so customers 1. get it, 2. buy it and 3. love it. Failing at positioning means failing with marketing and sales, which means the entire business fails. Positioning your product against the right trends, competitors, and market will make your customer understand and buy your differentiated offering.
April Dunford
26. Rich Dad Poor Dad
Pages: 336 My rating: 3Goodreads: 4.1
Rich Dad Poor Dad presents the rules and mentality of money that rich parents teach their kids, and help you avoid the common fallacies of how to think about making money. Neither a high income nor hard work is necessary to become rich. Rich people have money work for them, and spend with intelligence.
Robert Kiyosaki
27. Trajectory: Startup: Ideation to Product/Market Fit
Pages: 272 My rating: 4Goodreads: 4.31
This book provides practical advice and learnings from the ideation phase to finding product-market fit. 14 different revenue models are presented, together with a path to get you from ideation to launch and revenue in just six months.
Dave Parker
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