Business Books Every Startup Founders Must Read (or listen to)

Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

How to Win Friends and Influence by Dale Carnegie

The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Principles by Ray Dalio

Your Brain at Work by David Rock

The Messy Middle by Sctott Belsky – It will help you see that the ups and downs are similar for all entrepreneurs pretty much.

The Upward Spiral by Alex Korb PhD. – To help you fix your psyche when you’re down and feel like you can’t get out of it.

Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher – You will learn what it means to build a category defining company and how to do it.

Dear Founder by Maynard Webb – It will help you relate and see that the journey of all founders is similar.

High Growth Handbook by Elad Gill – Every startup needs to grow. This book can serve as a resource to refine your growth playbooks.

The Power of Relentless by Wayne Allyn Root – As an entrepreneur you’ll experience many rejections, you have to be relentless and not give up to win! That’s also know as Grit, the most important trait of a strong entrepreneur. This is book will help you inspire your grit 🙂

Marketing Resources for Startup Founders

It takes a ton of time to find good resources that actually provide useful actionable advice instead of too much fluff. For that purpose I curated this list of the most useful resources that will help you learn more and waste time less.

Websites with useful insights:

GrowthHackers

Indie Hackers

Marketing Example

GTM for Startups

DigitalMarketer

HubSpot Blog

Zest

The best content to learn about marketing:

Myk Pono

SEO specific:

Ahrefs

Moz

BuzzStream Discover (a great tool!)

Find bloggers who write about your topic. Enter for example “Kanye West”, filter “within the last 30 days” and Buzzstream gives me a list of all 440 bloggers who have written stories about Kanye West over the last month.

Ads:

AdZooma

Design specific:

SaaS pages

The same folks created also the SaaS pages builder Versoly

Copywriting specific:

Good Email Copy ( a tool by Front)

Podcasts (learn while on the go):

Marketing Trends 

Packed with useful advice by thought leaders in the space 

Podcasts for Startup Founders and What You’re Going to Learn

I love learning by listening to podcasts. My favorite ones are the ones packed with knowledge and are not too long. I’ve been trying a bunch and found some great ones that are worth my time, which I will cover here: 

Indie Hackers

Useful tips and tricks from clever entrepreneurs

SaaStr

Experienced operators sharing lessons learned and advice for building startups 

Build with Maggie Crowley by Drift

Thought leaders that share useful advice 

The NFX Podcast

High quality content from the accelerator and fund that brings advice from years of building many successful startups  

OV BUILD by OpenView Ventures

Open View is a content machine! Similar to First Round Review (tho they only have articles, no podcast). Lots of great speakers to learn about all things building great products and companies. 

Startup Therapy

From the founders of startups.com 

How I Built This 

Inspirational stories from successful entrepreneurs, talks about the ups and downs, and how they made it.  

The Pitch

A well produced podcast where entrepreneurs pitch to a live panel of investors and get an instant yes or no answer as well as feedback about what to improve. Can be a great example for founders on how to pitch and not to pitch. 

GroundUp

An insightful podcast by Databox

The SaaS Revolution Show

Popular entrepreneurs speaking about their SaaS experiences, what they did right and what they did wrong.  

The Growth Manifesto Podcast by Web Profits 

Insightful guests share about how to grow companies 

20 Minute VC

A podcast where Harry Stabbins with his charming British accent interviews accomplished founders and VCs that share some of their secrets and advice. 

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

The controversial podcast by Nathan Latke that got him in hot waters for extracting too much data about startup’s metrics and then selling it to VCs. The interviews are all available in this podcast, some of the best startup founders have shared about their metrics and it’s an amazing opportunity to learn and improve your own metrics. 

Ideas Elevated

From Comcast NBCUniversal the Lift Labs Accelerator. They interview famous entrepreneurs and operators about their journey of building great companies.  

The Tech.MN Podcast

A pleasant discovery from wanting to learn more about the Leadpages acquisition. Found this podcast and I’m loving it.