But building a profitable venture is such a challenge in itself that there are not many people who can actually apply the concepts taught in the book to turn the business into a franchise.
Yet, the book is a success. Am I missing something in the book that can be applied in a non-yet-profitable venture?
However documenting and following procedures that you learn will work might still be useful. E.g. for face to face sales, not that the typical HN startup does those (see Joel's essay on why software tends to cost < 3K or > 50K (or thereabouts)).
Doing this sort of thing for your web site deployment process certainly would is useful. And a recent HN item talked about a company in which the internal communications was so bad it was in danger of losing a critical client because the programmers had never been told the client needed a major new release.
Anyway, all that said, there's still plenty of good advice in the book for any entrepreneur. Here's what I had to say about it in previous HN threads:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021526
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385190
and for other discussions you can try http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+e-myth%22+site%3Anews....