Ask HN: Best books to go from zero to one | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best books to go from zero to one

5 pointssoueuls5 comments

Hello,

I am currently in Thailand and in my free time I decided to take someone under my wings to help her qui her job and start working online.

She is 23 years old Thai, pretty good English and hard working (she already tried to start a local business while having a full time job).

In October I am going to match her current salary and try to teach her setup two small business so she can quickly see that "it's possible to make money online".

In the mean time I would like to recommend books/articles that could spark interest, create lightbulb moments and help her to quickly explore many unrelated topics to see what could interest her.

It will be a fun experiment for both of us, so if you have any resources or advices, I am curious to hear them.

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Sounds like a fun project. Here is some advice to go from zero to 0.1 using nothing but the Internet:

Assumption: you are intending to build a software product

1) learn about how to do research for opportunities, specifically identifying valuable problems. Valuable problems usually impact lots of people and/or cost people lots of money.

2) learn how to write a problem definition (hypothesis) and then talk with people (surveys) about the defined problem. This helps to refine the problem definition and/or increase the potential value. Try to do this with lots of people, preferably those who might be actual users/customers.

3) learn how to do rapid prototyping. This could be anywhere from interactive presentations to low-code initial development. The goal here is to get something demonstrable that can be shown to potential users/customers so that you can get feedback and measure interest. The prototype might be throw-away. That’s ok, because you are not going to spend much time on these initial prototypes.

This whole concept is typically the opposite of how an engineer/programmer thinks. In other words, we typically think our knowledge and expertise will allow us to build something that people should like. But that’s usually the wrong approach. Let the people tell you what to build.

If you can master these initial steps, then you will have a strong start in your project and increase the chances of success. Good luck.

A web search on “problem definition business” will give you a list of over 100 books on this topic, alone.

Interesting insight, but I don’t think she will be able to build software, I have to be realistic, it seems fairly “easy” to help her make 500$/month after 2-3 months (which mean should go from having a regular full time job where she can’t scale anything and she does not grow much, to learning valuable skills, being able to scale and pretty much being paid to grow)

But software is a different beast, I would rather direct her into something where she can see quick results.

That being said, I do think I am going to take 2-3 weeks to introduce her to nocode tools (Notion, Airtable and n8n), I am open to other suggestions

Off topic, but is there some way I could reach out to you.

Sure thing, I just updated my profile to include my email, feel free to get in touch

Perfect! I'll get in touch soon. Much appreciated!

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