Books on Starting a Profitable SaaS Business

> Do you want to build a profitable business or do you want to theorize how to build one?

I was part of a startup with an inexperienced angel who insisted on bringing in a CEO. The CEO made a good pitch to me that we would adopt the lean startup model, so I went along with it.

Anyway the moment he started, the book went out the door. We didn’t have time to discuss things like strategy and market positioning and hypotheses (though he used the word at every opportunity) but we had plenty of time to have risk assessment meetings and road maps and CRM system integrations (zero customers mind you), monthly 3 hour board meetings and weekly 2 hour “senior executive meetings”. The board and executive was larger than our headcount. I had brought an experienced team into the business with me and they were just flown into the ground with this inanity. (It turns out that despite what I’d been told, CEO had only ever been in corporate settings and had basically no experience with starting a business).

Anyway the outcome was as expected. I’ve been in startups my whole professional life and this was easily the worst experience of career.

The moral of this story is that building a business is hard and none of the books are going to tell you how to do it. So I agree with the parent comment. Pick a couple of books, read them, and get going. If things don’t work out, read a couple more.

But for God’s sake, keep your eye on the prize - have a clear vision, execute an early version of it, find some customers, iterate.

This.

Maybe reading a few on Blinkist initially but all one really needs:

- is repeatedly trying (even on a side project)

- first principles thinking/common sense

Why? Because:

- all those books are repetitive

- we learn faster by doing

- problems a given project faces at a given time are highly situational

There's no way 20 books are necessary. You can achieve near expertise in many domains with 2 or 3 really good books, what do the remaining 17 add?

Oh cheers! I read The Lean Startup and due to my leaky memory I remember nothing! But it's as you say: 200 pages to tell "iterate more often on product updates". Hell yeah.

I've only read some of these books, but the ones I've read had 20 or 30 points or pieces of advice that took a few pages each. One of them would put just a few sentences on each page. If it takes you a long time to read the sentences that expand or illustrate the idea, learn to skim.

> The thing is, it seems to me that many of these books are just extremely information-sparse

I too have most of these books on a shelf. I’ve found most of them can be skimmed and if they have descriptive chapter naming , just skimming the TOC is enough to get the gist. They rarely go into much detail on execution and generally just talk about a couple business cases as examples of the topic in action. But these usually don’t help on your specific business other than making you aware of the topic. If you’re already interested in business and know some of the lingo these are mostly useless. There’s a lot of blogs and content online I’ve read over the years that is significantly more helpful but I could see how given the state of blogs and content how this could be useful for someone young and/or relatively new to business in general.

It's great for SEO, though. 20 books = more potential search hits and longer dwell time.

Users, not investors.

So basically every new enterprise software company is a scam now?

Legal compliance is something you want to hire a professional service for. It changes too much. They can educate you on the risks of your specific field.

Pricing is a massive question with infinite possibilities. It usually needs to be tested, continuously. Or just locked in and changed on a regular cadence. A lot of it is going to do with you users and the value your product adds, or how that value is perceived. No book is going to answer this for you, just give you ideas of things to think about. Half of which will likely be N/A to your business.

Which ones are excellent?

Which ones are bad and why?

mr egg dont leave us hanging, which are your recommendationss

Ask a lot of people what their problems are, and when a pattern emerges, try to solve it for them.

IaaS - Ideas As A Service. There's your idea.

Try to do any task on a computer and you'll find 95% of existing things suck and can be improved. You can sell these improvements. Don't worry about competition, that just means your idea has been validated. Make stuff you want to use yourself, that way even if you fail to sell to others, you're not at a complete loss. Plus you do not need to repeatedly iterate with a customer if you are the customer.

You might have ideas, but don't write them down because you don't think they're profound enough (yet). In that case, I'd suggest to track those ideas in an app or book. This gives you something to play with and reflect on, find patterns.

If you actually have few ideas. then that is also fine. Why do you think you need ideas? You can think about or work on other people's ideas.

Ignore ideas, notice problems. If you focus on that, profitable startup ideas will come from noticing small, repeatable annoyances.

Cool ideas are the bane of startups. What you need are problems that lack sufficient solutions. Sometimes a solution does exist but not for certain groups or only at certain budget levels - that's a startup! Flow like water to fill gaps in the market.

Running Lean, by Ash Maurya. It’s a great blueprint on how to start.

+don’t hesitate to take shortcuts

The Mom Test, mentioned in the post, have a good templates on how to do research on problems your potential clients might have. First 3 chapters are good to read because they explain what should be focued on and what's artificial.

Very sad to see such comments. We humans will still require attention spans longer than goldfish even with GPT.

The one book I’ve “quizzed” GPT4 on, it gave sufficiently good answers to convince someone they understood the book but actually missed almost everything salient about it.

Not super relevant but this was Henry George’s Progress & Poverty, so a pretty well-known book with fairly detailed arguments.

I read a lot of startup books. The value is spending time in these books to really internalize them.

Summarization tools have existed for a while. They don’t take off because they can solve the core problem of deep learning. It takes time to reshape how you think. Reading some summaries won’t do that.

Can you explain how you use Chat GPT-4 to do this?

My first thought was '20 books on starting a profitable SaaS business that were all actually written by ChatGPT'.

I'm guessing if the 20 books are actually written by people in all seriousness and the belief that they understood and cared about the subject, they're probably still going to be better than what we'll have in ten years, which is 200 books all of which are echoing voids of ChatGPT.

It'll be a lot cheaper to produce such books and put them into the marketplace if you don't actually have to write, learn, or know anything: so much cheaper that it'll become untenable to write 'real' books.

Which mostly means 'marketplace' will stop meaning anything. Knowledge will still mean something but we'll have to arrive at it and disseminate it in different ways that don't resemble the commercial marketplace, as that will not stand up against the cheapness of AI labor.