Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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Shameless (relevant) hijack: I want HN's advice on a book I'm considering doing.

Backstory: somebody on Quora asked about common startup misconceptions: http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-are-common-misconceptions...

Off the top of my head I named a bunch and it turned out to be a popular post. Somebody said, "Hey, that's a good outline for a book!" I thought, "Hm, let's give that a try."

So I could get feedback, I put together three sample chapters and a landing page:

http://williampietri.com/book/

Now I'm trying to decide: If I do the (substantial) work of writing it, will enough people read it to make it worthwhile? (Worthwhile is defined here in terms of impact. I'm sure it won't be as profitable as doing something technical, but there's an audience of first-time entrepreneurs I'd like to help.)

In particular, I'm wondering:

* Will new entrepreneurs bother to buy and read a book about problems?

* Will people who deal with entrepreneurs find a book like this handy enough that they'll make new entrepreneurs buy and read it?

Had a similar idea while reading this article: I was thinking of a website "How to do things", crowdsourced like Wikipedia where anyone could contribute. So examples could be: How to launch a ecommerce marketplace, or How to launch a Saas, etc. And you could read the manuals, edited by people that learned the hard way. And useful for some that didn't go through incubators. Plus we can extend out of startups/businesses. I like this idea of your book, but if you get a particular point wrong you can't change it, whereas by doing a crowdsourced website anyone can improve. Just my midnight 2cents :-)

I think both would be useful.

If I do the book, I'll do it through some medium like Leanpub so I can put out drafts to many people and get feedback. And after 18 months or so, I'll put the posts up on a blog so people can comment forever. But the nice thing about a book is that it's done; I don't want to be forever updating the material.

The how-to website would be cool. There's a lot of info out there that isn't well captured.

If you're excited to jump in on a related effort, there's the Lean Startup Circle wiki: http://leanstartup.pbworks.com/w/page/15765221/FrontPage

Sean Murphy in particular has done a ton of great work on that.

"The 4 Hour Workweek" had a great launch strategy that I suggest you steal. Tim Ferris basically did what we call Lean these days to figure out what he should title his book so that it would sell well.

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