Books

This book has achieved the status of a Startup Bible of sorts. This amazing piece of Startup based literature by Eric Reis will teach you agile and swift project management and customer development process, which when put into action will provide a lot of flexibility to your startup to navigate and take on different situations with successful strategies to take on each situation.

One of the ultimate growth hacks is to build your email list which also makes it one of the most difficult. Sumo makes that easy with its host of optin form tools and formats, which vary from a full screen occupying Welcome Mat to recognise when a user is about to leave the page.

The book by Peter Thiel lays out the distinction between successful enterprises from not so successful ones. It talks about how real-world problems can be solved by technology. It outlays strategies which a startup needs to absorb in its earlier phases and lays out a set of principles to follow for every Startup.

This book written by Timothy Ferris evangelises a change of lifestyle, how to eliminate clutter, improve focus and do more in less time. Apart from that, it also lays some ground rules to live the digital nomad life of a laptop entrepreneur.

The book written by one of Silicon Valley’s most experienced entrepreneurs, Ben Horowitz, lays down actionable strategies to manage some of the toughest problems which businesses face and offers must have knowledge about starting a startup and growing it through innovative growth hacking techniques.

Sujan Patel’s book dives straight into the value and gives 100 actionable tips to grow your business in a very easy to understand format. One can go through the book all at once while taking notes, and then revisit specific growth hacks to go deeper into more details.

Want to go behind the scenes of the fastest growing companies in the world? In this book, Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown make you understand the growth marketing secrets of companies like Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, Pinterest, Airbnb and much more. The book talks about how these companies move fast, crush the competition with exponential growth. BTW, Sean Ellis is the guy who invented the term “Growth Hacker”.

Nir Eyal takes you step by step through what makes certain products habit forming with a system he calls the “Desire Engine”. As a note of warning, this book is highly addictive and once you are done with it, you will start doing case studies in your mind taking different products and implementing the desired engine on it.

For those of you who are interested in addressing a two- sided economy through a platform based model, I cannot emphasise the importance this book holds for you. The book, written by Sangeet Paul Chowdhary, lays out a structured approach to designing and growing a platform business model and lays out the critical points which can determine the success or failure of such models.

This book written by Ryan Holiday has the subtitle “A primer on the future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising” and it is an understatement. it is much more than that! It is pragmatic, actionable and breaks down all the complexities related to growth hacking. Ryan’s strategies rely on completely clean implementation with little or no budget requirements. An absolute must read for future founders out there.

Building a product is the easy part, getting traction to it, is the hard thing to do. In this group, Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares lay out 19 channels you can use to build a customer base. Probably the most interesting actionable strategy of the book is the “Bulls Eye Framework” which will lead to clarity in terms of your marketing goals.

A perfect guide for Lean Startup Practitioners, the book by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz lays out proven steps to take your startup from initial idea to product/market fit and beyond.

This book along with its sequel Expert Secrets is the millennial craze at the moment (though its usefulness is not restricted to millennials but very much universal). The book was written by the founder of ClickFunnels, Russell Brunson will perfect your online sales funnel and is a must read for anyone involved in online business.