Start Small, Stay Small

the review

"He's one of us" is probably the highest compliment you can pay to an author that's trying to help a community. And I'm happy to pay that compliment to Rob Walling. Rob has put together an excellent book on how to transition from hacker to entrepreneur.

I've read a lot of hacker and startup books over the years. Some, like the SEO book I recently reviewed, got pretty boring at times. Many times we tech people have a tendency to make everything we write into technical manuals. So I've developed a nifty system of estimating the boring-ness of a book: if I'm constantly watching my Kindle's "percent complete" at the bottom of the page, I'm having a difficult time staying with the author.

With "Start Small, Stay Small" I hardly ever looked at that percent complete number. The book read so easily and well that I had to make myself stop reading it -- I was enjoying it as much (probably more, really) than the sci-fi book I was also reading at the same time.

Why? Because the book is targeted directly to me, the guy who knows how to code, maybe has done a little consulting, but is now ready to move on to running his own startup. I don't need lessons in HTML, I don't need discusisons of yet another way to pull data from a database, I can figure out how payment systems and app deployment will work, I'm not going to be the next Google -- I need practical advice on what to do right now. To get started.

That makes it a "beer" book for me. "Beer" books are books where it's as if you are sitting down with the author over a beer to discuss what you're doing. The more conversational the tone, the more practical the advice, and the more the author can anticipate your replies, the better the beer book.

I've read a few beer books over the years, and I've found that the authors are necessarily limited by their own experiences. If you read a book by a guy who sat on the board of BigCorp X, Y, and Z, and saw the soaring success of company A and the dismal flameout of company B, you're going to get stories about that. Nothing wrong with that, but with hacker/startup books in general, that means there is a high degree of selection bias involved: Whatever the author did or didn't do, they kind of make the book theme around that. If you're lucky, your experiences match up to the author's. If not, well, then you try to do the best you can by filling in the blanks on your own.

Rob kept telling me what I was thinking and then arguing against it. In one spot he was telling me to outsource more "I know you're probably not going to do it, but you should at least consider it"

That shows me somebody who has had these conversations before and is anticipating my stubborness. Awesome! And there were several examples like that. He would suggest something, I would think "Oh no, that's not going to work" and then he would explain that yes, he understood my objection but here is why I was wrong and this is how I need to change my thinking in order to be more successful. This is what I would like to see more startup books be like.

Rob's the guy I want to be in three years. He has working and practical methods for finding markets and addressing them, he is able to flip, automate, or scale projects, and he is aware of his own predeliction to micro-manage, get heads-down in the code, and emphasize the wrong things.

And guess what? I do those things too.

For instance, coding isn't that important in a tech startup. Rob estimates it at around 30% of total effort, but the more I read the more I'm thinking it could be as low as 10-15% of the total effort needed. For most of the technical guys I know, that piece of information alone represents a huge mindset change.

Lots more goodies like this. This is not theory: it is a step-by-step book. Rob tells you how to find an idea, how to find a market, how to fit the idea to the market, how to test the market, launch -- it's all in there. Great tips like running Adsense ads early on just to measure traction. Or getting a Virtual Assistant -- how to find one, how to evaluate one, and how to use one. Terifficaly good and practical stuff.

This is a good place to bring up an unusual item that Rob mentions. micro-niche-finder. This market research tool has gotten a couple of positive reviews from hackers I know and respect. It's also appeared on HN a couple of times. Rob recommends it -- but it ain't cheap: the full version runs $100. And fair warning: parts of this web site look like something from a used car lot. Flashing text, long streams of words -- all of the signs that a webpage is trying to high pressure you into buying. Ugh. So be prepared for that. Within the next month I plan on buying the it myself. I'll still use SEOMoz, but from what I can see this tool can do some nifty stuff with market segmentation that I'd like to automate. The tool creators also demo several money-making ways of using the tool that is different from market research that Rob recommends and I plan on looking into those. Plus it has the advantage that it's a one-time charge instead of somebody trying to bleed me each month. I'm excited about buying it and finding new ways of making money.

But back to the book. I can only give the book two dings. First, there's only one opinion, the author's. It's not like those books where you get twenty stories of how folks made it. I love those books, but I always find them lacking in depth and interactivity. I'd like to know more in-depth how these nuts-and-bolts things are done. So this weakness is also a strength. We trade breadth for depth.

My second ding is that, for me, I had to read other books to get into a mindset where I was ready to hear what Walling had to say. It's so good and distilled that, for some, it's just too much all at once. There are a lot of sacred cows punctured in this book, and it's a great thing they are. I just wonder if I could have read this book five years ago and it would have had the same impact. I'm afraid it would have just washed over me. Some things you have to learn the hard way, probably.

All-in-all, this is the book I would pay for and give to a lot of my friends who think they want to be entrepreneurs -- and I know several of them. Seems like every coder I know who has read about "iFart" is ready to strike it rich on the net. But we all need to realize it's not a simple 1-2-3 journey. I've been reading startup books for years and Walling gave me a dozen new things to do. He does a great job of dispelling a lot of the myths and providing encouragement in the right area. It's like having a dozen heart-to-heart talks with a coder who already made it. Highly recommended. Easily in my top-ten list of startup books. Probably top three, simply because the book is so targeted towards me. In fact, if I had to pick one book to give my programmer friends just getting started, this is it.

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