In this episode:
- Summer special: Peter and Niklas each brought five business books off the shelf (plus a pile of honorable mentions)
- Positioning, knowing when to quit, OKRs, marketing channels, and how to stop fooling yourself about your own idea
- Why Getting Real still holds up twenty years later
- The Mom Test and Deploy Empathy as a pair (and why they'll probably kill your idea)
- Radical Focus vs Measure What Matters: the startup version of OKRs and the enterprise one
- A reading list for the summer, since Niklas is driving to Norway
No updates this week (they already recorded once), so it's just books.
Peter's five: April Dunford's Obviously Awesome (April was a mentor at TinySeed when Peter was in the accelerator, and his advice is to actually do the steps, not just read them), Seth Godin's The Dip (he re-reads it every time he's about to quit or sell something, to double check it's the right call), Poor Charlie's Almanack in the Stripe Press edition, John Doerr's Measure What Matters, and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares (19 channels and the Bullseye framework, which Peter has read so many times he doesn't really need to open it anymore).
Niklas's five: Build by Tony Fadell (his "get fired up" category, next to The Social Network and the Isaacson Jobs biography), Getting Real from 37signals (his startup bible, published in 2006, free on the website, and he's given away more than a hundred printed copies), The Mom Test, Inspired by Marty Cagan (his scaling bible, and the thinking behind getting engineers in front of customers at Trustpilot), and Radical Focus, which is basically the startup-sized version of OKRs.
Both of them gravitate toward books that work like debugging tools. The Mom Test and Michele Hansen's Deploy Empathy pair up really well (one is short and hands you the questions, the other is dense and gives you the whole customer interview process). Peter's take: if you're reading The Mom Test and The Dip at the same time to solve the same problem, you probably should have read The Mom Test a lot earlier.
Honorable mentions: Purple Cow, The War of Art, Scaling People, Derek Sivers' Anything You Want (Adam sent Peter four Sivers books in the mail when he started at Tailwind), The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Sht Together* by Sherry and Rob Walling (Rob's TinySeed was the first investor in Peter's previous company), Business Model Generation, and Founder-Led Sales Explained, which Niklas is a third of the way through. On that last one, Peter also recommends Jen Abel's two episodes of Lenny's Podcast (in order). They've helped him a lot with the Tailwind CSS partner program, where he's the founding salesperson and pulls in Adam when a deal needs the founder in the room.
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