My Readlist Vol. 1
By: Rishi Kolvekar
Tags: Book Review, Startup Lessons, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Books

I run a startup, pretty lean, as of date just 10 people, and it's our 3rd year. Alongside this journey, I always felt books are something that always helps you transform from what you are today to a better person consuming and conceiving the facts, knowledge, experiences of the author.

2 years back, and I had developed this practice of reading at least 2 books a month, though as of now staying back at home quarantined due to COVID-19 situation, I thought of writing this short article on a few books that I really found interesting and developed me personally in my business.

As of date while I am writing this article, I have finished reading 40 books, just to keep this article short and crisp, I haven’t added them in the list, I will publish more articles on the books related to biographies and/or cycling (something I follow as a hobby)

Following are 10 books (in a random sequence) with a brief on what I learnt from each of them, in case anyone wishes to get an insight or discuss on these books, feel free to leave a comment.

1. Hooked

Nice book to improve your customer engagement, especially if you are a product manager or you are trying to get into any domain that needs an understanding of customer or user engagement.

The book explains the entire model in 4 phases — Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment.

2. Zero to One

Either you are a founder of a startup or planning to start one, this can be a must-read for you. Starting with a simple concept to scale your business/idea either horizontally or vertically, latter part emphasizing on uniqueness and value proposition with a gist of economics.

3. The Lean Startup

Published in 2011, this book turned out to be the bible for startups, and it is indeed one of the best books I have read. The author argues that in order to build a great company, one must begin with the customers in the form of interviews and research discovery. Building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and then testing and iterating quickly results in less waste and a better product-market fit. Ries also recommends using a process called the Five Whys, a technique designed to reach the core of an issue.

4. Extreme Productivity

A nice book to read if you got complaints regarding your time management. Book simply focuses on 3 interesting areas — improve productivity by managing your time and schedule, improve your reading, writing, and speaking skills, manage your team and boss.

5. Digital Selling

I started reading this book, when I wanted to peek into digital marketing fundamentals, but the book focuses on both traditional marketing fundamentals and their equivalent digital versions. A must-read for someone who is willing to start learning about digital marketing.

6. Sprint

The core idea is to help users understand how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just 5 days. This is essential for anyone who wants to understand how design thinking works with pure practical. It covers the below topics and essential and easy tools on how to accomplish them

How to make a map and choose a target, Sketching competing Solutions, How to decide on the best ideas, Building realistic prototypes Testing with target customers.

7. Remote

We recently started the remote culture, which I guess would be a common thing in IT startups post the current pandemic phase.

This book covers unique challenges and difficulties that can come across working remotely, but at a superficial level. This book emphasises more on remote as a culture, with a few tools and technologies that could be used to make the process more structured, being a simple and short book, I guess real-words cases are not covered in this book, I would rather say its more of an individualistic approach of the reader to implement the principles.

8. Startup Diaries

A book based on case studies or rather I would put them as interviews of 6 startups in India — One97, EKO, Coloseum Media, RedBus, The Loot, Yo!China. Personally I like reading about case studies, which attracted me towards this book, I believe a case study shares insight about a company's struggle, hard work, concluding it to either success or a failure.

9. Founders At work

30 interviews with tech business founders, and it's a great read.

The book distils fundamental concepts such as team building, creating a good product and founder’s perseverance.

10. Lost and Founder

The author describes his journey from an early idea to startup. Unfortunately, I think many of the lessons in this book can’t be taught via books. The book highlights the softer parts of running a tech startup — parts that are usually ignored as they fall behind more urgent tasks.

The book includes some very valuable perspectives on different kinds of investors and the pros and cons of a founder’s perspective. These may be valuable regardless of where you are in your founder journey — assuming you are on the brink of bringing in external capital or at least consider it.