Are there any other books or resources Hacker News recommends? I’m probably wrong on a lot of what I think I know. Reading / studying The Lean Startup is good,

Are there any other books or resources Hacker News recommends? I’m probably wrong on a lot of what I think I know. Reading / studying The Lean Startup is good, but I recommend going back to the origin of the whole movement, and read The Four Steps to the Epiphany by @sgblank. It really is an amazing book that walks through the process of starting a business, and explains the "Customer Development" process in excruciating detail. If you take nothing away from it, it will (hopefully) be the idea that a startup is all about search. Not "search" as in "web search" but "search" as in searching for a business model, market, distribution channels, promotional activities, etc. that work. Especially note the iterative aspect, and how the choice to "pivot" should occur in response to specific indicators, and isn't just some random whim that prompts a change of focus. Another book I like is The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. You might find it worth a read. I also recommend Alan Kay's video series on "How to Invent the Future" which can be found on Youtube. 1.Think of an idea/ find co-founders (starting a company with friends has risks) <snip> 7. Secure funding or be self sufficient cash business? Pitch to VC/investor??? No idea about this That's a reasonable approximation of the idea, but again, note that iterations are part of the process. And it's a little bit more structured than that. Here's an example of what I mean: Where you say "See if enough people have this “pain” to even pursue the startup." I would argue that that's incomplete. The question isn't only "do enough people have this pain" but also 1. Does the "thing" I'm proposing to build solve the pain? 2. If it does, does the customer value solving that pain enough to pay money for the solution? 3. How much will they pay? 4. Given the answer to (3) above, and my cost of developing and distributing the solution, can this be done profitably? And that's before you get into the other questions you're trying to answer during the CD process like: What channels do my customers learn about solutions like this from? Should this be a purely self-serve / transactional sales model on a SaaS model with credit card payments, or is this a high-touch, direct-sales kind of thing? What's the distribution channel that works for this "thing" and these customers? Maybe I need to sell through a VAR or System Integrator instead of direct. Blah, etc. etc...