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Recommended content for agile startups and entrepreneurs - March 2015 edition

Brandon Dees — 03/23/2015

We'd like to post helpful content more often and find ourselves frequently lacking the available time to compose well-written posts of our own, but we are constantly reading the best material we can find on the web for a variety of topics of interest to us, our business, and our clients, so today I'd like to begin sharing some hand-picked "best-of" selections from what we've been learning from lately, and hopefully we can begin to post more regularly by including high-quality content recommendations like this on a regular schedule.

Here are some excellent and highly recommended sources of information and education for startups, entrepreneurs, or anybody who works with them.

The Startup Owner's Manual, by Steve Blank, Bob Dorf: We consider this book required reading for anyone involved in running a startup or any startup-like business venture. This includes most entrepreneurs and businesses who depend on custom web applications and have any unknowns to discover in their customer acquisition model or product/market fit.
How to Start a Startup, by Sam Altman: An excellent series of video lectures from Stanford's curriculum, from the world's experts on the matters of startups. This is probably an easier way to pick up a lot of the same fundamental information in the book recommendation and is a good complimentary source of information.
So long MVP. Hello Minimum Loveable Product.: This is a long-form article describing how to re-orient from "minimum viable" thinking to more user-focused "minimum lovable strategy". All the points made are rock solid and if you'd like to dive even deeper, follow all the included links and reading recommendations there also, as this article draws from an extremely high quality reading list.
This Week's Newsletter from our colleague Josh Crews: Wasted time on premature scaling: Josh is at the core of Nashville's Ruby Community and has an insightful post this week which addresses some of the common mistakes startups and new app development projects are tempted to make, and what to do instead. His advice closely aligns with what we typically propose for most of our clients.