While it is easier than ever to start a business, there is so much information out there.
I know I have spent too many hours listening to podcasts and reading books to ever put all the content into action.
So, we’re here to help.
In this article, we rank the best books on starting a small business.
You’ll find most of these books on Blinkist if you’d like to read the summaries for free.
The Best Books on Starting a Small Business
Will It Fly?
- Audible Audiobook
- Pat Flynn (Author) – Pat Flynn (Narrator)
- English (Publication Language)
- 03/21/2016 (Publication Date) – SPI Publications (Publisher)
This book is written by Pat Flynn, a successful online businessman, and podcast host. The book offers a practical guide on how to validate the merit of your business idea before getting started. The book also looks at how to test whether or not your business will succeed.
Note: This process is divided into five parts: checking that your idea is aligned with your goals, discovering new important details about your idea, analyzing the market conditions, experimental testing of the idea on a small scale of your target customers, and finally, making sure that your idea is ready for takeoff.
The book is a definitive step-by-step testing manual for your idea.
You can read our summary of Will It Fly, or check the price on Amazon.
The Founder’s Dilemmas
- Audible Audiobook
- Noam Wasserman (Author) – Mark Mosely (Narrator)
- English (Publication Language)
- 09/21/2012 (Publication Date) – Audible Studios (Publisher)
This book by Noam Wasserman, a professor of clinical entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California, provides insight on the early decisions made by new business founders that could lead to success or failure.
Backed up by a decade of research, real-world case studies from the founders of Twitter and Pandora, and quantitative data on thousands of founders, the book tackles the question of whether to start alone or have co-founders and how to manage a founding team.
It also covers when to start hiring, when to bring in investors, and how to overcome detrimental mistakes.
The Lean Startup
- Audible Audiobook
- Eric Ries (Author) – Eric Ries (Narrator)
- English (Publication Language)
- 09/13/2011 (Publication Date) – Random House Audio (Publisher)
A number one Amazon bestseller by the successful entrepreneur and blogger Eric Ries, this book focuses on the lean startup methodology in managing successful and sustainable businesses.
It draws inspiration from the principles of lean manufacturing, rapid prototyping and experimentation, more efficient product development, effective budgeting, cash flow management, and more importantly the ability to adapt with agility, continuous validated learning, and innovation.
Ries shares his experience of working with different startups and large companies. He provides case studies showcasing the principles of the lean startup approach.
This is an essential book for anyone who wants to know how to effectively create and manage a business through continuous testing and adapting instead of wasting too much time on elaborate business plans.
We have a short summary of The Lean Startup you can read for more insight into the book.
The Art of the Start 2.0
- Audible Audiobook
- Guy Kawasaki (Author) – Paul Boehmer (Narrator)
- English (Publication Language)
- 03/03/2015 (Publication Date) – Tantor Audio (Publisher)
This is the second revised version of the essential classic business book by Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple chief evangelist, and Google’s Motorola business unit advisor.
This is a must-read ultimate handbook for all entrepreneurs on how to start any kind of business and create a successful product or service.
Kawasaki provides a complete guide of the basic fundamentals and challenges of:
- Managing a business
- Team management
- Marketing
- Mistakes to avoid
He even gives practical insights on how to benefit from and deploy the newest important tools like social media, crowdfunding, and cloud infrastructures.
The $100 Startup
- Audible Audiobook
- Chris Guillebeau (Author) – Chris Guillebeau, Thomas Vincent Kelly (Narrators)
- English (Publication Language)
- 05/08/2012 (Publication Date) – Random House Audio (Publisher)
This book is by Chris Guillebeau, a New York Times bestselling author, blogger, and world traveler who toured the earth and visited all of the 193 countries from 2002 to 2013.
In the $100 Startup, Guillebeau focuses on 50 amazing case studies of entrepreneurs who successfully built businesses earning more than $50,000 from an investment as little as $100.
Intriguingly, these people were able to profit from their personal passions without having any special skills, to begin with.
The book is filled with exact details about each one of these entrepreneurs. You’ll see:
- How much money they started with
- The actions they took in their first weeks and months
- Key mistakes
- Important factors that made them succeed.
Guillebeau provides the most important lessons from these experiences. The book is an easy guide on how to turn your expertise or passion into a successful business or source of income.
Rework
- Audible Audiobook
- Jason Fried (Author) – Mike Chamberlain (Narrator)
- English (Publication Language)
- 03/09/2010 (Publication Date) – Random House Audio (Publisher)
A New York Times bestseller and Amazon number one bestseller in Business Pricing, this book by Basecamp founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson adopts a new unconventional and disruptive approach of doing business. It’s simply to stop talking and planning too much and to start doing.
The book offers loads of counterintuitive ideas on how to run your business, be more productive, and get traction. It lays down the reasons why planning, outside investors, too much staff and meetings are damaging. It challenges the mainstream image of needing to have an office and working too hard.
The best and fastest way to succeed without all this is to prioritize things and take actions.
For more info, you can read the reviews and see prices on Amazon.
In the Company of Women
- English (Publication Language)
- 360 Pages – 09/15/2020 (Publication Date) – Artisan (Publisher)
A book written by Grace Bonney the design blogger and creator of the design website Design*Sponge, In the Company of Women, is a New York Times bestseller offering insightful interviews with 100 successful women, from entrepreneurs to comedians, architects, designers, bakers, activists, and even tattoo artists.
They share how they were able to create and maintain flourishing businesses, overcome hard times, and use their creative potential and abilities to move forward and accomplish their dreams.
The book is also full of amazing portraits of the women and photos of them in their homes and workspaces.
The E-Myth Revisited
- Audible Audiobook
- Michael E. Gerber (Author) – Michael E. Gerber (Narrator)
- English (Publication Language)
- 12/26/2004 (Publication Date) – HarperAudio (Publisher)
Voted the number one business book by Inc. 500 CEOs, this book is written by the entrepreneurship legend Michael E. Gerber, whom Inc. magazine referred to as “the World’s #1 Small Business Guru”.
The book dismisses the E-Myth (entrepreneurial myth). The notion that people who start small businesses are all entrepreneurs and that someone who understands the technical work of a specific business can run it.
The book tackles wrong assumptions surrounding starting your own business].
Gerber provides a step-by-step path through the life of a business.
He walks you through starting as an infant idea, passing through adolescent struggles, and finally reaching mature success.
He also shows how to benefit from franchising lessons and apply them to any business.
This book is a great guide to establishing and growing a long-term successful business.
