Book Concept

Book Description

My proposal for the book concept is a summary of best practices on building enduring businesses from experienced entrepreneurs and operators. Similar to “Tools of Titans” by Tim Ferriss, this book will consolidate and summarize the tactics and ways of operating that people who have built successful businesses utilize. 

Each section will be focused on a specific area of business building (sales, marketing, strategy, fundraising, etc.) with subsections (“Chapters”) diving into specific topics under the umbrella section. Each chapter will end with a summarized list of tips and tricks from 2-3 experts in that field. The goal is to create an “Entrepreneurs Handbook” that founders at any stage of their business-building journey will be able to pick up, quickly flip to a relevant section, and derive actionable insights for their business. 

Writing will be a process of interviewing, likely over email but also potentially via podcast or with additional context coming from a podcast (see Interactive section below), high quality entrepreneurs and operators and asking them specific questions about a focused topic related to building a successful business. We’ll make diverse representation in these interviews a priority, making sure to have as close to a 50/50 gender balance and ensuring we include non-white entrepreneurs and founders as interviewees.

Chapter writers will take the interviews and summarize them into a cohesive set of tips, tricks, and tools. This can include direct quotes from those interviewed, but will primarily be distilled knowledge consolidated across the answers of 2, 3, or 4 relevant individuals. This book will also be focused on actionable templates, tools, and processes. We may choose to include some of these tools or templates in an “Entrepreneurs Toolbox” interactive component online if we so choose.

Our target reader for this book is entrepreneurs and operators from inception through PMF and early scaling. Think Pre-Seed through Series A. Most target readers will have a defined business model and product. They’ll have a few customers but are not at the point where they’re publicly traded or leading thousands of employees. We’ll speak with experts that can provide insights to how they handled similar situations across different stages of company growth to contextualize the advice from Pre-seed through Series A.

This will also be targeted towards technology and product focused businesses. Other business models are important, but we need to focus on one, and collectively the writing group has the most experience and broadest network for experts in product and technology businesses. Diversity is important within tech and product businesses as well, we’ll need to make sure we are interviewing leaders across business types, industries, and customer segments so it is relevant regardless of if you’re building Enterprise Saas or consumer hardware.

We’ll be covering all the functional areas of business building but readers will be encouraged to skip chapters that aren’t relevant and jump around the book to find the chapters that are. We’ll focus on extracting insights and tips that are relevant for many stages of a company’s lifecycle and are actionable to many types of businesses and situations.

Chapter Outline

I’ve divided the structure of the book into 5 main sections, each with chapters sitting under them. Chapters don’t need to be super long for them to be valuable or helpful. Some will be several pages long, others might be only one page long. 

For the writing process, we’ll interview leaders about the Section focus, and then place insights from the discussion into the most relevant section. 

The sections are listed in what I think is an ideal order, but readers will be encouraged to jump around based on what they need to learn.

1. Introduction - This will briefly introduce the book’s concept, structure, and advise readers on how to use it as a resource. We’ll also share a bit about Book Club DAO and how the book was written. We will write this chapter last, as the writing process itself should inform the introduction.
2. Getting Started
   1. Business Models - This chapter will discuss different business models and ways to monetize a project and turn it into a real business.
   2. Business Strategy - This chapter will cover strategies for thinking about your business including market capture strategy, funding strategy, and negotiation strategy. 
   3. Legal - This chapter will discuss the legal steps needed to build a business, the differences between LLCs and C-Corps, etc.
3. Product - This Section will cover building great products. design, “killer features, building feedback loops, product development frameworks, and user experience.some text
   1. Product Development - This chapter will discuss the building blocks of product development and how to create and iterate on a product.
   2. Product Design - This chapter will discuss “killer features”, 
   3. User Experience - This chapter
   4. Measuring Product success and building Product Roadmaps - This chapter will discuss tools to build and measure great products, and share tips on how to develop a product roadmap and prioritize features, integrations, etc.
   5. Potential Interviewees:
      1.  Steve Vassallo - GP @ Foundation Capital - Wrote a book called “The Way to Design” about product design. Was also a product designer at IDECO. - Jake
4. Go-to-Market - This section will discuss all aspects of building and executing on a go-to-market strategy. This will likely be the longest sectionsome text
   1. Sales - This chapter will cover all parts of sales including sales strategies, customer prospecting and pipelines, contracts, and negotiations.
   2. Marketing - This chapter will cover marketing strategies and best practices including direct to consumer, B2B, Google Adwords, and marketing tools.
   3. Community - This chapter will cover strategies to build and leverage community for your business.
   4. Business and Revenue Operations - This chapter will discuss operationalizing sales processes and share tools to help founders make sales and build a repeatable sales process.
5. Finance - This Section will cover tips, tricks and tools for managing company finances. some text
   1. Bootstrapping and Fundraising - This chapter will cover strategies for bootstrapping or fundraising outside capital for your business as well as tips to evaluate which path is right for your goals and roadmap.
   2. Metrics and KPIs - This chapter how to calculate things like CAC, how to model things like unit economic, and how to use KPIs to measure and improve your business.
6. Starting to Scale - This section will cover techniques and strategies for businesses as they begin to scale beyond a core group of cofounders. Scaling in this sense means getting to your first $5m in revenue - at which point you have likely grown beyond insights this book can provide (maybe there is a sequel for growing from $5-50m)some text
   1. Structure and Compensation - Topics include org structure, employee equity and compensation.
   2. People Management - This chapter will cover people management including team building, hiring and firing best practices, and difficult to navigate situations like cofounder breakups.
   3. Potential Interviewees:some text
      1. Gordon Daugherty - cofounder @ Capital Factory - Has advised hundreds if not thousands of founders through tricky situations and cofounder disagreements. - Jake

Interactive Features

• Entrepreneurs Toolbox - provide relevant resources related to concepts covered in the book online and create a central source of valuable tools and information.
• Book Club Podcast - bring the successful entrepreneurs and operators we feature in the book on a podcast to have a broader discussion and promote their participation in the book. This will serve to build interest in the book pre-launch as well as potentially gain additional relevant content for the book.
• Book Club Summit - invite the best entrepreneurs and operators featured in the book as speakers and create a valuable networking event that anyone can attend. This can coincide with the launch of the book and double as promotion for the launch as well as initial book sales (a $50 ticket to Book Club Summit includes a copy of the book plus a ticket to attend the event.