This step-by-step DIY guide shows today’s entrepreneurs how to create and launch new products, package and market them to consumers, and build a thriving business.Thanks to high-speed Internet, game-changing technology, and innovative new platforms, individuals with vision and heart can go from idea to marketplace on a shoestring budget. In How We Make Stuff Now, Jules Pieri—cofounder and CEO of The Grommet, a product launch platform that helps innovative products reach a community of millions—takes readers through the entire consumer product creation process, showing how individual Makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs have utilized technology, the Maker Movement, and perseverance to turn ideas for innovative consumer goods into thriving businesses, breaking the rules of traditional retailing in the process. Jules details what goes into each of the steps they take: ideation, education, research, design and documentation, prototyping, funding, manufacturing, packaging, marketing, distribution, logistics, payments, customer service, financial and inventory management, and growth. Using case studies of successful startups, she reveals how entrepreneurs overcome obstacles, solve challenges, and rise above them to deliver innovations.If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, Maker, or inventor, the first crucial step in your journey to turning your ideas into products that build thriving businesses is learning How We Make Stuff Now.
Entrepreneur and bestselling author of The Lean Startup, Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses of all kinds, ranging from established companies to early-stage startups, to grow revenues, drive innovation, and transform themselves into truly modern organizations, poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the twenty-first century. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries laid out the practices of successful startups – building a minimal viable product, customer-focused and scientific testing based on a build-measure-learn method of continuous innovation, and deciding whether to persevere or pivot. In The Startup Way, he turns his attention to an entirely new group of organizations: established enterprises like iconic multinationals GE and Toyota, tech titans like Amazon and Facebook, and the next generation of Silicon Valley upstarts like Airbnb and Twilio. Drawing on his experiences over the past five years working with these organizations, as well as nonprofits, NGOs, and governments, Ries lays out a system of entrepreneurial management that leads organizations of all sizes and from every industry to sustainable growth and long-term impact. Filled with in-the-field stories, insights, and tools, The Startup Way is an essential road map for any organization navigating the uncertain waters of the century ahead.
A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.
Are you ready to take the next step in your author journey? Art for the sake of art is important. Writing for the love of it, or to create something beautiful on the page, is absolutely worthwhile and critical to expand the sum of human expression. But I’m not here to talk about creativity or the craft of writing in this book. My aim is to take the result of your creativity into the realm of actually paying the bills. To take you from being an author to running a business as an author. I was a business consultant for 13 years before I gave up my job in September 2011 to become a full-time author-entrepreneur. I worked for large corporates and small businesses, implementing financial systems across Europe and Asia Pacific. I’ve also started a number of my own businesses ”" a scuba dive charter boat in New Zealand, a customized travel website, a property investment portfolio in Australia as well as my freelance consultancy. I’ve failed a lot and learned many lessons in my entrepreneurial life and I share them all in this book. In the last six years of being an author, through tempestuous changes in the publishing world, I've learned the business side of being a writer and I now earn a good living as an author-entrepreneur. I’m an author because it's my passion and my joy but also because it's a viable business in this age of global and digital opportunity. In the book, you will learn: Part 1: From Author To Entrepreneur The arc of the author’s journey, definition of an author-entrepreneur, deciding on your definition of success. Plus/ should you start a company? Part 2: Products and Services How you can turn one manuscript into multiple streams of income by exploiting all the different rights, various business models for authors and how to evaluate them, information on contracts, copyright and piracy. Plus/ putting together a production plan. Part 3: Employees, Suppliers and Contractors The team you need to run your business. Your role as author and what you’re committing to, as well as co-writing. Editors, agents and publishers, translators, book designers and formatters, audiobook narrators, book-keeping and accounting, virtual assistants. Plus/ how to manage your team. Part 4: Customers In-depth questions to help you understand who your customers are and what they want, as well as customer service options for authors. Part 5: Sales and Distribution How to sell through distributors and your options, plus all the information you need to sell direct. ISBNs and publishing imprints ”" do you need them? Plus/ your options for pricing. Part 6: Marketing Key overarching marketing concepts. Book-based marketing including cover, back copy and sales pages on the distributors. Author-based marketing around building your platform, and customer-based marketing around your niche audience and targeted media. Part 7: Financials Revenues of the author business and how to increase that revenue. Costs of the author business and funding your startup. Banking, PayPal, accounting, reporting, tax and estate planning. Part 8: Strategy and Planning Developing your strategy and business plan. Managing your time and developing professional habits. The long-term view and the process for becoming a full-time author. Plus/ looking after yourself. Part 9: Next Steps Questions from the book to help you work out everything to do with your business, plus encouragement for your next steps. Appendices, Workbook and Bonus Downloads including a workbook and business plan template. If you want to go from being an author to running a business as an author, download a sample or buy now.
The longtime chief marketing officer for Chick-fil-A tells the inside story of how the company turned prevailing theories of fast-food marketing upside down and built one of the most successful and beloved brands in America. Covert Cows will help you… Discover unexpected, out-of-the-box marketing methods and new ways of approaching business problems. Understand the positive impact of building a business based on biblical principles. Receive an insider’s look at the evolution of one of America’s most beloved brands. Learn key marketing and business insights from the man who was the chief marketing officer for Chick-fil-A for thirty-four years. During his thirty-four-year tenure at Chick-fil-A, Steve Robinson was integrally involved in the company’s growth--from 184 stores and $100 million in annual sales in 1981 to over 2,100 stores and over $6.8 billion in annual sales in 2015--and was a first-hand witness to its evolution as an indelible global brand. In Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A, Robinson shares behind-the-scenes accounts of key moments, including the creation of the Chick-fil-A corporate purpose and the formation and management of the now-iconic "Eat Mor Chikin" cow campaign. Drawing on his personal interactions with the gifted team of company leaders, restaurant operators, and the company's founder, Truett Cathy, Robinson explains the important traits that built the company's culture and sustained it through recession and many other challenges. He also reveals how every aspect of the company's approach reflects an unwavering dedication to Christian values and to the individual customer experience. Written with disarming candor and revealing storytelling, Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A is the never-before-told story of a great American success.
This is your foolproof guide on how to make your start-up stand out from the crowd! Get professional business advice in the palm of your hands. This uniquely visual guide equips you with everything you need to know about setting up and running your own business. Are you looking to start a business? You’ll need advice on how to identify your customer, what pitfalls to anticipate, and how best to spend your time and money to turn your idea into a profitable venture. This insightful business book takes you through everything from balancing the books to building a brand. It inspires you to take that giant leap towards making your entrepreneurial dreams come true. The Simplest, Most Visual Guide to Becoming an Entrepreneur - Ever! This comprehensive guide to starting your own business acts as an invaluable blueprint for your path to business success. It’s the ultimate gift for entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to learn more about the world of business management. This informative reference book is packed with: - Practical, authoritative information on the skills required to run a small business. - Easy-to-understand graphics. - No-nonsense advice and jargon-free language. - Insightful and inspiring quotes from the most successful minds in business. This entrepreneur book gives you all the tools you need to understand how a modern start-up works and then start your own. Whether you're a CEO or an aspiring tech entrepreneur, the information and advice in How To Start Your Own Business can be applied to anyone. Complete the Series: This guide to setting up a small business is part of the How It Works Series from DK Books. Expand your knowledge about business and management even further with How Business Works and How Management Works.
The self-employment revolution is here. Learn the latest pioneering tactics from real people who are bringing in $1 million a year on their own terms. Join the record number of people who have ended their dependence on traditional employment and embraced entrepreneurship as the ultimate way to control their futures. Determine when, where, and how much you work, and by what values. With up-to-date advice and more real-life success stories, this revised edition of The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business shows the latest strategies you can apply from everyday people who--on their own--are bringing in $1 million a year to live exactly how they want.
