Book Review: The 7 Day Startup
A few days ago, I was browsing Amazon’s Kindle book store to buy the “Lean UX” book. After purchasing it, I saw in the “recommended” section, a book with an intriguing title: “The 7 Day Startup : You Don’t Learn Until You Launch”. Low price tag (around 4$) and great readers reviews made me click the “buy” button one more time.
The book has 131 pages and is easy to read so I decided that the “Lean UX” book could wait a day or two. “The 7 Day Startup” is a great book for what Dan Norris calls “wantrepreneurs”: people who want to launch a startup or business, but are not doing it.
If you have a conversation with a friend about your business idea this month, and next month you are having the same conversation, you are a wantrepreneur.
What you will learn in this book
First, you’ll learn about the author’s failures at building a sustainable business. Mistakes that eventually led to a critical situation where his last attempt had just a couple of weeks to be successful. That’s how his startup WPCurve.com was born, in 7 days.
After a brief introduction about what a startup is, you’ll learn the methodology and tools that helped Dan to quickly build a successful startup:
- Define your service and how it helps people.
- Design your service.
- Find a good name for your service.
- Register your domain and create a WordPress site for your landing page.
- Think about the marketing methods you’ll use to get your first customers.
- Define the metrics that will help you check if your business model is working.
- Launch and start working on customer acquisition.
For Dan Norris, launching a startup (a business with a high level of uncertainity) can be done quickly, very quickly. Since you don’t know if your idea/service is something that people need and are willing to pay for, you’d better not build something expensive (in time or money) . What you want to do, is to build your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) quickly and get as much information about it as you can. In the “The 7 Day Startup”, Dan made a short yet very useful reminder about what an MVP really is.
Finally, the 7th and last chapter talks about 14 business rules that will help you run and grow your business after your launch.
What I think about the book
Startup or “Service Startup”?
There is just one thing that bothers me with the “7 Days” plan: it’s all about a “service startup”. And actually, I think that the title of the book should be “The 7 Day Service Startup”. That is because Dan and his co-founder don’t sell a product, they sell a service (WordPress customization and maintenance).
For startups who actually build a product , the book is still valuable for the launch phase but it will take more than a week to build the product itself. However, even in that case, I’d say that you can build your MVP in one month, then prepare your launch in one week.
A bit of marketing
The book references many times wpcurve.com, the actual “startup” launched by Dan Norris. There’s nothing wrong about that. After all, that’s the website the book is all about. However, sometimes I had the feeling that a part of the book is just a promotion tool for their website. That’s not a big problem considering the good advices and references you can find through the chapters.
Conclusion
“The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch” is a good book overall. It gives pragmatic examples and references tools and websites that will indeed help you to launch your startup. I would recommend it to people who are on the edge of launching a business.