Book Review - Lost and Founder - The Mostly Awful, Sometimes Awesome Truth about Building a Tech Startup By Rand Fishkin

READ: 2 mins

REVIEWER: Robert Craven

Key Messages

In a nutshell:

1. The venture capital route is full of challenges

2. Some growth hacks and minimum viable products do more harm than good

3. Look after your existing customers before expanding.

‘Lost and Founder (2018) is a hands-on guide to getting your startup off the ground. Written by the founder of a company that’s already made it and packed with cheat codes and hacks, this is the ultimate insider’s playbook of strategies and tactics for struggling founders and would-be innovators’

Blinklist

I like this book. A lot. Rand tells it how he sees it. He is clear that most business books portray the Silicon Valley dream that maybe .0001% of startups get to see. The reality is so vastly different from the glam and glitz.

He tells stories. He tells what he has learned. Warts and all. The book is honest and refreshing. He doesn’t present a candy-coated version of the world. He tells his story.

This is a more accessible version of my other favourite, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

Key Lessons:

1. Founding a startup isn’t a shortcut to fame and fortune, so dig in for the long haul

2. Make sure your product fills a gap in the market

3. The venture capital model is a gamble, and there are risks involved

4. Be transparent to avoid mistrust in your company

5. Take stock of your strengths and weaknesses to better understand your company’s dynamics

6. Team diversity and meritocratic promotion will boost your chances of success

7. Growth hacks and MVPs (minimum viable products) often do more harm than good

8. Make sure you’re taking care of your existing customers before trying to grow your company.

Great one-liners

‘Grandfather clause’: keep the price on old customers but raise once or twice a year on new customers. This helps both the revenue AND the happiness of old clients (customer loyalty).

If you want money from an investor, then ask for help. If you want help, ask for money.

If somebody asks you to hide information from a third party, it’s code red (what are they hiding from you?).

Aim for transparency! Transparency is not the same as honesty! Honesty is saying only the things that are true. Many founders are honest, in that they don't directly lie. Transparency is to dig deep and expose what others would leave unsaid and refusing to take the easy quiet road.

Write every email as if it would leak.

Some things the investors won’t tell founders:

1. I invest in hundreds of companies and I have no clue which will succeed. But if after investing, if your company isn’t behaving like a rocket, then we don’t want you to bother us

2. Our main tool to make the company grow better: replace the CEO

3. Investors are not the right option if you want to build a nice working environment.

Call entrepreneurs who you don’t know since most will be helpful and share contacts.

This is what amazon.co.uk says

'You won't find a more honest, raw and helpful look into the trenches of founding a tech startup than this book' 

Nir Eyal, author of Hooked

'Rand Fishkin is the real deal' 

Seth Godin, entrepreneur and author

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Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: a young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions and becomes the envy of the technology world.

This is not that story.

Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, is one of the world's leading experts on SEO. Moz is now a $45 million a year business, but Fishkin's business and reputation took 15 years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt.

Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: a minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment, growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour but initiatives to your business can fizzle quickly, revenue and profitability won't protect you from layoffs and venture capital always comes with strings attached.

In Lost and Founder Fishkin reveals the mostly awful, sometimes awesome truth about startup culture with the transparency and humour that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. This book can help solve your problems and make you feel less alone for having them.

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'This is a truly courageous book. It's one-part business-building guide and two-parts Indiana Jones-style adventure memoir' 

Chris Guillebeau, author of Side Hustle and The $100 Startup

'Rand Fishkin is like the industry friend we all wish we had—funny, warm, and refreshingly honest about the rollercoaster ride that is founding your own company' 

Julie Zhou, VP of Product Design at Facebook