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Ask HN: Any good case studies of companies for entrepreneurs?

8 points| hubatrix | 9 years ago | reply

I am planning to start my first venture, and I believe it's important to do good research before. It can in the form of books or articles or videos. Can you please comment best resources I can find case studies of companies for entrepreneurs ? One such I found was https://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneur-Journeys-1-Sramana-Mitra/dp/1439206872

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[+] GFischer|9 years ago|reply
Depends on what your venture will be about, but there's a lot of books written specifically to help entrepreneurs.

The best ones IMO are the ones by Steve Blank and Alex Osterwalder:

- “Business Model Generation”, by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur

- “The Startup Owner´s Manual”, by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf (haven't read it yet)

- "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", by Steve Blank

and others

These slides are pretty good too:

http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/successful-entrepreneurship...

Above all, execute. I have what I believe is a very good project and it's floundering because of lack of execution (cash would help, but I should be able to make it work anyways). I've seen crappy ideas pivot into success by sheer tenacity (coupled with flexibility).

Edit: more resources

Getting Real by the Basecamp guys

https://gettingreal.37signals.com/

http://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...

http://s3.amazonaws.com/37assets/svn/Rework-by-Jason-Fried-a...

[+] Mz|9 years ago|reply
You might have more luck looking for biographies of founders and company histories instead of case studies. It might be especially useful to look for biographies of founders who have something in common with you and histories of companies that do (or did) work that is in some way related to the kind of work you desire to do or that otherwise have some kind of connection or thing in common with your intended project.
[+] skrish|9 years ago|reply
I would highly recommend "Founders at work",if you haven't read that yet. I liked Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull, which deals with challenges of managing a highly creative team and working towards tangible output.
[+] nanospeck|9 years ago|reply
I have almost finished writing a kindle ebook on the same topic. Just my observations on interesting strategies of top companies. Please let me know (drop an email) if you are interested to join the waiting list. Akhil.karun[at]gmail[dot]com