Last night, I was trawling Reddit…
(Not trolling. Not this time, at least.)
…And I came across this post:
What’s the best book you’d recommend for a small business owner?
I would love to hear your book recommendations. Literally could be on any business topic: strategy, marketing, operations, networking, hiring, finance, etc. Could be a traditional book or a biography.
Predictable—Reddit’s top replies were gurus pitching their own products, conveniently upvoted to the heavens by an astroturfing army of bots.
Such is life.
But if you held a gun to my head and demanded a business book recommendation?
Easy: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
The One-Sentence Business Shift You Need
I read The Lean Startup waaaayyyyy back in 2014. First business book I ever picked up.
Here’s the key takeaway, compressed into one sentence:
Instead of wasting time and money developing a “dream product,” rapidly deploy a “minimum viable offer” you can sell and get real customer feedback on.
That’s it.
The book goes deeper, but that one idea alone is a game-changer. It forces you to shift from theory mode to action mode—something most business owners desperately need.
The Business Killer: Perfectionism
And to all the perfectionists reading?
Brace yourself. I’m about to make you squirm.
Because The Lean Startup taught me (indirectly) something even more valuable than building MVPs:
Perfectionism is just procrastination in a tuxedo.
See, I used to obsess over getting everything just right before launching a business idea.
- Every duck had to be in a perfect little row.
- Every plan needed endless revisions.
- Every new skill required months of learning before I dared use it.
But guess what? No plan survives first contact with the customer.
As Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke the Elder put it:
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
Business translation:
“No plan survives first contact with the customer.”
Your pretty little prototype? It’ll fold like a cheap beach chair the moment someone buys it and leaves negative feedback.
Because the thing you’re building might not be the thing people actually want to buy.
And that’s where business success really happens—not in your ivory tower, but in the marketplace, where you get real data from real customers.
What This Means for Marketing (And You)
This principle doesn’t just apply to products. It applies to marketing.
Bad marketing is when you pitch whatever you’ve got lying around the shop.
Good marketing is when you pitch what customers are already dying to buy.
And the easiest way to get inside customers’ heads? Study what works.
If you want more insights like this—the kind that actually make you money instead of just filling your brain with fluff—subscribe to my email list. No spam, no B.S., just hard-hitting lessons on copywriting, marketing, and business growth.
Productively yours,
Nick
