During the years I ran Hashrocket, my web design and development shop, I worked with literally hundreds of web entrepreneurs. They would share their business ideas with me, and I would do my best to help them make those ideas reality. In that role I was always looking for good books to help make my job easier.
One day, in frustration, I asked myself: “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a concise book that prepared the aspiring web entrepreneur for a successful startup experience?”
I looked all over the place for a book like that, one that would educate the non-technical founder and provide them with a guide that helped them avoid stupid questions and decisions. Guess what? Nothing like that on the market! So I went ahead and wrote over a hundred pages of the manuscript before setting it aside and getting busy with other startup ambitions. Now I've got a little bit of free time on my hand so I'm finishing up the book and publishing it via Leanpub.
If you are interested in being a web entrepreneur then you need this book. Or if you are like me and work with people that want to build web apps, then you’ll need a whole bunch of copies of this book so you can give them to your clients as gifts. I promise that it’ll save you a lot of time and effort explaining the fundamentals of the web app business over and over again.
In my experience, as a first-time web entrepreneur you’re likely to have all sorts of misconceptions about what it takes to succeed, from wildly inaccurate cost estimates to thinking you can do everything yourself or with the right partner, to putting an overabundance of attention on technical matters that actually don’t matter that much.
This book aims to arm you with the knowledge you need to succeed, as well as the right mindset for success. The headings are phrased as questions, and I don’t assume much about your pre-existing understanding of computer terminology. Feel free to skip through the parts of the chapters that you are already familiar with, I won’t mind.
Ultimately, I hope that this little book prepares you to take an honest and informed look at your idea and the resources at your disposal, so that when you do set off on that road to building the next Twitter or Facebook, you’ll have much better odds of actually getting there andenjoying the journey!
