The Business of Software
Three Practical Business Books To Drive Focus
I spoke at the Business of Software conference in Raleigh last week and discovered three recent books worth reading. Unlike a lot of Bay Area conferences, BoS is not about lofty topics such as Crypto / Web3 / AI making the world a better place. It’s a pragmatic conference helping people run software companies, many of which are self-funded and outside the venture-backed echo chamber. As conference organizer Mark Littlewood says, attendees aren’t looking for inspiration, they want practical tips they can put into place immediately. And they got that in spades.
All three of the books hit on a central theme that came up at the conference which was on the importance of focus and alignment to drive growth. In my own work, I’ve seen firsthand how much impact you can achieve by prioritizing on a small set of important goals and then say no to as many lower priority tasks as possible.
Unlike a lot of business books that have one good idea padded out over 250 pages, you can get through these books in a weekend or over one one long flight.
Meanwhile, I’m still working on how to turn all of the essays here at Build To Scale into a cohesive book, while turning out new content at a regular, if slower pace. (If you have ideas, let me know!)
Matt Lerner - Growth Levers
Matt Lerner did a great presentation at BoS and explained the genesis of his book from his work at PayPal and as an advisor to many startups. Although his book started out as a somewhat random collection of stories, he narrowed the focus to identify the most important levers for growth.
The key to Lerner’s thinking is to really understand the patterns of behind the different customer journeys that are happening. Don’t let data analytics smooth out the outliers and leave you wallowing in averages that mask customer behavior. All of this is important in understanding which activities are going to drive growth.
Georgiana Laudi & Claire Suellentrop - Forget The Funnel
Fellow Montrealer Georgiana Laudi gave a tremendous presentation at BoS that was somewhat counter-intuitive. The “forget the funnel” concept is attention grabbing, but what she’s really talking about is that the funnel is an internal construct. You can get busy with a lot of marketing activities to chase buyers, but if you don’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish you’re wasting time and money. You need to understand their journey. Traditional funnel metrics can obscure what is really happening among distinct segments. This really resonated with me. One of the first things I do when I work with a company is to try to understand the underlying customer patterns.
Rob Nicolletti - How Revenue Happens
Rob Nicolleti has developed both a framework for focusing executive teams and a software dashboard called Halo (meaning Holistic Approach, Leveraged Outcome) for managing and monitoring progress. When he showed me the dashboard it was like a Vulcan mind-meld. I’ve never seen software map as directly to how I operate. His book was released just last week and is on sale at Amazon for the ridiculous price of $0.99. I can’t imagine a higher return on investment to founders than putting in place some of Rob’s ideas.
Check out all three books and let me know what you think. Feel free to post a comment below about any other books you have found useful in building your business.