The Founder Bookshelf
Books founders recommend to each other. Browse by topic or by where you are as you grow, mark what you've read, and add what's next.
6 books on Operations & Scaling for finding pmf
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A step-by-step process for reaching product-market fit.
The Lean Product Playbook offers a concrete, six-step process for achieving product-market fit using minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback. Olsen...
1 founder recommends Get the book ↗
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How great designers turn ideas into products people actually love.
Hurff distills how successful product designers think and work, drawing on interviews with practitioners across the industry. He covers everything from finding what to...
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Run a fast, data-driven experiment engine to drive breakout growth.
Ellis and Brown lay out the operating system for growth teams: a rapid, cross-functional experimentation process that pulls together product, marketing, data, and...
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Design as a fast, collaborative, hypothesis-driven team activity.
Lean UX applies the principles of Lean Startup and agile to the practice of user experience design. It reframes design as a collaborative, hypothesis-driven process...
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Get out of the building and validate before you scale.
Blank argues that startups fail not from product flaws but from a lack of customers, and proposes Customer Development as a parallel process to product development. He...
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The exhaustive playbook for finding customers before building the product.
A dense, step-by-step manual that lays out the Customer Development process for taking a startup from idea to scalable business. It walks founders through customer...
Questions, answered
What books do founders recommend?
Founders on the eChai network recommend titles like The Lean Product Playbook, Designing Products People Love, and Hacking Growth. The bookshelf ranks books by how many founders have read them.
Where can I find a startup reading list?
The eChai founder bookshelf is a curated, founder-recommended reading list you can browse by topic (fundraising, product, hiring) and by stage.
How is the bookshelf ordered?
By recommendation: the more founders mark a book read, the higher it ranks. You can also sort by newest or A to Z.
