Book Review #1 — From Zero to One, Peter Thiel

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina

Hello, that’s my second post about my journey of becoming a product maker.

I wrote about that in the previous post and it’s like a start point of all my stories.

As I mentioned later, I’m going to read about six books till the end of this year. Most of these books are going to be business books that contain advice, case studies and other tips and tricks that could help with the starting an own product.
In my case, I focused on the online businesses, in particular with SaaS type projects.

So, I would share the main list of them that placed in my queue for the reading (probably, items may change):

• From Zero to One, by Peter Thiel ✅
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, by Nir Eyal ⏳
• The 1-Page Marketing Plan, by Allan Dib ⏳
• Lean Startup, by Eric Ries ⏳
• The Culture Code, by Clotaire Rapaille ⏳
• Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising, by Ryan Holiday ⏳

A few books that are going to be as Handbooks

• The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, by Steve Blank ⏳
• Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster, by Alistair Croll ⏳
• UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design, By Laura Klein ⏳

📚 From Zero to One, by Peter Thiel

It’s the first startup book that I decided to read in my journey, like to start from the something generic that cover general vision of creating a startup and main approach in building profitable products.

📘 About the book

Peter Thiel thinks that the basis of any successful startup is a unique product, giving to the company a winning monopoly status.

One of the main requirement in the survival of any project — is the ability of founders take a fresh look at the world that notice idea which nobody has realized yet.

There are two way of approach to building products and found a successful business.

1. From 0 to 1 ( Find new technology )
2. From 1 to N ( Do globalization )

From 0 to 1 approach
That means you need to create a fresh new technology, idea that nobody has realized and created yet.

From 1 to N approach
When we have a general product and create globalization by making similar products, or some side products to work based on the main technology.

🎓 7 lessons that I learned from the book:

1. Every time you have to find new technology, the idea that haven’t implemented in our life.
2. You need to try to be a monopoly company on your market.
3. Let’s start from something small and step-by-step do monopolize the market.
4. Innovation with the right strategy of sales marketing — the main of a profitable startup.
5. Big competition of market — killing your profit.
6. Select the ultra-niche market and provide one solution to become a monopoly and start as a small business in the begin.
7. Use some affiliate program to get the first customers and decrease expenses in the high competition market.

Conclusion

It was my first book about startup/product making that I read.
I studied tips and tricks from the book and got inspiration and some useful advice from Peter Thiel.

Ideally, I’d like to increase the number of books per month and per year because it’s a good habit to be productive and to train and learn new skills. Maybe I’ll introduce that in the next year 😌

My next book of the Sep is going to be:
📙 Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, by Nir Eyal.
It should be cool food for the brainstorm ideas of habit-forming products and could take the place of SaaS books at my bookshelves.

By the way, I’ve already started work on my first MVP in August and
It has already done 60%. ▪▪▪▫▫

Stay tuned with my updates and subscribe to my blog 📣

Thanks 👐

Related articles:

I’m starting my journey to the side project’s world or How to start don’t read “how-to” stories.