Startup from the Ground Up: Practical Insights for Transforming an Idea into a Business

Serial entrepreneur Cynthia Kocialski has collected much of her experiences, common sense lessons, and stories from the businesses she’s started and those start-ups she’s worked on in her first book, Start Up From the Ground Up. The book is organized into eleven sections (though they aren’t listed that way in the Table of Contents), looking at subjects like Product and Business Concept, Customer Understanding, The Team, Understanding Sales and Business Model and Planning. Within each section are chapters that expand on the subjects at hand, with some practical stories from Kocialski’s experiences or those in fairly common knowledge. Mentions of major Internet and tech company beginnings are also scattered throughout. Kocialski includes practical advice on many situations faced by start-ups of all types, though primarily aimed at technology companies. The section on getting funding for a start-up is probably the most important collection of pages any group of founders can read while still sitting around the table during their first meeting. No one is likely to fall in love with your initial idea and hand you a check for enough to let you do everything you could ever imagine with your company. Finding funding is almost a full-time job and constantly distracts from the running and managing the day-to-day operations of your company. Yet without money, you can’t grow. Start Up gives some suggestions, insights, and ideas on how to manage either the funding search, or avoiding it all together.

Considering your own start-up? This might be the best $15 you’ll ever invest in your idea. There are many books on starting a business, writing a business plan, and developing your team. While not adding anything groundbreaking to the overall current body of works, Start-Up From the Ground Up is an eminently readable survey of what you need to know, in an easy-to-follow style.