You've got "The Mom Test" on your nightstand, "Zero to One" bookmarked on every device, and you're halfway through your third re-read of "The Lean Startup." Your Goodreads list is a who's who of startup wisdom, and you can quote Paul Graham essays from memory.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: you're probably reading these books wrong. And worse, they might be the exact thing keeping you from actually building anything.
I know because I spent years in the exact same trap. Years of "preparing" and "learning everything I needed to know" before I was ready to build. It wasn't until late 2021 when I finally said screw it and actually shipped something. Since then, I've built LogSnag (still running it) and launched UserJot about six months ago. Now I'm indie hacking full-time, actually making money from products real people use.
The difference between my years of reading and my years of building? Night and day. Here's what I learned the hard way.
The Startup Book Trap
We've all been there. You get excited about building something, so naturally, you want to prepare. You start with one book—maybe someone on Twitter recommended "The Mom Test" for customer interviews. It's good stuff, so you grab another. Then another.
Before you know it, you're six months deep into your "research phase," you've consumed every startup book on the planet, and you haven't written a single line of code or talked to a single potential customer.
You've become a professional startup student instead of a startup founder.
Why This Happens (And Why It's So Seductive)
Reading feels productive. It's comfortable. There's no risk of failure when you're curled up with a book about someone else's journey. You're learning, right? You're preparing. You're making sure you don't make the same mistakes.
But here's what those books don't tell you: every single successful founder you're reading about learned by doing, not by reading about doing. They didn't have a library of startup wisdom before they started. They figured it out as they went, made mistakes, and adapted.
The books came after. The wisdom was extracted from the bruises, not the other way around.
The Real Problem With Startup Books
Don't get me wrong—these books aren't bad. The problem is timing and context.
Reading about customer development when you don't have customers is like reading about swimming techniques when you've never been in water. Sure, you might memorize the motions, but when you finally jump in the pool, all that theory goes out the window. You're still going to flail around and swallow chlorine.
These books are narratives told from someone else's perspective, filtered through their specific context, market, timing, and frankly, luck. What worked for Airbnb in 2008 might be completely irrelevant for your SaaS in 2025. What made sense for Peter Thiel with his PayPal mafia connections probably doesn't apply to you coding in your apartment.
The Better Way: Just-In-Time Learning
Here's how you should actually use startup books—as solutions to real problems you're facing, not as prerequisite reading:
Week 1-2: You launch your MVP
You throw together a basic version and get a few sign-ups. Exciting! But then... crickets. People sign up and disappear.
NOW you read: The activation chapters in "Product-Led Growth" or "Hooked." Suddenly, Nir Eyal's hook model makes sense because you're seeing real users drop off at specific points. You can map your actual user behavior to the model, not just theorize about it.
Month 1-2: Your churn is brutal
Users try your product for a week and cancel. Your MRR graph looks like a ski slope.
NOW you read: "The Lean Startup" chapters on product-market fit, or check out "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg. When he talks about the "bullseye framework," you're not just nodding along—you're thinking, "Oh shit, I've been targeting the wrong channels entirely."
Month 3: Nobody wants to pay
Free users love you. The moment you mention pricing, they ghost you.
NOW you read: "The Mom Test" hits different when you realize your users have been lying to you. They said they'd "definitely pay for this" but their credit cards say otherwise. Rob Fitzpatrick's advice about asking for commitments, not compliments, suddenly feels like it was written specifically for your situation.
The feedback you missed: If you had a proper feedback system (like UserJot) running from day one, you might have spotted the warning signs. Users would have told you what was actually valuable versus what was just "nice to have."
Month 6: You can't figure out positioning
You've got some paying customers but can't explain what you do in a way that resonates. Your homepage converts at 0.5%.
NOW you read: April Dunford's "Obviously Awesome" or "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. Positioning frameworks actually make sense when you have real customer feedback to work with.
See the pattern? When you read with a specific problem in mind, everything clicks differently. You're not memorizing abstract concepts—you're finding solutions to real problems you're actually facing.
What Building Actually Looks Like
Here's the real path (not the one in books):
Step 1: Build the embarrassing MVP
I mean embarrassingly simple. If you're building a feedback tool, maybe it's just a form that emails you responses. If it's a marketplace, maybe it's a Google Sheet and some manual matching. Just solve one tiny problem for one person.
Step 2: Get it in front of real people
Not your mom. Not your best friend. Real potential customers. Watch them use it. Watch them struggle. Watch them abandon it. And make sure you have a way to capture their thoughts—whether that's through user interviews, screen recordings, or a feedback widget like UserJot that lets them report issues as they happen.
Step 3: Set up a feedback loop
This is where you actually start learning. You need a way to collect what users think, what they're struggling with, what they actually want (not what they say they want). Set up something simple—could be as basic as a feedback widget like UserJot that lets people tell you what's broken while they're actually experiencing it. The key is making it easy for them to complain when something sucks.
Step 4: Ship fixes based on real feedback
Not based on what you think users want. Not based on what Steve Jobs would do. Based on what your actual users are actually struggling with.
Step 5: Watch what happens
Do they stick around longer? Do they refer friends? Do they upgrade to paid? These behaviors tell you more than any book ever could.
Step 6: Repeat until something works
This is the part nobody talks about. It's not a 3-month process. It's not even a 6-month process. You'll do this loop dozens, maybe hundreds of times before things start clicking.
The Brutal Truth About Building
Let me be honest about what's actually going to happen when you stop reading and start building:
- Your first idea will probably suck
- Your first 10 marketing attempts will fall flat
- You'll have days (weeks, months) where you have no idea what you're doing
- You'll watch competitors raise millions while you're bootstrapping
- You'll question everything approximately 47 times per week
- You'll feel like an impostor who accidentally convinced a few people to give you money
And you know what? That's exactly how it's supposed to feel.
This isn't a 6-month journey. It's not a "follow these 10 steps" situation. Building a real business takes years. YEARS. And most of that time is spent feeling lost, experimenting, failing, and slowly—painfully slowly—figuring out what actually works for your specific situation.
Making Feedback Your Superpower
The fastest way to compress those years of learning? Build tight feedback loops. The tighter the loop between "ship something" and "learn what's wrong," the faster you improve.
This is why setting up proper feedback channels early matters so much. Whether it's user interviews, support tickets, or a feedback tool like UserJot that captures issues in real-time—you need to know what's broken while users still remember why they were frustrated.
The difference between successful products and failed ones often comes down to this: successful teams use tools like UserJot to systematically collect, organize, and act on user feedback. Failed ones rely on sporadic emails and forgotten conversations.
Books can't tell you why YOUR users are churning. Only your users can tell you that.
The Reading List You Actually Need
If you must read before building (and I know some of you will), here's your entire pre-launch reading list:
- One chapter about MVPs from any startup book
- One blog post about how to set up Stripe
- The documentation for whatever tech stack you're using
That's it. Everything else can wait until you have real problems to solve.
Your Real Education Starts Now
Here's what I want you to do right after reading this:
- Close all your startup book tabs
- Open your code editor (or Figma, or whatever you build with)
- Build the absolute simplest version of your idea
- Ship it somewhere—anywhere—where one real person can use it
- Set up a way to capture what those real people think (seriously, UserJot takes like 5 minutes to set up)
- Watch what happens
Yes, it will be scary. Yes, it will probably fail. Yes, you'll feel like you should have read more books first.
Do it anyway.
Because in two weeks of building, shipping, and talking to real users, you'll learn more than in two years of reading about other people's journeys.
The books will still be there when you need them. But they'll mean something completely different when you're reading them with battle scars instead of dreams.
Stop Reading. Start Building.
I know this post is ironic—I'm literally telling you to stop reading while asking you to read this. But this is your sign. This is your permission slip. You don't need to read another book. You don't need another course. You don't need to be more prepared.
You need to build something terrible, ship it to real people, and start learning from reality instead of from someone else's filtered experience.
The startup world doesn't need another person who's read every book. It needs builders who learn by doing, adapt from real feedback, and aren't afraid to figure it out as they go.
So what are you waiting for? Your startup education begins the moment you ship something real. Everything before that is just procrastination dressed up as preparation.
Now go build something. I'll see you on the other side.
P.S. - Save this post. You'll want to come back to it in six months when you're deep in your next "I should read more books" phase. Trust me, we all relapse.
Top comments (2)
startup books are mostly a scam
😂
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