Why startup founders shouldn’t read business books

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The following is an edited excerpt from Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding by Rob Walling. The excerpt was provided by the author. Read more here.

You’re a startup founder, whether actual or aspiring. You’re a constant learner; a student of life. Also a student of reading. You own a wall of books, or perhaps a Kindle or iPad bulging at the edge of its hard disk with nonfiction you’ve earmarked for future reading. Business books are a founder’s learning tool. A way to stand on the shoulders of giants. So let me tell you why you should stop reading them.

The Gladwell effect

Every entrepreneur has read at least one book in the “Gladwell/Godin” genre. These books are fun to read, focus on a single high-level premise and are packed with entertaining anecdotes to demonstrate or support that premise. The problem is not that these books are a series of anecdotes disguised as science. The problem is that the premise of all of them – whether true or false – is irrelevant to you as a startup founder.

“But wait a minute,” you say “isn’t knowing about tipping points and purple cows going to help me in the long run as I run a business. I mean come on, I need to know about marketing and trends and stuff, right?” There’s a slight chance it will. But probably not.

There are actually two problems with this line of thinking: 1) The amount of actual information garnered from this kind of book can be summarized in a page or two of written text. 2) The information is at such a high level that it’s downright impossible to implement.

Knowing you need to make your product remarkable is one thing. Knowing how to do that is another thing entirely. How many times have you finished one of these books and thought: “Great… but what do I do now?”

The “Everyone is in the Fortune 500″ effect

OK, so high-level, feel-good books about social/marketing trends are not going to help my startup. But what about other kinds of business books? Books that deal with real data and have actual case studies? I was on paternity leave a few weeks ago, and I had time to catch up on reading a long list of books that have sat stacked on my desk for months. These books are more specific and rigorous than your standard Malcolm Gladwell fare; things like Getting to Plan B, The New Business Road Test, and Business Model Generation.

I’ve read similar books like this in the past as well, some of my favorites are Good to Great and Built to Last. As a serial entrepreneur, these books should be right up my alley. They cover topics like how to pivot your product and/or revenue model to find market fit, how to test a business idea before building the business, how to find a business model for your company, and how to build great companies. And these books are great at doing just that… if you’re Sony. Or Proctor and Gamble. Or Panasonic. The thought that kept running through my mind as I read them was: “This information would be helpful if I needed to generate a huge business plan to impress a business-school professor.”

The problem here is also twofold: 1) Many of these books are weighed down with so much theory it’s like sitting in a horrific MBA course from the 1950s (the first three I mentioned are in this trap; the last two, not so much). 2) They speak to markets and business opportunities measured with 8 zeros or more – massive markets that you don’t need to understand to run a software company. Before you know what kind of company you want to start, this can be helpful. Think of it as a survey course you take in college that shows you all of your options for starting a company.

But if you’re past the point of needing a survey course, and you’ve settled on a focused type of entrepreneurship involving self-funded, organically grown companies, you will find the vast majority of business books have no relevance to this path. Even if you’re going after angel and VC funding, your choice of books that actually apply to your market instead of the one billion people who will buy toothpaste next year is slim.

Once you’ve decided to start a startup and you know if you’re going to self-fund or raise capital, you need laser-focused books (or better yet, blogs, podcasts and mentors) that speak in-depth about your particular situation. Starting a self-funded startup but listening to how a bunch of venture-backed companies made it is a waste of your time. Inspiring stories aren’t going to help you unless you’re in desperate need of inspiration; you need knowledge that comes from someone with actual experience.

The information overload effect

Finally, if you find a book that has some tidbits of semi-actionable information that you’re not ready to implement in the next month, think really hard about investing the time to read it. Given the amount of information we consume every day, the portion of the info that you can retain, synthesize, and put into action is plummeting. The problem is that we’re addicted to consuming. Addicted to the firehose of tweets, blog posts and books because it makes us feel productive and informed, when what they really do is kill time.

Reading a business book that does not have a direct impact on what you’re going to be working on in the next month or two is about as productive as watching Lost. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that for entrepreneurs, reading business books is the new television.

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