"Wow!
A dense tome of startup advice, wisdom and humor. I picked Howard's book up and couldn't put it down - it's broken down into two sections (Sales and Marketing and Customer Acq. & Retention) and filled with 2-3 page essays that are a mix of insight and case study. You can tell behind each essay is a war story and the key ideas distilled down into something actionable and memorable.
The essays really remind me a lot of when I first read Paul Graham's work in college and saw much of my own conventional beliefs about business and value creation challenged. What pg did in terms of getting someone to forego a job at Google to start a company feels similar here - Howard gets you to forget conventional wisdom about advertising/marketing and instead return and amplify to things that work.
Howard's also got a great sense of humor that comes out throughout the book.
Highly recommend - you can probably get through it in 2-3 hours sitting but will find several things worth returning to. I would put this into a startup must read list along with:
Paul Graham's Essays
Venture Deals (if you're raising money)
Hard Thing about Hard Things
Scaling Up
Startup Owner's Manual"
A dense tome of startup advice, wisdom and humor. I picked Howard's book up and couldn't put it down - it's broken down into two sections (Sales and Marketing and Customer Acq. & Retention) and filled with 2-3 page essays that are a mix of insight and case study. You can tell behind each essay is a war story and the key ideas distilled down into something actionable and memorable.
The essays really remind me a lot of when I first read Paul Graham's work in college and saw much of my own conventional beliefs about business and value creation challenged. What pg did in terms of getting someone to forego a job at Google to start a company feels similar here - Howard gets you to forget conventional wisdom about advertising/marketing and instead return and amplify to things that work.
Howard's also got a great sense of humor that comes out throughout the book.
Highly recommend - you can probably get through it in 2-3 hours sitting but will find several things worth returning to. I would put this into a startup must read list along with:
Paul Graham's Essays
Venture Deals (if you're raising money)
Hard Thing about Hard Things
Scaling Up
Startup Owner's Manual"