Learning the business-side of things as a developer?

I think it really depends on what kind of software business you want to create.

For example, being a solo founder running a profitable bootstrapped SaaS business requires different skills than a venture-backed B2C social mobile app!

If you want the former, I suggest you read interviews and follow companies on IndieHacker: https://www.indiehackers.com/

You'll find lots of resources and case studies of people that made the switch from developer to founder.

I quit my software developer job two years ago to build a SaaS API business with a co-founder. We're at $4500 MRR and we are documenting almost everything we do: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/scrapingninja

About business books, Traction[1] is a must-have in my opinion as a developer. You'll learn a lot about marketing, which is often the problem most developers face when launching their first company.

I also love "Start small stay small, A developer’s guide to launching a startup with no outside funding" by Rob Walling.

If you need solid advice in terms of code & technology choice/architecture to launch a startup, you should read Hello Startup.[3]

With these three books, you'll have a solid understanding of what to build, how to build, and how to market your software.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/19... [2]: https://startupbook.net/ [3]: https://www.hello-startup.net/

Started as a solo developer, spent 10+ years to grow it into a small business with 40 employees.

The hardest lesson for me was that at the crux of it, business is all about scarcity. There is no other magic out there. A great question to ask yourself is: How many people want what I sell and how many people are already serving it.

Business is about being in the right market with the right product, and then differentiating against all other players in the market. Once you figure this out, you will solve most of the operational problems.

I've lived for 10 years solely from the revenue of an indie web app I wrote, so I guess my experience is applicable in so far as you're also doing bootstrapped/shoestring investment web applications.

I just started a YouTube channel where I give behind-the-scenes looks at how the technical and the business sides connect.

Specifically, I'm covering things like

- Experiments in SEO (from outsourced freelance content to microdata, to preserving SEO juice when user-generated content changes)

- Basic Google Analytics game

- The surprising hidden costs with payment providers like PayPal/Stripe

- AB testing

- The hell that is sales tax accounting

- Using data to decide what features to build (minimal viable features), so you don't over-invest limited resources in uncertain rewards.

- Technical cost-cutting (e.g. having a shitty looking admin area, knowing what not to test)

- Handling customers gracefully (e.g. setting expectations about response times, letting them yell at you and still feel zen, why you should always give refunds)

So, for a frank look at one particular programmer's/solopreneur's take on the above, you might get value from my channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCzT-LQI6x0

I highly recommend reading about the business model canvas (definitely get this book [1]) and the "double diamond" framework [2] in design thinking. I'd also recommending reading some Steve Blank [3] for the "mainstream" understanding of "startup business".

The Lean Startup [4] is often recommended, but I've been told it's extremely beginner-level (though I haven't read it, so my analysis might be unfair)

If you want to get really in-depth, there's a lot of really great interplay between the design discipline and entrepreneurship that is often overlooked. "Design Thinking" is much more than a buzzword, check it out.

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Business-Model-Generation-Visionar...

[2] https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/09...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous...

If you've got some time - there are twenty pages of archived blog-posts categorized as "mba mondays" at Fred Wilson's blog. His content is quite accessible and frequently has good suggestions for additional reading. E.g., the first couple of posts are the basics of finance and accounting: https://avc.com/category/mba-mondays/page/20/

Quite a lot of books I want to recommend are already here. - Hard things about hard things - Good Strategy / Bad Strategy are a couple of books that can help here

If the purpose of this exercise is to improve your overall understanding, I would recommend something more fundamental than above (software-specific business books). Read some Macro Economics, articles around industries you are interested in (SaaS, Mobile, etc.) - especially historic ones which give you more foundational understanding.

Also, I strongly recommend not doing an MBA program if knowledge is what you seek.

Are you working in the industry at the moment? The best way to learn is talk to people who are closer to the business side - product managers, sales people, finance, and so on. Also software touches on a lot of industries, so you might want to narrow down a little what you mean by software-specific business.

Some books that I liked:

- “Good Strategy / Bad Strategy” : it’s an introductory book to business strategy with tons of examples in the software/hardware business.

- “Understanding Michael Porter” is another one about business strategy that I enjoyed.

- “Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love”, a book about product design with some interviews from the industry (I enjoyed the interviews)

- “Why We Fail: Learning From Experience Design Failures” another book about product design using some well known cases as examples.

- “Sense and Respond”

If you want to learn the basics you don’t look for specializations.

Business is business, the trade is far less important and delivering software instead of garden furniture doesn’t make you special.

Like others have mentioned it depends on your goals.

Do you want to build a passive income side business you can run from the beach? Check out The Personal MBA. https://personalmba.com/

Do you want to build a huge rocketship and IPO? Check out Y Combinator's "How To Start A Startup". https://startupclass.samaltman.com/

While these are not "software-specific" business books, I would say it's more important to spend time mastering the fundamentals[1] of business, which is the skill of finding people who want to pay for what you have. Everything else like management[2], operations[3], and marketing[4] can come secondary. This may sound cliché only because real business skills are boring, the same way "To get healthy, diet and exercise" sounds boring.

[1] https://jamesclear.com/fundamentals

[2] Marc Andreessen: The Hard Thing About Hard Things

[3] Eliyahu Goldratt: The Goal

[4] Chip and Dan Heath: Made To Stick

Crossing the Chasm

The Challenger Sale

To Sell is Human

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These books have all been super helpful. You will need to primarily learn sales, this is the oxygen of a business. All cash comes from there. The other main thing is learning to speak to non technical users and then turning that into messaging and marketing. For most of the business details you can find software or services.

Find a non technical cofounder, upskilling your business acumen during the search.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler

This book is actually two books in one. The first section is a short tutorial on developing enterprise applications, which you can read from start to finish to understand the scope of the book's lessons. The next section, the bulk of the book, is a detailed reference to the patterns themselves. Each pattern provides usage and implementation information, as well as detailed code examples in Java or C#. The entire book is also richly illustrated with UML diagrams to further explain the concepts.

Armed with this book, you will have the knowledge necessary to make important architectural decisions about building an enterprise application and the proven patterns for use when building them.

I made my first $1M last year.

There are many good sales and general business books out there.

I’ve not yet found a good book on the fundamentals of the software business from someone WHO HAS ACTUALLY BEEN SUCCESSFUL. However, I have found plenty of books and articles by “thought leaders” (full of s*) and failures (full of cope).

It seems to me this industry has changed quite a bit over the past 50 years, yet the principles of general business not as much. Perhaps you could start with good business and sales books by people with the tax-returns to prove they know what they’re talking about.

Getting Real, by the makers of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, is one of the only books on the subject that ever resonated with me. Also, it's free.

I joined a startup 6 years ago where the CEO has been extremely transparent about all business decisions over the year. I've learnt a lot from that.

Find a good mentor; someone that is a natural leader, looks past differences to accomplish a goal, finds common ground, has a track record of financially smart deals, and is well connected. Many startup CEOs can exhibit these qualities but ultimately emotional money deals or obsession with poor ideas lead to their downfall. Find someone that's had success in a "boring" industry.

It worked for me:

1. Go to your boss (or your company owner or CEO) and tell him about your willing to develop in this field.

2. Study economics. Not books (only) about startups etc, but more scientific ones.

3. If some business idea will come to your mind, just try it! It 99% times will be not successful, but you will learn something new.

4. Accept fact, that in modern economy most of results are mostly luck ;)

Maybe not software specific but a must read, for business in general, is High Output Management by Andy Grove. The best way I can describe it is: a manual on how to be a better business manager, for engineers. It's dry, its concise, its exactly what I needed when I wanted to learn more of the "business" side of things and it helped me greatly.

There aren't any fundamentals of the software business. The buyers get lots of drinks and dinners, bullshit presentations from product managers, pointless meetings, and make irrational decisions just like in everything else. Nothing interesting happening there, don't bother.

I don't have good answers to your questions. But I do have this advice: get a good lawyer and a good accountant. Don't try to do taxes or legal paperwork on your own. It's never worth it and the cost of doing it wrong is so high.

https://www.heavybit.com/library/