Doing your own research, <i>visiting libraries</i>, reading reviews, etc. These are the best way to find books that you never would have found otherwise.<p>Otherwise you're going to end up with the same old stuff (SICP, Release It!, GEB, Code Complete, blah blah blah). Those books are actually good but they are on every single list and even worse, some "modern classics" are actually complete dreck. You might impress your developer friends but you won't advance yourself.<p>For example when I was studying for my PhD in signal processing and machine learning (before machine learning became popular again) I had to learn a lot about functional analysis. I also needed to learn a small amount of measure theory; and to go appreciably deeper in to time-frequency analysis, probability, and statistics, than I had before.<p>I discovered many masterpieces of my own accord. I never would have seen them because one lesson I learned during my literature review and actually doing research is that very few people actually read the books and articles they cite. They merely copy bibliographies from one ancestor article to another without knowing why.
“The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick is in my mind the most revolutionary and essential business book for indie hackers in the last 20 years. It would have saved me $1.4 million in my attempt to beat craigslist at its own game a decade ago.<p>It illustrates in the most logical progression a set of easily implementable steps to ensure that your own confirmation bias doesn’t sink your company.
I just want to recommend a service called eReaderIQ. It's a price tracking service for eBooks. Basically any book you've wanted to read has been available for $3 or less in the past year. I've saved a ton of money with this service.<p>- <a href="https://www.ereaderiq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ereaderiq.com/</a><p>You're welcome :)
Here's another vote for The E-Myth. I would recommend it to everyone working in any business. For example, if you are considering joining a company, you can use the principles described in the book as a way to evaluate that company. If you are starting something or a business owner trying to grow, it describes accurately the mistakes you might make and a path forward.
One option no one mentioned: No book. Do first, read later. Experience trumps reading every time. At least I think that many people just started to work on something instead of reading first.<p>My favorites, which I read only after I launched a product:<p>Rework. About improving a product.<p>"This is Marketing" from Seth Godin. To get the right mindset about who the audience is.
Start Small, Stay Small - by Rob Walling and Mike Taber<p>"Great how-to guide about being a micropreneur: an entrepreneur running many small but profitable businesses."<p>Here's a Sivers summary of the book<p><a href="https://sivers.org/book/StartSmallStaySmall" rel="nofollow">https://sivers.org/book/StartSmallStaySmall</a>
The Dip by Seth Godin is perhaps the essential book for an 'indie hacker'.<p>It's about identifying the difference between dips (good business ideas facing inevitable challenges) and cul-de-sacs (poor ideas that are not going anywhere).<p>Choice quotes:<p>> <i>Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations</i><p>> <i>Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new</i><p>> <i>Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other....the opportunity cost of investing your life in something that’s not going to get better is just too high</i>
For me most interesting are autobiography books where author is sharing his path from the start, instead of giving "10 rules of success" (which is his subjective insights summary of what worked for him).<p>The beauty of autobiography books is that we need to aggregate (generalize) these key insights based on the raw story ("subjectively raw" of-course) and our current situation.<p>The most valuable part for me is about overcoming hard problems.<p>The #1 book in my list is "Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight (The Founder of Nike). There is also an audiobook where Phil himself is read the first chapter.
My favorite from the list is Traction. It is quite short and it clearly fit the type of person that I am: Developer who like to sit down and create some products, but haven't really thought about channels and distribution systematically before.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is supposed to a good book for start ups/indie hackers. I listen to a lot of podcasts in this area and it's mentioned quite a lot.<p><a href="http://hardthings.bhorowitz.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hardthings.bhorowitz.com/</a>
The book: Small Giants.<p>This entire book is literally about companies that focus on deliberately growing but still staying excellent. Many were profitable and didn't raise a lot of outside funding. Many also were strongly owned by employees.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-Anniversary/dp/014310960X" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-A...</a>
These are all MBA business books whist I could see some business books being useful.<p>Having 100% make me think the target audience are MBA students and not "hackers"
I think some of the classic tech business books are also good for “indie hackers”:<p>Andrew Grove’s High Output Management<p>John Brooks’ Business Adventures<p>Brad Felds and Jason Mendelson’s Venture Deals<p>Antifragile is on the list, but Fooled by Randomness is better I think as it’s shorter and contains almost all the ideas.
If you liked E-myth, the Road Less Stupid is a great one for small companies or startups especially if you're struggling to move from an operator to an owner role
Not super familiar with the space, but ReWork by Jason Fried and DHH, founders of BaseCamp (DHH made Ruby on Rails), was pretty good. They provide a very different take on business and startups than typical on HN. They are almost anti VC, and really have some good points when it comes to making something and running a company differently than typical enterprise and startups do.