If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Let Inc. catapult your company to success. To put a business on the map, nothing beats great marketing. No matter how original your idea or ambitious your dreams, the company will stall without a plan to spread the word, build momentum, and drive sales. But how many entrepreneurs excel at marketing? If you are like most, you are focused on building your product or service...and don't know how to execute a marketing strategy or measure the results. No one is better positioned than Inc. to help you get up to speed fast. For years, Inc. has covered the innovative marketing used by thousands of tiny startups that turned into household names. Now, Marketing Your Startup shares these compelling stories and spotlights strategies for igniting growth, including how: Dollar Shave Club mastered the inexpensive viral video- and rocketed to success * Casper combined content marketing, creative branding, and old-fashioned subway ads to convince consumers to buy mattresses a whole new way * SoulCycle's obsessive fixation on their brand fueled their rise from spin studio to cult-like fitness sensation Through firsthand insights from founders and helpful how-to guidelines, you'll learn to define your brand, market position, and customers, then unleash the right mix of tactics through the right channels: social media, email and direct mail, content marketing, SEO, media ads, events, guerilla marketing, influencers, cause marketing, and more. Whether you've got a robust budget or you're bootstrapping your way to the top, Marketing Your Startup gives you the tools to launch an empire.

Most startups end in failure. Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don't have are enough customers. Traction Book changes that. We provide startup founders and employees with the framework successful companies use to get traction. It helps you determine which marketing channel will be your key to growth. "If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business." -- Peter Thiel, billionare PayPal founder The number one traction mistake founders and employees make is not dedicating as much time to traction as they do to developing a product. This shortsighted approach has startups trying random tactics -- some ads, a blog post or two -- in an unstructured way that will likely fail. We developed our traction framework called Bullseye with the help of the founders behind several of the biggest companies and organizations in the world like Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Paul English (Kayak.com), Alex Pachikov (Evernote) and more. We interviewed over forty successful founders and researched countless more traction stories -- pulling out the repeatable tactics and strategies they used to get traction. "Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don't have a good distribution strategy." -- Mark Andreessen, venture capitalist Traction will show you how some of the biggest internet companies have grown, and give you the same tools and framework to get traction.

The proven 7-step marketing system for fast and furious business growth Whether you're wondering how to get your startup off the ground or looking for answers to why your business has stalled, Feed the Startup Beast will show you how to feed--and unleash--the beast that is your business. "Williams and Verney have written the operating manual for driving market share and revenue in the twenty-first century." -- Christine Crandell, chief experience innovator, New Business Strategies; Forbes.com and Huffington Post blogger "Customer enthusiasm doesn't magically happen. In this important book, you'll learn how to create the fuel that flies your business like a rocket ship to success." -- David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR "There are a lot of great marketing ideas in this book. If you use just a few of them, you'll be way out ahead of your competitors. If you use all of them, your competitors had better dive for cover." -- Lois Geller, author of Customers for Keeps and Response! and contributor to Forbes.com "Beast is indispensable for the ambitious entrepreneur looking to successfully navigate the treacherous waters of growing a business while running it." -- Leslie Bennett, serial entrepreneur and contributor to Forbes.com

Entrepreneur's guide for starting and growing a business to a public listing