12 Books EVERY SaaS Founder Should Read This Year

Tracy Osborn, 2021

Hello Web Design is good for entrepreneurs who want to learn just enough design so that they can either do simple designs themselves or evaluate designs and give better feedback. Better feedback than 'I really want this to pop' or 'can you make this better'. Right? Designers hate that kind of feedback. But if you read this compact and relatively quick read, you will fill your head with the bare minimum that you should know about design if you want to be a web entrepreneur.

Geoff Smart, Randy Street, 2008

This is another one of those best-in-class books. I think this is the best book I've ever read on the subject of how to hire, including deep dives into job interviews and what questions to ask and just how to conduct an interview process. I'll admit I do not follow this book to the letter because the interview process is six hours, seven hours, eight hours long over many interviews across weeks. However, I have borrowed heavily from this book. If you haven't read it and you're struggling even a bit with your hiring process, I can't recommend it enough.

John Warrillow, 2021

John has written three books on maximizing the value of a sale, should you decide to sell your company. In my opinion, this one is far more applicable and is the one that I would focus on if you're a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped software founder. John has incredible knowledge on the topic of exiting. He's been through exits himself and has helped people through many exits. This book is about real businesses selling for real cash or real stock with earnouts. It is not the TechCrunch headlines where someone sells a company for a billion dollars to Mark Zuckerberg in a weekend. He dives into the tactics and strategies you should go through if you ever decide to sell your company.

Allan Dib, 2021

This book is really good for small businesses and good for small budgets, so it applies to the kind of company you're gonna be growing. Basically, it helps you put together a nine quadrant, one page marketing plan. This is actually similar to what I did for my SaaS apps where I would keep it super simple in a Google Doc. I would use bullets instead of the quadrants, but you keep it simple and you do the work and you execute on it. You can obviously get similar info from a lot of books even at this scale, but The 1-Page Marketing Plan is a nice compact version that can help you get your head around marketing and how it should work. I found parts of it to be a bit heavy on the markety speak, but if you can get through that, it's great content.

Dan Martell, 2023

Buy Back Your Time teaches entrepreneurs and executives how to have more time in their day by finding people to do things for you. However, it is not just delegating in a superficial way. He dives into what tasks you should think about delegating, how you should think about it, who you should hire first, and how you should hire more people to have more time in a day to do the things that only you can do. He goes into great detail about the process he uses. It's one of the better books I've seen in a long time about figuring out how to make more time in your day.

April Dunford, 2019

This has become a staple in our circles for getting your head around positioning: what it is, how to think about it and how to apply it to your company. It is a quick read and I say that with all positivity. I love books that say what they came to say and then move on; that don't pad the pages such that the binding of the book is wider on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. It's a waste of time, right? Obviously Awesome does not do that. April comes to teach, she drops her knowledge and gets out. You can read this on an airplane in three or four hours.

Rob Walling, 2023

I wasn't gonna put it on the list because it's my book, but several people mentioned it and encouraged me to put it on this list. The book will come out in the summer of 2023. It contains all the knowledge that I could instill into about 200 pages. So similar to Obviously Awesome, it is something you can read in just a few hours. But I cover market and marketing, hiring and growth, and mindset of being an entrepreneur. It's kind of all the key topics that I feel like SaaS founders should know. There's a reason that the subtitle is How to Build a Multimillion Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital, because that is the entire focus of every page of The Saas Playbook.

Michele Hansen, 2022

The book is Deploy Empathy by Michelle Hansen. This is a very well-written book about Jobs to be Done and talking to your customers. It's about which questions to ask and how to have conversations with customers, whether you are just getting started, trying to figure out what to build, trying to find product market fit, trying to make your support processes better, your customer success processes better, doing sales, or just trying to make your product better to grow your company. It's written by a bootstrapped SaaS founder with bootstrapped SaaS founders in mind, so it's not a bunch of high level theoretical Jobs to be Done stuff. She throws in exact questions that you should think about and exact templates for emails. It really is a book I can't recommend enough.

Arvid Kahl, 2020

Arvid bootstrapped his company and sold it a few years ago and now you've probably seen him on Twitter or maybe you've seen his books. Zero to Sold is a well-written tome that covers his journey and pulls out lessons for folks who want to bootstrap SaaS companies. He comes at it from a lifestyle bootstrapper who's looking to build a great business and quit their job to give themselves a better life. And at 450 pages, it covers a lot of ground.