Review – The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital
The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital
Baptiste is the cofounder/CEO of OnSwipe.
To be honest, I loath OnSwipe.
If you’re not familiar with it, the product turns normal websites into piles of ‘tablet friendly’ ugly. Worse, it operates like a precision suck missile, targeting people with iPads (which was designed to show the web as normal, not the mobile garbage).
I’m not alone in my disgust. Winer says it is “another example of the web breaking up.”
So yeah, I didn’t love the product or what I imagined to be its cackling, hooded creator. But, to be fair, Baptiste has built a company with a lot of traction, and, as it turns out, his book is actually pretty good.
That said, there is little to no original material in this book. Rather, it is a good compilation of best practices. Perhaps the best way to describe it, is that The Ultralight Startup provides the 100 ft view to the 20,000 ft view presented in The Lean Startup and The Four Steps to Epiphany.
So you’ll get a lot of bullet points of, basically, how to take a business from zero to something. Basically checklists of content marketing, raising funding hiring, finding cofounders, ideating, building, hiring freelancers, a brief legal section. Baptiste could have gone deeper on each subheading, but I get he wanted to present an overview, and in that, he succeeded.
It’s quick. (I read the book in an hour or so.) And though I wouldn’t try stick to his roadmap, it does present a starting point, which is useful in its way.
-Shlok
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