Are you looking to break away from your current job and become your own boss? Do you already have a business idea in mind? Or are you still in the dreaming stage?
Whether you already know what you’re passionate about and how to monetize it or you’re still brainstorming, we’ve got you covered. We’ve compiled a list of the best resources for entrepreneurs, including books, blogs, and podcasts.
Get inspired by success entrepreneurship stories, become an expert in business theory, and learn helpful tips from those who’ve already walked the path you are about to embark upon.
Learning Entrepreneurship
Breaking away from the stability of a regular job and starting your own business is daunting, especially when you think about how slim your chances of success are—90% of startups fail in the first few years.
However, many people start successful businesses every year. Those who succeed typically spend a significant amount of time doing market research, educating themselves on business fundamentals and best practices, devising a realistic business plan, etc. Knowledge is by no means an absolute guarantee of success, but it improves your chances immensely.
That’s exactly our goal in compiling this list of the best resources to learn entrepreneurship, including books, blogs, and podcasts.
Best Entrepreneurship Blogs
Building a successful business is no easy feat, so you’ll need a lot of advice along the way. There are many entrepreneurship bloggers who churn out content daily, but how do you know whom to trust?
We’ve scoured the web for the best entrepreneurship blogs to inspire, motivate, and guide you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Tim Ferriss is a bestselling author, speaker, investor, and entrepreneur. His blog has been featured on Inc. Magazine’s list of 19 Blogs You Should Bookmark Right Now. Tim blogs about numerous topics, from investing and entrepreneurship to dance and psychedelics. In his entrepreneurship section, you’ll find articles authored by both Tim and guest contributors, covering entrepreneur success stories and tips for building a business from the ground up.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and one of the most sought-after speakers on media marketing and consumer behavior. On his blog, he shares his insights on a wide range of business topics, with an emphasis on online marketing and personal branding.
Steve Blank’s Blog
Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany and a Professor of Entrepreneurship. He blogs about a wide range of business topics, often walking his readers step-by-step through his points.
Suitcase Entrepreneur is run by Natalie Sisson, bestselling author and a business coach. If you want to start an online business that generates income without your full involvement, Natalie’s blog is the place to be. She writes about creating and monetizing your personal brand, launching your product on Amazon, and a myriad of other ways to start a profitable online business.
Startup Savant writes about all things entrepreneurship, from brainstorming business ideas to funding, launching, and marketing. Contributions to the blog come from real startup founders willing to share their entrepreneurship story and the lessons they learned along the way.
Seth Godin is a well-known public speaker, bestselling author, and the founder of altMBA, an intensive 31-day online workshop on leadership skills. His blog is incredibly popular, and there are 7000 posts and counting. Seth blogs about entrepreneurship, leadership, media, and personal development. His posts are always short and to the point with no fluff.
The Entrepreneurial Mind is run by Jeff Cornwall, author and a Professor of Entrepreneurship at Belmont University. His blog covers a whole gamut of topics relevant to entrepreneurship and running a business, with a focus on entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ethics.
Guy Kawasaki is a bestselling author, speaker, and evangelist of the Australian graphic design company Canva. His blog was featured on the WSJ’s list of 15 Entrepreneur Blogs Worth Reading. He writes from his vast experience in entrepreneurship, giving valuable advice on how to tackle common challenges business owners face.
Best Entrepreneurship Podcasts
Listening to entrepreneurship podcasts is great if you like consuming content on the go (e.g., during your morning run or while driving to work). Here is our round-up of the best podcasts to learn entrepreneurship in 2022:
The EntreLeadership Podcast is hosted by George Kamel, a Ramsey Solutions Personality and Personal Finance Expert. In each episode, he interviews America’s top speakers, authors, leaders, and entrepreneurs on the lessons they’ve learned on their entrepreneurship/leadership journeys.
Vested Capital is hosted by Yaro Starak, an entrepreneur, investor, and blogger on a mission to educate people on how to make money through entrepreneurship and investing. Every episode is an interview with an esteemed figure from the world of business and/or investing on how they made money and put their capital to work.
On The Entrepreneurs Library, host Wade Danielson takes you through the key insights and takeaways of the best business books that—according to Wade—every entrepreneur should read. He sits down with the authors themselves and gets them to break down the book chapter by chapter. He covers books on a whole variety of business topics, from sales and marketing to innovation and HR.
The Growth Show with Meghan Keaney Anderson, the VP of Marketing at Hubspot, explores the stories behind businesses, ideas, and movements. In every episode, Meghan sits down with entrepreneurs and leaders, interviewing them about the obstacles they encountered and the lessons they learned on their entrepreneurial journey.
The Judgment Call Podcast is run by serial entrepreneur Torsten Jacobi. In each episode, he invites and interviews entrepreneurs, speakers, and “simply mind bogglers” on a wide range of topics, with a focus on entrepreneurship and finance.
Podcast by the Nice Guys with Doug and Strickland hosts authors, leaders, speakers, and entrepreneurs willing to share their secrets on how to grow a successful business and foster a culture of trust and cooperation in the workplace. The podcast emphasizes the intangible, “soft” elements of entrepreneurship such as trust, integrity, and respect.
Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki features interviews with remarkable people—leadership experts, bestselling authors, CEOs, scientists, professors—on their work, personal and business philosophy, and tips for success.
Best Entrepreneurship Books
Entrepreneurship books offer a good balance of theory and firsthand experience from people who have already walked the entrepreneurial path and tackled the challenges along the way. The best entrepreneurship books address things like how to raise funding for your startup, how to decide on your business model, how to launch, how to market your product and more.
Here is our roundup of the best books to learn entrepreneurship:
If you’re looking to break away from your current work arrangement and start doing something that you’re passionate about, consider starting your own microbusiness, a business run by one person. Where you once needed to have a fair amount of funding to get started, Chris Guillebeau suggests you can now do so for as little as $100.
In The $100 Startup, Guillebeau breaks down the process of starting your own business. He covers everything from finding your target audience to creating a development plan, explaining how you can find success without loaning a cent from the bank.
Inspired teaches companies and entrepreneurs how to build successful technology products. The book introduces a two-step plan for success: 1) organize and structure effective teams, and 2) develop products using a flexible “discovery process.”
Inspired author Marty Cagan, a Silicon Valley product executive, details how important product managers are in implementing the two-step plan and in product development in general. Cagan teaches product managers how to be successful and explains some of the biggest pitfalls that product managers and tech companies fall into when designing products.
If you have an idea to spread, Seth Godin believes you’re a marketer. All Marketers Are Liars offers a fresh take on marketing—one that focuses on connecting with your customer, rather than on catchy advertising jingles or gimmicks. Godin defines marketing as telling consumers a great story about your product, your political campaign, your job experience, or even just yourself. This book explores new marketing concepts that you can use to tell a better story in any area of your life.
As social media becomes increasingly central to how we share information, socialize, and do business, a personal brand—your digital presence and reputation—is now an essential career tool. In Crush It!, Gary Vaynerchuk explains how to develop and leverage your personal brand to get a better job or—better yet— to quit your job altogether and earn a living monetizing that brand.
Business Model Generation, a contemporary guide to systematic business innovation, provides a template for brainstorming and visualizing the overarching elements that make up a successful, holistic business model.
The authors analyze the different ways you can combine these elements to create the most successful business model patterns. In addition, they provide techniques you can use to generate your own innovative business models, as well as strategies you can incorporate to regularly analyze and optimize your existing business models.
Tired of competing head-to-head with other companies? Do you feel like your strategy differs little from the competition surrounding you? W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest that the answer to competitive problems is to create a blue ocean: a brand-new market for an innovative idea, allowing your company to avoid competing with rivals—because it has no direct rivals.
In Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne discuss how you can create such a market by focusing on your product’s characteristics that customers really care about while discarding the characteristics they don’t. This creates a new product offering that doesn’t currently exist, in a space without direct competitors.
Conventional wisdom says that starting a business requires outside investors, strategic plans, accountants, a board of directors, and many other “musts.” But in Rework, entrepreneurs Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson explain how old-school thinking doesn’t apply in today’s new business paradigm.
If you’re launching a company today, you can access online tools and technology that let you operate on a shoestring. You don’t need a big staff of managers and workers. You don’t need to take on huge financial risks. You don’t need to work 100 hours a week. You don’t need to advertise to find customers. You don’t even need an office—your employees can work from home from anywhere in the world. Instead, reject old-school thinking, embrace simplicity, and run your company like a smart, frugal, well-oiled machine.
Traction offers a helping hand for beginning entrepreneurs and others whose businesses are stuck at a point where hard work and determination are no longer enough for them to survive and grow. Business owner and consultant Gino Wickman explains how to structure your business using his Entrepreneurial Operating System to remove typical frustrations, so it regains momentum and runs seamlessly, and you don’t get mired in details. The system is based on practical experience, not theory. Numerous tools and templates lead business owners step by step through processes to create a structure and core focus that strengthen and reenergize their organizations.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz was a public CEO through the dotcom bubble and burst. He learned a lot of hard lessons about how to build a company and get it to survive. Now co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he shares his advice to other founders and senior executives on getting through your company’s inevitable hard times.
The book covers a wide span of topics, including handling the psychology of a failing company, building a good place to work, scaling a company, and being a good CEO. It’s targeted to startup founders and CEOs, but there’s good advice here for anyone who wants to help build a better company.
Richard Rumelt is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on strategy, having guided organizations ranging from small, entrepreneurial start-ups to large, multinational conglomerates, as well as several governments and the U.S. Department of Defense. In Good Strategy Bad Strategy, he lays out the essential components of good strategy and the faulty thinking behind bad strategy. He also describes specific and measurable techniques for designing a focused strategy that gives your organization the best chance of success.
In Positioning, advertising consultants Al Ries and Jack Trout explore the concept of positioning—a strategy of framing your product, service, company, or self against your competitors and within your market. They examine not only how you can use positioning for your organization, but also how you can use it to achieve your personal career goals.
Final Words
There’s a learning curve to running a successful business. Luckily, there’s no shortage of resources to help guide you on this journey. However, finding the best resources to learn entrepreneurship can be a tall order. That’s why we’ve found the best resources to learn entrepreneurship, including books, blogs, and podcasts.
We hope these resources will help you save time and spare hardship on your entrepreneurial journey.
Did we miss out on your favorite entrepreneur blog, book, or podcast? Let us know in the comments!
