Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software Author: Visit Amazon's Alex Cowan Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1118205553 | Format: EPUB
Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software Description
From the Back Cover
PRAISE FOR STARTING A TECH BUSINESS
"Alex's book deploys decades of the best ideas towards a practical, immediately usable recipe for building technology-based businesses. I particularly liked Alex's list of challenges entrepreneurs face across the life of the venture, with playful names like The Lawn Gnome of Indolence, The Hydra of Operational Readiness, and The Whale of Scale, to name a few. I also liked the case study that Alex used throughout the book showing exactly how to use the tools in each chapter. This is a big book. But don't be daunted. It dives into the detail that is missing in most other entrepreneurship books to show you how to do it." —TOM KOSNIK, Professor, Stanford University
"Some books on high tech flirt with the details, but this one goes all the way. Alex shows how attention to a highly manageable set of specifics dramatically increases the effectiveness of a tech venture."—JAN LINDNER, former CTO, Sierra Online Games (a division of Vivendi)
"Readers of this book will steer clear of many, many bumps on the road to success." —SCOTT HOFFPAUIR, CTO, BroadSoft
"Starting a Tech Business is both a primer for first-time entrepreneurs and the book experienced execs should keep handy too." —MARK VOGL, Executive Director, Bay Area Video Coalition
Starting a technology-enabled business is cheaper and easier than ever before. Starting a Tech Business supplies the tools prospective entrepreneurs and managers need to avoid common pitfalls and succeed in the fast-paced world of high-tech business. Get practical checklists and frameworks that business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals can apply to any web-based business idea. You'll learn how to move a product idea to market quickly and inexpensively—and to tap into the stream of wealth that a tech business can provide.
About the Author
ALEX COWAN is the founder and CTO of Leonid Systems, a software company providing solutions to the world's largest communications providers. He has worked with companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100s, improving their competitive advantage in a fast-changing high-tech landscape. He lives in Aptos, California, and can be reached at www.alexandercowan.com.
- Paperback: 258 pages
- Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 10, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9781118205556
- ISBN-13: 978-1118205556
- ASIN: 1118205553
- Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 10 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
My business partner and I are in the process of turning a complicated concept into an online application for the education market. We are both experts in our fields but none of us had the experience of turning an idea into a business. We would meet and talk about different aspects but would eventually be lost about where and how we made progress. We needed a systematic method of starting a business. We got some books on startups and entrepreneurship; which were good for understanding some concepts but did not help us much in making progress because they did not provide a system.
Then we got a hold of Alex's book through one of our mentors and it changed the way we thought about how to start a business. To begin with it was structured for companies that wanted to turn a concept into an actual business and included steps to ask the right questions, validate assumptions and build our prototype in an iterative way. Some of the initial chapters make you challenge your assumptions about your product and market so that we can validate our assumptions not only for our own business but also to create a convincing case for talking to others who might be interested about our company.
Alex also uses personas and the book is significantly in tune with design thinking which forces the entrepreneur to understand the target customers and their needs deeply. Coming from Instructional Design, the personas made a lot of sense to me and we formed and reformed personas based on our research and conversations with our actual target customers. We are still making our way through the book as we make progress in our company but it's great to find a blueprint that shows you how you can do it from conceptual development to scaling your application.
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