The lean startup bundle

Some books and good reading material to learn more about the lean startup

People often ask me if they can buy "Lean Startup in a box" from me. It's a strange thing, to be asked by a potential customer if they can give you copious amounts of money, and then to have to refuse.

Startups run into this problem all the time: not every possible way of making money is equally useful. On the other hand, I try to keep in mind the idea that feedback is always about them and never about you. I recognize the need being expressed by this request. People want to get started with Lean Startup but aren't exactly how. If you're in that boat, today my friends at Appsumo are trying a new experiment that just might help you out.

It's called the "The Lean Startup Bundle" and it is available this week only. It is the ultimate product development get-started guide to Lean Startup. We did our best to package as much content (including almsot a dozen books and ebooks) as well as tools and apps, into one low-priced magic offer. Naturally, the bundle includes every essay I have written for this blog, as part of the Startup Lessons Learned ebook series.

But I am even more excited to report that it will include a hardcover copy of my new Lean Startup book.

That's right, I am writing an old-fashioned, traditionally-published book full of all new material. Because of the traditional publishing industry's commitment to rapid iteration, the book won't come out until Fall, 2011. But if you buy The Lean Startup Bundle this week, you'll get a pre-order of the book included. That means you will get a hardcover copy of the book in the mail when it is eventually published. (Believe me, you will be hearing a lot more about this book over the course of the next year, so that's all I will say about it right now.)

But that's not all! I'm even more excited to announce two brand-new ebooks from two of my favorite bloggers: Sean Ellis and Andrew Chen. These ebooks were created by my friends at Leanpub especially for this bundle, and include the best essays written by both authors (and a foreword from yours truly). Also included is the incredible Venture Hacks Bible, which is worth the price of admission on its own, and The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development (which I previously reviewed here).

And there's so much more. For two awesome books which have been traditionally published, we have several ebook chapters: Inbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah, Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons To Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld & David Cohen. And also making its debut, you'll get a sample of Ash Maurya's forthcoming ebook Getting Lean.

"But," I hear you say, "so far this sounds like just a bunch of gurus trying to sell me books." Indeed, but - as they say - that is not all. We also reached out to companies that make products useful to accelerating your Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, from cloud-hosted Selenium provider Sauce Labs (disclaimer: where I have equity) to ScrumPad (where I don't) and many in-between (a sampling is below, but you should really just click through to see the whole smorgasbord). (And even if you don't buy this bundle, one beneficial side-effect of my research for it is this cool list of Lean Startup tools curated by twtpick.in. Because of the short timeline in putting this all together, we couldn't include them all. But, if this bundle is successful, perhaps we'll have a chance to do another.)

Phew, I'm exhausted. "But," you are sure to ask, "how much will all this bundling cost me?" How about $1000? $500? $250? No! All of those prices are much too high. "Ok," you surely say, "how about $100?" Absolutely not. "$75?" No. "$65?" Absurd.

No, all of those prices are incorrect. If you act now, you will pay not one dollar more than $42. Don't panic. Buy now.

(Image source: wikwikit.com)