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Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged
The astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world---and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, it is a mystery story, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder---and rebirth---of man's spirit.
Steven Johnson: Emergence.
The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software.
Scott A. Shane: Finding Fertile Ground
Identifying Extraordinary Opportunities for New Ventures
Antony Flew: How to Think Straight
An Introduction to Critical Reasoning
Murray N. Rothbard: Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (Scholars Edition)
William Poundstone: Prisoner's Dilemma
John von Neumann, game theory, and the puzzle of the bomb.
Michael A. Cusumano: The Business of Software.
Makes for in-depth, very informative tech start-up reading about the software industry.
David Deutsch: The Fabric of Reality
A startingly integrated, rational and optimistic world view that combines four strands: quantum physics and the theories of knowledge, computation and evolution.
Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead
The story of an intransigent young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a woman who struggles to defeat him.
Michelle Tampoya asks: How do we get people to buy?
It is clear that with zero budget you have pretty much no other chance than to find other ways to spread the word. The best marketing is a fantastic product: even with a marketing budget, you'll need that. One of the most important lessons of marketing is that you simply cannot turn poo into chocolate, no matter how stretched your budget.
Still, I absolutely agree that it is worth pointing out that "no budget" does not mean "no chance", which is what many people still believe. Then again, I think this is more of a general state of mind that cannot be "fixed" easily by counterexamples or counterarguments. You may have the drive to find ways to "make it happen" no matter what resources are at your disposal or not. I'm not saying this is determined by nature or fate or nurture, rather that it depends on the context, but given an individual isolated situation, you will probably find that you belong to the one camp or the other, likely revealing our "real" preferences no matter what we wish they were. Just a vague suspicion on my part here.
Michelle writes:
Leaving aside that, from what I have observed, this is the question most forum posters ask to begin with, suggesting that they have figured this mental leap for themselves already, I will point out that this is the only logical next question you can arrive at, were you to ask how to "get" people to buy your stuff.
How can other people be compelled to do something we want them to do? All possible answers boil down to two fundamental answers: attempting to force them (whether through fraud or at gunpoint), or to convince them by argument. In marketing, this is called "persuasion", but the idea is to:
I'm digressing a little but the point is that, ruling out the option of force, the only next question that you can logically arrive at after asking, "how can I get people to voluntary exchange their hard-earned cash for my product or service?" (i.e. arrive at a valuation of your product / service that ranks higher than their valuation of the sum of money you are asking for in exchange), is asking one of two "why" questions, where each will in turn lead you to the other: either "why are they not buying?", as Michelle suggested, or "why are they buying elsewhere?" / "when people do buy stuff, why do they do it?". In other words, why don't they realize (whether correctly or incorrectly aside) that my product serves their best self-interest? [2]
This isn't meant as much as a criticism of the article, as it just got me thinking and blogging after I finished reading it. Her five bullet points pretty much cover the basic prerequisites of marketing in practice, "community marketing" as it is called to contrast it with what is believed to be more "traditional", slap-in-the-face marketing.
Talking about proper marketing, I have to point out Spark This, a marketing resource that I just discovered today and that seems low on quantity (last update was in April), but for my tastes very high on quality.