My New Book Explains Its Own Table of Contents

2022-05-30 original Startups

My book comes out on May 18, 2022. (Amazon has it scheduled for 5/20. Bookstores will follow shortly after.) So I’m going to explain and introduce the content little by little.

The Outline of a Happy IoT Startup

The book is structured into four chapters:

Chapter 1: Understanding the basics of startups
Chapter 2: Understanding common worries in running a startup
Chapter 3: Understanding typical stumbling blocks in IoT device development
Chapter 4: Leveling up once you think you understand it all

Chapter 1 covers ground that applies pretty universally.

For example:

Do you need an outlandish idea to start a company?
Is “speed is everything for startups” actually true?
Should you start a company alone, or with multiple people?

Anyone who has started a startup has struggled with, been tormented by, or come to regret things related to these points, and I analyze them from my own perspective.

I’ve also included insights useful to anyone involved in launching a business or planning a product or service in general, such as:

Should you start from technology, or from the market?
Is building a persona important?

Chapter 2 covers the common experiences of running a startup.

For all the fancy talk about “startups,” they’re really just ordinary companies that happen to be small and change extremely fast. There’s the pain that comes from having few people, and there are the worries that arise as headcount grows. How should you approach hiring? How should you adjust team culture? For each of these points, I think you can ultimately find commonalities across any kind of company.

Put another way, I believe that “a startup should serve as a good reference that’s useful to everyone.”

Every day is a treasure trove of trouble, after all (lol).

Chapter 3 goes deep into the development of IoT products.

Requirements specifications, prototypes, PoCs, quality assurance, customer service, manufacturing, patents, regulations, and so on.

Readers far removed from hardware or product/service development may find some of this hard to follow, but I’ve tried to write it so it can be enjoyed to some degree as “reading material.” File it away with a “huh, I guess that happens,” and pull it back out the moment you find yourself stumbling on something somewhere down the line.

For those who are about to start building IoT products, this chapter is packed with genuinely meaningful, concrete benefits. Pay attention.

As for Chapter 4, I’m braced for the possibility that, depending on the reader’s prior knowledge and experience, it might come across as “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.” I wrote it anyway.

Most of the content in this chapter draws on things that happened to me or people around me, lessons learned from painful experiences and major failures, or things that made me go “ah, I see” after watching the actions of friends who run companies or acquaintances of mine.

The whole premise of this book is “the things I’ve said when various people asked me questions or sought my advice.”

In other words, what’s written here consists entirely of things that rookie founders and startup team members have actually experienced, struggled with, stumbled over, and then come and asked me about.

So I think this will be genuinely useful content for anyone who is about to start an IoT startup, or any other kind of startup, for that matter.

Throughout the whole book, I aimed for something where “even though it’s in Q&A format, you come away with systematic wisdom.”

If even a little of this strikes a chord with you, I’d be glad if you gave it a read.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/05/885/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.