Buy Then Build

Practical rather than deep, and I recommend it anyway because it says out loud the thing almost nobody in the startup world will.

Acquiring an existing business and improving it beats starting from zero on nearly every measurable axis. Customers on day one, revenue on day one, a track record a lender will actually look at. The failure rates are not close.

I lived the other version. Enterprise SaaS was the darkest stretch I have had, and I was miserable for most of it. Big valuations, very little revenue, no product-market fit, money to burn and not much to show. What it taught me is that building something nobody has ever built is a one percent game, because most of the time the reason nobody built it is that nobody wanted it.

The seller financing and SBA chapters are worth the whole book if you have never done an acquisition. Not sophisticated, does not need to be.