

The Art of Profitability - lpolovets
http://codingvc.com/the-art-of-profitability

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sivers
Don't knock it 'til you actually read it. The succinct snippets given on
CodingVC's blog don't do it justice.

It's one of the most interesting business books I've ever read - one of the
only that's worth reading multiple times.

You can see my more detailed notes from it, here:

[http://sivers.org/book/ArtOfProfitability](http://sivers.org/book/ArtOfProfitability)

Or if you're the video type, I did a conference presentation about it, here:

[http://vimeo.com/15088740](http://vimeo.com/15088740)

~~~
rrtwo
Hi Derek, That presentation is awesome! Are the slides available somewhere?
(the video doesn't capture them) Thanks

~~~
sivers
Hi rrtwo -

Please email me for the slides. I'm happy to share them.

\- Derek

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idlewords
Profitability is like weight loss. Extremely straightforward, in principle.
Charge money and keep more of it than you spend. What could be so hard about
that?

~~~
scott_karana
> What could be so hard about that?

Fantastic analogy. It also covers the difficulties: it's fun indulging in
ivory tower engineering exercises, or decadent offices, or letting delusions
of grandeur grow your staff too quickly, if you don't have the self-restraint
needed to make sensible decisions every. single. day.

~~~
idlewords
And it's _especially_ fun to tell other people how they're doing it wrong.

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weeksie
This is why I hate business writing. Endless platitudes without any substance.
Sure, each of those are models, but they are neither novel ideas nor are they
prescriptive enough to leave a path toward building something that takes
advantage of one of them. Nor, for that matter, is it possible to prescribe a
path to successful entrepreneurship beyond the basic principles because as
soon as one path to success is known, it stops being a reliable path.

Less hand-wavey:

a) Read some Peter Drucker. b) Read a bunch of case studies in your industry.
c) Start a bunch of businesses with someone else's money.

~~~
lpolovets
(I'm the author of the post.)

I went from software engineering to VC about two years ago, and I used to have
the same opinion as you: a lot of business books/articles/blog posts are just
platitudes, and anyone with common sense should already know this stuff or be
able to figure it out easily.

Moving to the VC side was eye-opening. From what I've seen, people are very
good at taking something they've learned in a blog post and seeing how it
would apply to _other_ people's businesses. They're not very good at realizing
how those same lessons apply to their own businesses. For example, I've met
many founders who talk about building MVPs but don't notice that their own
pre-launch products are heading way past "minimum viable". I'm not immune to
this, either. Like many engineers, I have a bunch of side project ideas that I
hope to one day turn into successful companies. Literally days after becoming
a VC, I realized that most of the pitfalls I saw in other people's business
ideas were very present in my own ideas. It was humbling.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I agree with you that AoP's advice is
not particularly deep (although it's much better than most books), and that
the challenge _is_ in applying it. What I loved about this book is that makes
it makes profit model advice so easy to apply to your own business. You can
literally go through each of the 23 profit models in the book and ask, "What
would my product look like if I applied this model to it?" If you spend 2
minutes on each model, I bet that you'd have some excellent ideas in just 45
minutes. I haven't found many other business books that are as practical.

~~~
antaviana
Great advice! However when I tried it, it took me 46 minutes instead of 45 (I
tried it twice just to make sure)

~~~
dalke
You didn't have any excellent ideas until the last minute of the last model?

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hkmurakami
The book shows up as "usually ships within 2-3 weeks" on amazon, even though
it's a prime item. I guess this is what happens when amazon gets flooded with
orders on an item without a large stock? I wonder if it's the publisher that
didn't give amazon a large stock, or if it was driven by its own algorithms.

~~~
MarkMc
No it's due to a power struggle between the book's publisher and Amazon.
Amazon is intentionally delaying shipping the book.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/25/amazon-
hac...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/25/amazon-hachette-
publishing-future-ebooks)

------
mindcrime
Sounds good to me. Just ordered a copy, along with Gabriel Weinberg's
_Traction_ book, and _Profit Patterns_ [1].

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/Profit-Patterns-Anticipate-
Strategic-R...](http://www.amazon.com/Profit-Patterns-Anticipate-Strategic-
Reshaping/dp/0812931181)

