Alex has been working on a site called https://stackingthebricks.com for a decade now. I’ve been following along with the content that they have been putting out there for quite a while and it always vibed with me. I came into reading this book with some expectation on the style of content. This isn’t your big name, VC massive growth, Harvard MBA kind of content. If you’re looking for that, go elsewhere. There is a space in business though where bootstrapping and building up a business can and should be the proper path. It is especially viable in the software world where the cost and barriers to entry are low relative to other small businesses that you could start. Their perspectives and style of writing do not hold any punches.

The book rings true to its name. It’s tiny. A real quick read of about 30 or 40 minutes. It’s like a jumping in your local martial arts studio for a workout where the multiple times black belt pushes you around a little bit and forces that keen focus.

This reads like a long Twitter thread with lots of truth. Your typical business book has a lot of fluff, a couple great nuggets, and a lot of overlap with other business books. This book is a whole string of nuggets clearly backed by experience. One of the last notes in the book really resonated. The quote says that one of the intentions of the book is to help realign and recalibrate your brain. This book is perfectly positioned to come back to over and over to make sure that your business is on that right path.

Try auditing who and what you’re paying attention to, and then cut two big things that you’ve let distract you in the past.

With all the infotainment out there, it’s easy to chase the next best thing, do all the socials, and follow everything that the big name CEOs seem to be saying you should be doing. Sometime business is not flashy, and you just need to do the thing over and over and over. Tiny MBA really helps realign your mission to make sure that you are on that right path.

[…] show up to do the work when you say you will, you’re ahead of 99.9% of business that exist.

Tiny MBA takes you through the whole path touching on the “stair step” approach and dropping bombs on consulting. (Large clients can be a liability!), and leading into building products and the importance of building trust. Ultimately though:

The hardest parts of being in business long term are all people problems.

The hidden gold is the further reading laced throughout Tiny MBA, and it is worth buying just for the list. If you thinking of or pursing a business that is bootstrapped, you will get value out of this. This may initially send you down rabbit holes of reading, but subsequent reads are about that recalibration. If you are looking at stair stepping into different flavors of business, each takes a different mentality and need to be reframed separately.

The most valuable books for business owners/ operators aren’t business books, they’re books about human psychology and communication.