#tag
Business Models
How a business creates, delivers and captures value.
3 guides · 3 tools · 24 books
Simple guides
Business Model Canvas
A one-page map of how your business creates, delivers and earns money from value.
Blue ocean strategy
Instead of fighting rivals in a crowded market, create a new space where competition doesn't matter yet.
Lean Canvas
A one-page startup plan that starts with the problem, not the product.
Free tools
Essential sources
Books in the library
Billion Dollar Lessons
by Paul B. Carroll & Chunka Mui
A collection and analysis of major corporate and startup failures over 25 years, extracting patterns and lessons on strategy, governance, and risk. It helps founders understand common pitfalls in scaling, acquisitions, and business models so they can avoid repeating costly mistakes while building their own startups.
Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years
by Paul B. Carroll & Chunka Mui
A book that analyzes major corporate and startup failures over 25 years, extracting patterns and lessons founders can use to avoid strategic mistakes in areas such as acquisitions, scalability, and business model design.
La estrategia del océano azul
by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne
Spanish edition of "Blue Ocean Strategy", this book presents a systematic framework for entrepreneurs and founders to create uncontested market space (‘blue oceans’) instead of competing in saturated markets (‘red oceans’). It’s widely considered a must-read for startup founders who want to differentiate their products, design innovative value propositions, and build defensible business models by shifting focus from competition to value innovation.
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur
Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas equips founders with a visual framework to iterate models rapidly, testing pivots from resource to revenue streams. Key for lean startup experimentation vs Porter's static industry views.
Entrepreneurial You
by Dorie Clark
Dorie Clark offers insights into diversifying income streams and monetizing expertise, providing a roadmap for entrepreneurs to expand their business models effectively.
Good Profit
by Charles G. Koch
Charles G. Koch’s management and business philosophy book detailing market-based management, value creation, and long-term profitable growth—useful for startup founders designing scalable, principled business models.
Subscribed
by Tien Tzuo & Gabe Weisert
Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo is a business book that explains how to build and grow subscription-based companies, covering recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, and business model transformation—highly relevant for startup founders designing scalable SaaS and subscription startups.
Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future
by Tien Tzuo & Gabe Weisert
Tien Tzuo outlines subscription pivots from one-time sales to recurring relationships, stressing land-expand metrics for SaaS founders. Frameworks for usage pricing and customer success loops; recurring revenue evolution vs Porter's transaction models.
The Automatic Customer
by John Warrillow
A business book by John Warrillow that explains how to build recurring-revenue and subscription-based business models, making it highly relevant for startup founders designing scalable, predictable revenue streams.
The Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management tool that allows startups to visualize, design, and innovate their business models. It provides a framework for understanding the key components of a business, including value propositions, customer segments, and revenue streams.
The Profit Zone
by Adrian Slywotzky & David Morrison & Bob Andelman
A strategy book focused on understanding where and how a business truly makes money, emphasizing profit models over pure revenue growth—important reading for startup founders refining business models and unit economics.
Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur & Gregory Bernarda et al.
Alexander Osterwalder's practical guide to designing compelling value propositions using the Value Proposition Canvas.
Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model
by John Mullins & Randy Komisar
Randy Komisar’s book that teaches founders how to evolve their business model from an initial, assumption-heavy “Plan A” to a validated “Plan B” by rigorously testing leaps of faith using a framework of analogs and antilogs, metrics, and rapid iteration—making it a strong companion to lean and hypothesis-driven startup building.
Running Lean
by Ash Maurya
Running Lean is a pragmatic guide for founders to systematically test and iterate their business model from an initial concept to one that works. It applies lean startup methodologies, focusing on hypothesis-driven validation, customer interviews, and metrics to reduce risk and build products that customers actually want.
Testing Business Ideas
by David J. Bland & Alexander Osterwalder
Testing Business Ideas by David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder is a practical guide for startup founders to systematically validate business models, products, and features through rapid experimentation. It provides a catalog of experiments, prioritization frameworks, and visual tools to reduce risk and avoid building products nobody wants, making it a must-read companion to Lean Startup-style innovation.
Unlocking the Customer Value Chain
by Thales S. Teixeira & Greg Piechota
Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira reveals how startups disrupt by decoupling customer value chains. Based on eight years of research into how consumer industries are actually disrupted.
Core Curriculum Reading: Financing Entrepreneurial Ventures
A Harvard Business School Core Curriculum Reading that introduces key issues in financing entrepreneurial ventures, including how business models shape funding needs, tradeoffs between bootstrapping and external capital, differences between debt and equity, types of equity investors (angels, VCs, strategic investors), venture financing stages, alternative models like partnerships, and emerging funding mechanisms such as crowdfunding and accelerators. Useful foundational reading for startup founders seeking a structured understanding of entrepreneurial finance.
The Founder's Mentality
by Chris Zook & James Allen
The Founder's Mentality by Chris Zook and James Allen examines the recurring crises that growing companies face and how founders can preserve the insurgent, owner’s mindset while scaling. It offers a framework for maintaining speed, customer focus, and entrepreneurial energy, making it directly relevant to startup founders navigating the transition from early-stage venture to larger organization.
Why Startups Fail
by Tom Eisenmann
A practical startup book by Tom Eisenmann that analyzes common reasons new ventures fail and offers a structured roadmap to avoid typical pitfalls, helping founders design more resilient business models and execution plans.
Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You
by Geoffrey G. Parker
By Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary (2016, W.W. Norton), this book explains how two-sided platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon create value by connecting producers and consumers. It covers how to design, launch, and monetize a platform business.
The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue
by Robbie Kellman Baxter
By Robbie Kellman Baxter (2015, McGraw-Hill), this book argues that successful modern businesses build ongoing relationships rather than one-off transactions, covering membership and subscription models across software, retail, and media.
Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires with Minimum Investment
by Sangeet Paul Choudary
By Sangeet Paul Choudary (2015, self-published/Platform Thinking Labs), this book digs into the mechanics of how platform businesses achieve rapid scale, focusing on how value is created and distributed on digital platforms.