Sivers is one of the few writers on the subject of business/startups that is reliably good.
A few reasons this is the case:
1. He's not some professional blogger pontificating on things he doesn't know about. He started a real business and his posts are from his experiences starting and scaling up a successful business. He's not the usual mountebank type you get here.
2. His real business involved selling actual products that made people happy, he wasn't agglomerating eyeballs for wholesale to the advertising industry. The value proposition is very explicit.
3. He thinks like an engineer and applies the rational processes normally demanded of programmers/engineers/etc. to the business. It's not Six-Sigma certification lessons, it's him analyzing and responding to discrete business, engineering, and product problems.
You could just bundle up a dump of every post he's made about programming, products, and businesses and sell it as a book and be distributing something far more useful than 99% of what exists on the business advice book market or what gets posted to HN day to day. Toss in a bonus pack of Patrick's advice on business, SEO, A-B testing, statistics, marketing, etc and you've got a great batch of material to start with.
The stuff is timeless (relative to the internet) in a way that Norvig's post on his sudoku solver for demonstrating dynamic programming and constraint solving was.
A few reasons this is the case:
1. He's not some professional blogger pontificating on things he doesn't know about. He started a real business and his posts are from his experiences starting and scaling up a successful business. He's not the usual mountebank type you get here.
2. His real business involved selling actual products that made people happy, he wasn't agglomerating eyeballs for wholesale to the advertising industry. The value proposition is very explicit.
3. He thinks like an engineer and applies the rational processes normally demanded of programmers/engineers/etc. to the business. It's not Six-Sigma certification lessons, it's him analyzing and responding to discrete business, engineering, and product problems.
You could just bundle up a dump of every post he's made about programming, products, and businesses and sell it as a book and be distributing something far more useful than 99% of what exists on the business advice book market or what gets posted to HN day to day. Toss in a bonus pack of Patrick's advice on business, SEO, A-B testing, statistics, marketing, etc and you've got a great batch of material to start with.
The stuff is timeless (relative to the internet) in a way that Norvig's post on his sudoku solver for demonstrating dynamic programming and constraint solving was.