10 Practical Startup Books Every Growth-Obsessed Founder Should Read in 2026

This list focuses on books that help founders make better decisions. Books that don’t just explain what matters, but help you work out where you’re wrong and what to try next. These are the ones I find myself recommending again and again.

1. Click by Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky

Click earns the top spot because it focuses squarely on the pre-product phase of the startup journey, the moment before roadmaps, features, or scaling conversations even make sense.

The book helps founders figure out exactly what to build and who to build it for, before committing time, money, and organisational momentum in the wrong direction. It offers a structured way to clarify the core problem, understand why customers should care, and identify which assumptions genuinely need testing early.

Best thought of as a pre-PMF companion to Sprint, Click is especially valuable for founders who feel pressure to just ship something. It helps you slow down in the right way and avoid building the wrong thing with confidence.

2. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

Most founders have been taught to “validate” their ideas with customers. The problem is that, more often than not, what they are actually doing is seeking reassurance.

They hone in on signals that suggest they are on the right track, amplify positive feedback, and quietly filter out anything contradictory. It feels good, but it is a reliable way to end up launching a perfectly competent and ultimately mediocre product.

The Mom Test tackles this head-on. Fitzpatrick shows why polite encouragement and hypothetical praise are worse than useless, and how easy it is to misread them as demand. More importantly, he teaches founders how to genuinely listen and use what they hear to build something that actually lands.

3. Obviously Awesome by April Dunford

A huge number of founders implicitly follow an “if we build it, they will come” philosophy. The hope is that once people use the product, they will immediately see its genius.

In reality, I have seen countless websites and pitch decks for products I either do not understand or do not care enough about to want to understand. Most are not bad, they are just indistinguishable. A me-too bundle of features with no clear differentiation and no obvious reason to exist.

Obviously Awesome explains why this happens and how to fix it. April Dunford shows that positioning is not about clever messaging, it is about making deliberate choices. Who is this for? What is it competing against? And why is it better in that specific context?

If customers do not get your product quickly, this book will help you understand why.

4. Growth Levers by Matthew Lerner

Growth Levers is an excellent primer for founders who want to start exploring the world of growth without feeling overwhelmed.

It is intentionally approachable and very readable. You could comfortably get through it in a single sitting, say over coffee on a Sunday morning. Lerner does a good job of shifting the conversation away from channels and tactics and towards understanding leverage, constraints, and where growth actually comes from.

That same approachability means it does not go as deep as some of the other books on this list. Rather than a comprehensive playbook, it works best as a jumping-off point. Read it to orient yourself, then use it to decide which areas of growth you want to dive into next.

5. Product-Led Growth by Wes Bush

Product-led growth can be a powerful strategy once you have found product–market fit.

Where PLG often struggles is pre-PMF. For very early-stage startups, relying primarily on self-serve onboarding and organic adoption can slow learning, mask weak positioning, and reduce the quality of feedback founders get from customers.

That is why this book is best read slightly later in the journey, when you already know who your product is for and why it works. At that stage, Wes Bush’s frameworks around activation, onboarding, and value delivery become genuinely useful.

6. Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown

Hacking Growth earns its place here largely for historical reasons.

It was one of the first books to focus on growth as a discipline in its own right, rather than something bolted onto marketing. It also popularised the Sean Ellis test, still one of the simplest and most reliable ways to assess product–market fit: “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?”

That alone gives the book lasting relevance. It is worth reading with context though. The growth hacking movement has always carried ethical baggage, particularly where short-term metrics trump long-term customer value.

Despite that, the book is still selling well nearly a decade on. Treat it as historical framing rather than a blueprint for how growth works today.

7. Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy

If you want a deep dive into founder-led sales, this is the book.

Founding Sales walks founders through the realities of the enterprise sales process, from early prospecting through to closing and expansion. It also covers how to think about hiring, structuring, and eventually scaling a sales team once the founder can no longer carry the quota.

What it deliberately does not do is dwell on the sales tech stack, which is probably a good thing given how quickly those tools change. Instead, it focuses on sales strategy and fundamentals. For founders who have never done sales before and need to get up to speed quickly, this is an excellent primer.

8. Shape Up by Ryan Singer

For founders who have never run high-performing engineering teams before, Shape Up is a great place to start.

It is a book I have recommended to countless founders who spent their first few years organising design and development around its philosophy. One of the reasons it works so well is that it pushes back on the default two-week sprint mindset, which often leaves teams feeling permanently rushed and without time to fix underlying issues.

Instead, Shape Up introduces a six-week cadence. The early phase focuses on discovery and shaping the work properly. The final week is reserved for tying up loose ends, fixing rough edges, and resetting before the next cycle.

It is a more human cadence. Teams tend to ship higher-quality work with less burnout and a stronger sense of ownership.

9. The High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil

I originally bought The High Growth Handbook thinking it would be about finding growth. It is not.

Instead, it is a book about how to run your business once growth has arrived. Elad Gil focuses on the operational, organisational, and leadership challenges that show up once things start working, from hiring executives to structuring teams and managing culture.

It is the perfect primer for ambitious founders or COOs who want to understand how to set their business up so it scales well and does not break the founder, the company, or the team.

10. The Growth Equation by Andy Budd

The Growth Equation is aimed squarely at founders trying to get through the hardest part of the journey: finding their first users, scaling towards a million-plus in revenue, and working their way to product–market fit.

Rather than treating growth as a set of isolated tactics, it looks at the whole system. Customer discovery, positioning, founder-led sales, activation, retention, and feedback loops all interact. The aim is to help founders diagnose what is actually broken, decide what to focus on next, and avoid the false confidence that comes from chasing the wrong metrics.

If time is short, I would start here. The book is designed to act as an early-stage founder’s missing manual. From there, founders can expand out into deeper dives depending on where they feel least confident, whether that is user research, product-led growth, or sales.

Wrapping up

There are plenty of great startup books that did not make this list. Not because they are bad, but because they are often more inspirational than operational.

These ten are the books I see founders actually use. They help you diagnose problems, make trade-offs, and decide what to do next. That is usually where founders are really stuck.

Happy reading.