BOOK REVIEW: Before You Start Up by Pankaj Goyal

The debut novel of Pankaj Goyal, Before You Start Up is about preparing for the life of an entrepreneur. This book offers insight on more than having an idea, evaluating it, the financial hurdle, and other pragmatic steps of launching your own product or a service company. It is a business book that I recommend especially to someone who might have doubts in their mind about the journey.

Doubts are not at all like holes in the brain cells. They are an essential part of a critical thinking process. But they often lead to low creativity levels. I urge not to dwell in them much. Instead, read this book. The first 50 pages of this book are highly critical. The author/entrepreneur himself starts by telling his own journey, a brief period of three years of his own product. All over the book, he has used quotes and cites text from the book that is already bestsellers and popular in the business world as well as with readers. He refers to the to his story in between the chapters. But that is not the reason I want you to read this book.

This book offers a lot of pragmatic advice that is important to observe if not implement all of it. I suggest you take his advice and his personal experience as his own point of view but at the same time you will find things useful. The world is full of them. You have your own and that is very necessary. No one has succeeded in their life by walking the track already exists. It is not a linear track for anyone.

The topics this book puts emphasis on are the generation of an idea, evaluating it, finding a co-founder, but most important one I found is understanding your “why”. It is all about your “why”. Everything starts and end at the “why” part. Best chapter of the book I would say.

Rest, as I said, his opinions are his own, I do not agree with his three-year breakup analogy of running a startup. You cannot judge a company or a product with that. What if it fails in the fourth year? He sounds too harsh in first pages of the book which in my opinion could have been anatomizing over the book instead of appearing all at once with more reasoning and understanding of the reader, especially, the first time readers. Here, at this point, the author assumes, the reader is already familiar with the sense of a topic. What if he is not?

3.5 out of 5