Building a SaaS business has never been easier.
What used to cost $1M to build 10 years ago now costs less than $10k.
Given the low barrier to entry, SaaS companies are popping up faster than ever before.
This sounds great until you realize that this is driving customer acquisition costs through the roof on a macro level.
What used to cost $1,000 to acquire a customer five years ago now costs north of $1,550 to acquire the same customer.
Pair that with the fact that customer willingness to pay for features has dropped by 30% over the same period and, well, your expenses go up while your profitability goes down.
Not a good combo.
As a result, argues Andrew Chen, it’s becoming more expensive to acquire customers.
To thrive, you can’t risk playing it safe by using the same marketing and sales playbook that everyone else is using. That’s why I asked some of the top SaaS leaders to share their most helpful books with you.
Each of the books below shows you how to build a modern SaaS business.
11 indispensable SaaS go-to-market strategy books
Every company needs a go-to-market strategy. There’s no replacement for it. But of course, developing and carrying out a go-to-market strategy is easier said than done. If you read these 11 books, you’ll find yourself more confident in your ability to create a go-to-market strategy that yields positive results.
1. The Product-Led Playbook: How to Unlock Self-Serve Revenue and Dominate Your Market (With a Tiny Team)
In this actionable playbook, you'll discover the nine key components that make up the ProductLed System™️. This simple system provides a step-by-step approach to operationalizing PLG in your business. It enables any SaaS founder to move from frenetic to focused, with a sustainable pace of execution that provides more bang for your buck.
About the author: Wes Bush (that's me!) is the founder and CEO of ProductLed.
Who should read it: A must-read for any SaaS founder or CEO who already has a product-led motion (or is currently transitioning) and wants a structured approach to implementing PLG.
2. Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself
I am proud to have authored the number one book on product-led growth (released 2019), which focuses on developing a go-to-market strategy. You can read my first book for free here.
About the author: Wes Bush (that's me!) is the founder and CEO of ProductLed.
Who should read it: A must-read for anyone seeking guidance in creating a defined go-to-market strategy based on years of experience and thousands of conversations with industry leaders.
3. Crossing the Chasm
Crossing the Chasm is in its third edition thanks to its attention to detail, advanced case studies, and updated insights and findings.
About the author: Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and consultant who has worked with Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google among others.
Who should read it: Moore touches on the ins and outs of developing a go-to-market strategy, with a focus on the chasm between early adopters and the early majority.
4. Mastering Product Experience (in SaaS): How to Deliver Personalized Product Experiences with a Product-led Strategy
The title says it all. Mastering Product Experience is all about teaching you how to acquire and retain customers by providing an industry-leading product experience.
About the author: Mickey Alon has more than 12 years of experience building and managing high-growth SaaS companies.
Who should read it: Anyone seeking go-to-market guidance from a product-led expert with first-hand experience.
5. Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
An in-depth study of category-creating companies and how they reached the top of their space. Find out how Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA, among others, took their brand to market.
About the author: Al Ramadan is a co-founder at Play Bigger Advisors. From entrepreneur to CEO, Ramadan has held roles across the spectrum.
Who should read it: Do you want to follow in the footsteps of the biggest brands in the world? Play Bigger gives you the playbook for doing just that.
6. Category Creation: How to Build a Brand that Customers, Employees, and Investors Will Love
Creating a category and winning big as a result requires a detailed and concise go-to-market strategy. Category Creation provides lessons from Salesforce, HubSpot, and many other category-leading brands.
About the author: Anthony Kennada is the chief marketing officer at Gainsight, where he is responsible for creating a new software category of “customer success.”
Who should read it: Creating a new category is a tall task. This book helps you define your go-to-market strategy, which is critical to hitting the ground running.
7. Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
Out of all the books on this list, Obviously Awesome is the one that spends the most time on product positioning and how to use it when creating a go-to-market strategy.
About the author: April Dunford is an expert in positioning and market strategy with 25+ years of bringing successful products to market.
Who should read it: Product positioning goes hand in hand with your go-to-market strategy. This book gives you the knowledge necessary to position your product in a way that will attract and retain customers.
8. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
I like the way Positioning is described on its Amazon page:
The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a "position" in a prospective customer's mind-one that reflects a company's own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors.
Reaching your audience today is more challenging than ever before. Positioning helps you break down the barriers.
About the author: Al Ries is an author, branding strategist, and founder of the concept of “positioning.” You can’t create a go-to-market strategy until you know how to position your product.
Who should read it: Any entrepreneur, CEO, or business leader who wants to properly position their product for their market.
9. The 33 Strategies of War
Examples from history that show what it takes to overcome the competition. An in-depth look into the strategies of Napoleon, Shaka the Zulu, Ulysses S. Grant, and more.
About the Author: Robert Greene has written several bestselling books, including The 33 Strategies of War. Others include The Art of Seduction, Mastery, and The 48 Laws of Power.
Who should read it: If you want to learn from the best thinkers and leaders from the past, The 33 Strategies of War is a good place to start.
10. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Good Strategy Bad Strategy provides examples of what works and what doesn’t when taking your product to market.
About the author: Richard Rumelt is a UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School graduate, Emeritus Professor at UCLA Anderson, and an internationally recognized writer and speaker on strategy.
Who should read it: A good go-to-market strategy positions your company for success. A bad go-to-market strategy can kill your company before giving it a chance to succeed. That’s reason enough to study this book.
11. Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets
A leading book on how to take your product from early adopters to the mainstream market, which includes various marketing strategies that have been proven successful.
About the author: Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and consultant who has worked with Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google among others. He’s also the author of Crossing the Chasm (see #2 above)
Who should read it: Anyone who realizes the importance of using their go-to-market strategy to capture early adopters and then move into the mainstream market.
Now that you know our Top 10 to get you started, let's get into the weeds a little bit and look at the best SaaS books for different stages of your business.
15 valuable SaaS management books
SaaS management books touch on a variety of topics, including but not limited to:
- How to attract customers
- How to retain customers
- Hiring and training
- How to use innovation to save resources
- Eliminating distractions to boost productivity
Along with the above, many of these books back up my belief that first principles thinking is critical to developing an effective product-led growth strategy.
2. It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work
4. Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't
5. Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World
6. The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business
7. Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business
8. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
9. Rework
10. Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
13. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
15. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
9 must-read SaaS operations books
Your approach to product operations can make or break your product-led organization. While it’s often put on the back burner, operations should be one of your primary focuses.
The following nine SaaS operations books can put you on the right track and keep you there.
1. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
3. Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine
4. Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance
5. Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
6. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't
7. Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
8. Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
9. Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself
11 practical books on SaaS products
One of the best ways to achieve success with your SaaS product is to take cues from successful companies before you. Below is a list of 11 books that provide information on product-led growth, building a successful product, running lean, reducing churn, growing recurring revenue, and more.
1. Product-Led Onboarding: How to Turn New Users Into Lifelong Customers
2. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
3. The Elements of User Onboarding
4. Start with NO...The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don't Want You to Know
5. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
6. Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want
7. Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue
8. Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty
9. When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy
10. Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice
11. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
4 essential books about SaaS metrics
There’s no shortage of product-led growth metrics to track. These help you determine what’s working, what’s not, and where you need to focus your resources in the future.
If SaaS metrics are on your mind, here are four books to read.
1. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
2. How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
3. Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future
4. Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth
6 pivotal books about SaaS marketing
SaaS marketing books will open your mind to new ways of reaching your target audience. As you learn more about product-led marketing, you’ll find that these books serve as a foundation for the strategy you’ll develop and subsequently rely on in the future.
1. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
6. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Get expert guidance building your SaaS business
You can read every SaaS book out there, but nothing comes close to actually doing it.
Most companies approach product-led growth from the surface level.
The problem is, your free trial, onboarding experience and pricing are only the tip of the iceberg.
You need to plunge beneath the surface to build a solid product-led organization base too.
When your organization has the proper infrastructure and cross-team collaboration, you can build the right processes to collect data and launch high-impact experiments to drive powerful holistic PLG growth.
In the ProductLed Academy coaching program, you work directly with Wes Bush and product-led specialists to implement a three-phase framework to successfully scale your product-led business.
As you progress through each phase, you'll work through these nine core components:
- Strategy: Craft a winning strategy for your company
- User: Go deeper than "jobs to be done" with improved customer research process and KPIs
- Model: Identify and fine-tune the best product-led model for your users (beyond simply freemium or free trial)
- Offer: Distill the value of your product into an irresistible offer
- Onboarding: Improve your onboarding by deploying a proven framework for getting users to value faster
- Pricing: Optimize for scale by aligning pricing with value metrics ( so revenue scales with customer success)
- Data: Identify the metrics that are mission-critical for monitoring potential bottlenecks as you scale
- Process: Install a seven-step process for building experiments, prioritizing the high-impact ones, and launching them.
- Team: Make sure your team is full of A players with an org structure that can scale
While you can have one or more of these components dialed in perfectly, if you’re missing one of these key elements, you’re going to have a hard time with growth.
If you're ready to break through to the next level and master your pricing strategy, be sure to check out coaching program.
FAQs about SaaS books
Even with the above list guiding you, it’s likely that you’ll have questions about SaaS books. While there’s no right or wrong answer to these questions, the following information should provide more direction.
What are some of the best SaaS marketing books that every start-up SaaS marketer must read?
The best jumping-off point for learning more about SaaS marketing is The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you.
Once you’ve laid the foundation, read High Growth Handbook for more advanced tactics.
What are the best books to read on SaaS metrics?
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs and Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future are two of the most highly-rated books on SaaS metrics.
What are the best UX books for SaaS?
While many of the books above touch on UX, one that’s missing is Productize: The Ultimate Guide to Turning Professional Services into Scalable Products. For all things SaaS UX-related, read this book from cover to cover.
What is the best book on SaaS pricing?
You can pick up pricing advice in many of the 50+ books I’ve mentioned, but there’s another to add to the list: Price To Scale: Practical Pricing For Your High Growth SaaS Startup. This book is all about how to price your SaaS product for high growth.
What book should every SaaS entrepreneur read?
Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself marks every checkbox. Building a product is different than building a product that sells, and Wes Bush will teach you what it takes to succeed.
What comes after reading these books?
You may never read all of these SaaS books, but you should pick one or two from each category and dive in as time allows. And of course, if you need help in a specific area — such as metrics or marketing — choose titles from the applicable category.
Reading these books will help you build a modern SaaS business but, at the end of the day, execution is the ultimate differentiator.
In my nine years in the product-led space, I've seen spectacular successes and promising companies that ultimately didn’t make the cut. Having coached over three hundred SaaS founders, I know what it takes from a strategy perspective and the commitment required from founders and their teams.
If you're serious about scaling your SaaS company, explore the ProductLed Academy coaching program and apply today.
