Book Review: Start Small, Stay Small. A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling

I read this book by Rob Walling for the first time in 2018. I did a quick re-read it in 2025 because I wanted to refresh some ideas about how to quickly go from idea to product.

The gist of the book is this: test before building, start marketing before building… i.e., validate your idea with the market before building. Don’t fall in love with a hunch or gut feeling about what you suppose people want or need.

If you love to code, it can be difficult to resist the siren’s call to start coding immediately. However, evaluating your selected niche is the way to go if you want to increase your odds of successfully launching a (software) product or service.

Rob Walling published the first edition of this book in 2010, so expect many of the detailed testing techniques to be outdated. Nonetheless, the core of the book still holds.