Books Recommended by Sanja Zepan

The book that helped me almost instantly was How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. It's a book from the 40s, I believe, and I was reluctant to read it because of its title. The title sounds like a self-help book mixed with magic spells and incantations. But in reality it offers very easily digestible tips on how to be approachable, how to negotiate, how to diffuse conflicts... Everything that's very useful for founders who are navigating their team, investors, and users. I used the advice in the book first when I started doing customer support, and it was pretty incredible how easy it was to take a user that's angry and aggressive, and make him happy and an actual supporter who posts about our product and good customer support on their social media. Dale Carnegie explains how to understand where people are coming from and how to react to that, instead of reacting to their words.

My favourite business book is Hooked, by Nir Eyal. It talks about building habit forming products, apps that integrate into people's lives and make them easier or better in some way - but to do that, these products have to create a new habit, like putting your expenses in a budgeting app, adding missing ingredients to a shopping app, or in our case marking chores as done in Homey app. Almost every consumer facing startup needs good engagement, and I've recommended this book to countless founders. It's definitely not only for apps that rely heavily on gamification, as many people thought. It provides real world examples for many different business cases, and the ideas are usually easy to apply, test and integrate. We've used some ideas from this book, but we're still not done with it.

Favourite non-business book would be Der Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse. It's a book that's often read by privileged people who feel misunderstood (usually teens), so everyone focuses on the first part about loneliness in the bourgeois world and forgets about the whole second part of the book that's about overcoming that and finding a sense of humour, a shift in perspective, and a bit of distance. Jack Kerouac even dismisses the book in the fashion of the precisely same intellectual hypocrisy this book talks about, which to me sounds like hipsters talking about how other people are hipsters and fake, because they themselves "have been listening the band before it was popular". Also, Steppenwolf is very relevant today - especially in the often lonely world of startup founders, where everyone talks about how great they're doing. So, the message still resonates with me.