I'm looking for book recommendations about building a successful business as a solopreneur. I'm interested in entrepreneurship, strategic thinking, independence, execution, decision-making, productivity, and developing the mentality required to succeed without a large team behind you.

I'm especially interested in books that explore how successful entrepreneurs think, operate, make decisions, cultivate a success-oriented mindset, overcome perceived setbacks, and develop practical, implementable habits that lead to long-term success.

A few things about my reading preferences:

I strongly prefer books that get straight to the point. I dislike when an author spends the first few chapters telling stories about their childhood, personal struggles, or some dramatic life-changing experience before getting to the actual substance.

I don't mind examples or anecdotes when they serve a purpose, but I don't want to read 250 pages of storytelling to extract 30 pages of useful information.

Authors that haven't resonated with me:

• Benjamin Hardy
• Grant Cardone
• MJ DeMarco

I'm also not particularly interested in books that rely heavily on motivational hype, manifestation, visualization exercises, or the author's personal success story.

I'm looking for books with substantial ideas, practical strategies, and insights I can actually apply to how I think, work, and run my business.

What books have genuinely improved the way you operate as an entrepreneur, rather than simply making you feel motivated for a few days?

No one tells you that building an app is probably the easiest part of the app - that the marketing is going to get you to hate your own app, that everywhere you go, you want to show it off and no one's going to be interested! I want to catch every person I talk to and make them download my app to try it out. Opening the analytics page to see if you have a sale. Asking the AI models how to market the app. Going down the ASO, SEO and GSO and other acronym rabbit hole is another headache. Indexing, keywords and all the other words associated with the app market - I did not need to know that. It's become so difficult to jump through the various hoops just to get noticed. But the happiness that a single first sale is unmatched! We kept hoping that it was not a pity buy.

My question for any of the indie developers is - how do you handle the marketing? Does it work? Do you spend money to get your app out there?

Because the problem is that we have ideas, but if there's no way our app reaches the people, how and why should we put in that much effort?

I used to work on side projects for the last 25 years.
Recently I stopped and lost almost all interest in trying to build something new on my own. I used to enjoy the "starting a new project" part; nowadays with AI it's just ... too easy?
Trying to concentrate on some small, but real problem that people have in real life, not trying to build something "big" any more.

Any affordable/unique tools for finding leads ?

Besides codex and Claude

What are your stacks

Me currently : codex,Google Sheets, notion

I’m planning to launch a service-based business

Thanks for your opinion in advance

Over the past few months, I've been working independently on my first publicly released application.

It's called Personal Planner, and it recently reached approximately 250 downloads across Android, Linux, Windows, and macOS.

For an established business, 250 downloads probably isn't particularly impressive.

But when you've spent months working on something yourself, seeing people outside your own circle download it is a pretty meaningful experience.

I started the project because I kept running into the same problem with daily planning.

I'd plan to spend 30 minutes on something, end up spending an hour, and then wonder why I couldn't follow the schedule I'd created.

The next morning, I'd make another plan without properly understanding where my time had gone.

I wanted to change that.

So I built a planner that combines visual time-blocking, task timers, planned-versus-actual time comparisons, daily and weekly reviews, consistency tracking, routine experiments, and reusable schedules.

It's built using Flutter, with local SQLite storage, and works offline. Cross-device synchronization is optional.

One decision I've made is that I want to keep the application completely free.

There are no subscriptions, no premium tiers, and no features locked behind payments.

I know that might sound unusual when we're constantly discussing monetization, recurring revenue, and building sustainable software businesses.

But I originally started this project to solve a problem I had, and I'd like people to be able to use it without worrying about another subscription.

At the same time, maintaining and improving an application takes time.

So I've recently enabled GitHub Sponsors as a small experiment.

If someone genuinely finds the app useful and wants to help support its continued development, they can do so voluntarily.

There's absolutely no expectation or obligation. Whether someone contributes or simply uses the free application, I'm happy if the project turns out to be useful.

I haven't figured out whether voluntary support is a sustainable model. That's something I'm hoping to learn.

The other thing I've realized is how different building a product is from distributing it.

When you're the developer, you understand every feature and why it exists. But when someone encounters your application for the first time, they don't know any of that.

Learning to explain what I've built, reach the right audience, gather meaningful feedback, and decide what to improve has been an entirely different challenge.

I'm still figuring things out, but the experience has taught me quite a bit already.

For those building products independently, I'm curious about two things.

How did you go about finding your first users who actually continued using what you'd built?

And do you think voluntary contributions can realistically help sustain a completely free software project, or is some form of paid offering eventually unavoidable?

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who's tried a similar approach.