A well-styled, illuminating startup guide.
The founder of MissNowMrs.com shares her insights on building and sustaining a successful business in this debut entrepreneurship book.
At 25, Tate, a top saleswoman for a large medical company, leapt to entrepreneurship, creating MissNowMrs, a site that streamlines the name-change process that she endured after getting married. Noting that her startup “developed at the same dizzying pace as my learning curve,” Tate intends this guide to “tell you all the things I wish I had known before I founded a company.” In 12 chapters, she outlines what she sees as the key steps in a startup’s life cycle, from testing the viability of the product or service (she provides an “Innovation Gauntlet” flowchart to aid in that process) and conducting business planning (pitch decks and SWOT— Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats—analysis are among the tools explained) to overcoming setbacks (including figuring out your refund strategy since “there is always a ‘percent dissatisfied’ ”). Each chapter ends with bullet-point “takeaways,” a further reading list, and a “How It Feels” section, with Tate offering tips on handling the emotional stresses of entrepreneurship, noting that “the concept of ‘no grit, no pearl’ applies…setbacks and competitors ‘irritate’ you into becoming a better entrepreneur.” She also includes inspirational quotes from businesswomen, including Ivanka Trump and Oprah Winfrey, and discusses how entrepreneurship is particularly empowering for women, allowing a better work/life balance, noting that her own son is now her “favorite startup.” In her introduction to this book, Tate defines “elegant” as “insights (right brain) that provide pleasingly ingenious and simple concepts.” While she is specifically referring to valuable entrepreneurial ideas, this term also applies to her overall primer. Tate provides helpful encapsulations of potentially dry and/or intimidating business topics (including pitch decks, Porter Five Forces Analysis, etc.) and an array of succinct stories highlighting her moxie and missteps, including using Twitter as the “backdoor” to reach an elusive potential partner as well as having to exit a flawed partnership that she ventured into beyond MissNowMrs. Tate’s female focus feels a bit wedged into this narrative, however, since her advice is largely applicable to both genders.
A well-styled, illuminating startup guide.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9970074-0-4
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Ten Eleven Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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