Gary Vaynerchuk reads this one himself, and the description makes a claim most listings never bother to make: this audiobook version contains additional material not found in the hardcover. The name differs too. The listing says Crush It!, while the copy opens on Crush It! 2.0: The Audiobook, a gap worth clearing up before you decide which edition you are actually buying. Either way the whole thing runs three hours and forty minutes.
Brevity is part of the pitch. An American response from November 2009 calls the book short and then stops to insist the word is meant as a compliment, which tells you what kind of business title this is: a pep talk with a method attached rather than a reference work. That entry predates the January 5, 2010 recording by seven weeks, and so does the other American response, from October 2009. Both were written about a printed book, and that gap deserves attention on a page whose counter claims three ratings while five signed responses sit underneath it.
Start with that counter, because it cannot be right. Three whole-star votes can only total thirteen or fourteen stars out of a possible fifteen, which displays as 4.3 or 4.7. A 4.6 is not available at that count, and every one of the five visible responses is a five-star, a column that would average a flat 5.0 on its own. The two accounts cannot describe the same group of people. Pooled editions, a migrated record and a display quirk are all plausible explanations and the page offers no way to choose between them, so treat both numbers as soft and read the responses themselves.
They are worth reading. The other American entry, from October 2009, states its own scoring method up front: it judges a business book by the number of ideas and usable pieces of advice it yields, and on that test Crush It! passed. It also captures the moment the book was written in one image, a train you either get in front of or get run over by. Vaynerchuk's argument is that the camera and the connection were newly free, that a wine shop could be turned into a national business by someone willing to be recognizably himself in public, and that the window would not stay open forever.
Why Listen to Crush It!
Author narration is not a bonus feature here, it is the argument in operating form. A book insisting that your personality is the asset, and that people follow a person rather than a brand, is a strange thing to receive in a stranger's voice. The description also promises material the print edition never carried, though it declines to say what that material is, so the honest summary is that the audio is the longer version of a short book by the person whose whole thesis is that you should hear him.
The Japan entry, filed in July 2010 by a self-described internet marketing consultant, supplies the number that makes the wine story concrete: annual sales moving from four hundred million yen to five billion. That response also recommends the English text over the available translation, on the grounds that the finer shades of the argument survive better in the original, which is an unexpectedly useful note for anyone weighing an English recording against a local-language print edition.
What to Watch For in Crush It!
Weigh the date before anything else. A 2010 playbook about cashing in on your passion online sits at a considerable distance from the platform landscape of today, and the copy never names a single service, which cuts both ways: nothing has gone stale in the description, and nothing in it is specific either. The tactics you will hear were built for an internet where video blogging was still a novelty. The Australia entry from January 2024 reports that the motivational charge still lands fourteen years on, and that rings true. Take the energy and rebuild the tactics yourself.
Set your expectations on scope, too. Three hours and forty minutes is roughly the length of a long train journey, and a book this size cannot do case studies, spreadsheets or platform mechanics. What it does instead is argue, at speed and at volume, that you should start. No worksheet or companion file is mentioned anywhere on the listing, so whatever you decide to act on will have to be written down while it plays.
Who Should Listen to Crush It!
This is for the person who already has the hobby and the obsession and is stuck at the point of deciding whether any of it could pay. It suits anyone who responds to being pushed rather than instructed, and anyone curious about the origin document of the personal-brand era, which is a genuine reason to spend an afternoon on it even at this distance. Listeners who already know Vaynerchuk from video will find the register familiar; the German response from October 2017 calls the language itself motivating and animating, which is exactly the appeal.
That same response also carries the warning. It says the tips are real but that not everyone can implement them, and that each one has to be carried across to your own situation. Anyone wanting a structured operating manual, financial modeling or current platform tactics should look at a newer title. Crush It! is a starting gun, and starting guns date faster than the races they begin.
- Narration: The author reads his own book, which on a title arguing that the person is the product makes the credit line part of the evidence rather than a production detail.
- Themes: Personal branding, turning a hobby into income, early social media as a land grab
- Mood: Loud, impatient, motivational
- Verdict: A short, energetic starting gun from 2010 whose enthusiasm survives better than its tactics.
