Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

What founders use most, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

1. Blank separates a new market, where customers do something they could not before, from existing and resegmented markets, and... Inc. Article · ~8 min read · Starting Up Defining New Markets Steve Blank
2. This essay dismantles the seductive but hollow logic of if we just capture one percent of a huge market. It explains why that... Angus Norton, Predict Essay · 9 min read · Starting Up The 1% TAM Myth: Why Most Market Sizing Is Just Theater Angus Norton
3. A short, plain read on why the one percent capture argument backfires and how to reframe your sizing around real buyers. It... The Venture Crew Article · 8 min read · Starting Up Is the 1% Market Fallacy Holding Your Startup Back? Sahil S
4. A practical guide from a startup accelerator that walks through gathering the data behind both top-down and bottoms-up... MaRS Discovery District Article · 10 min read · Starting Up How to Estimate Market Size: Business and Marketing Planning for Startups MaRS Discovery District
5. This is the foundational research on how new ideas actually spread through a population, and why some stick while others die.... Simon & Schuster Book · 576 pages · Starting Up Diffusion of Innovations Everett M. Rogers
6. The gap between a big market and a paying market is willingness to pay, and this piece gives you a rigorous way to actually... Kellogg Insight, Northwestern Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up A Better Way to Measure Customers' Willingness to Pay Kellogg Insight
7. This tackles the exact case where no budget line exists yet because the problem is new to buyers. Altman argues an unbudgeted... Forbes Article · ~8 min read · Starting Up Why Budget Doesn't Matter in B2B Selling Ian Altman
8. If your market is real but latent, meaning the pain exists but no one is actively shopping, this is the playbook for creating... Bessemer Venture Partners (Atlas) Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up A B2B Founder's Guide to Generating Demand from Scratch Bessemer Venture Partners
9. Christensen explains why capable incumbents rationally ignore small, unproven, low margin new markets, which is exactly the... Harvard Business Review Press / Amazon Book · 288 pages · Starting Up The Innovator's Dilemma Clayton M. Christensen
10. This is a direct takedown of the round-number thinking our short answer warns against, written for founders who keep reaching... Startups.com Article · ~6 min read · Starting Up Avoid the Lame "1% of the Market" Approach Wil Schroter
11. A quick, plain read on why capturing one percent of a billion dollar market is a fantasy rather than a plan. It reinforces the... Inc. Article · ~5 min read · Starting Up The 1 Percent Fallacy That Trips Many Entrepreneurs Erik Sherman
12. This is a direct, practical breakdown of what a real why now looks like and how founders talk themselves into fake ones. It... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 15 min read · Starting Up Why now? Lenny Rachitsky
13. A stark case of the opposite bet: an entire Indian industry built on a court-defined skill-game loophole that a new law erased... TechCrunch Article · Starting Up India bans real-money gaming, threatening a $23 billion industry TechCrunch
14. The direct follow up that models your exact case: roughly a hundred customers each paying a million or more (his brontosaurus),... The Angel VC blog, by Christoph Janz Essay · 8 min read · Starting Up Three more ways to build a $100 million business Christoph Janz
15. Tunguz studied SaaS companies that went public and found there is no single right customer value. Large companies were built on... tomtunguz.com, by Tomasz Tunguz Article · 5 min read · Starting Up The Optimal Average Customer Value for SaaS Startups Tomasz Tunguz
16. Lemkin's point is that almost everything about your company, from the sales team to support to marketing spend, is set by your... SaaStr, by Jason Lemkin Article · 6 min read · Starting Up Everything is Sort of the Same at a Given ACV Jason Lemkin
17. If your business is a small number of very large accounts, this is a practical playbook for actually landing them. It lays out... Wiley, by Tom Searcy and Barbara Weaver Smith Book · 240 pages · Starting Up Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company Tom Searcy and Barbara Weaver Smith
18. This is the second act in action: once you own a narrow vertical, adding payments and fintech can more than double your... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Article · 10 min read · Starting Up Fintech Scales Vertical SaaS Kristina Shen, Kimberly Tan, Seema Amble, Angela Strange
19. A focused essay on how vertical software companies grow past their first small market by layering on second and third products.... Fractal Software (Medium) Article · 9 min read · Starting Up How Second Acts Unlock Vertical SaaS Fractal Software
20. Veeva is the definitive proof of your thesis: a company serving only life sciences, with roughly a thousand customers, worth... Compound & Fire (Substack) Article · 15 min read · Starting Up Veeva Systems: Vertical SaaS Quality in Life Sciences Compound & Fire
21. This is the honest, uncomfortable side of the answer: sometimes the doubters are right and the idea simply cannot reach venture... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 12 min read · Starting Up Your startup idea probably isn't venture-scale Lenny Rachitsky
22. Cohen, who built two large companies, argues for taking a small slice of a big, growing pie rather than owning a niche that... A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen) Essay · 25 min read · Starting Up What makes a strategy great Jason Cohen
23. A practical walkthrough of reading Reddit communities as a free market signal, including how to pick the right subreddits and... ZoomInfo Article · 12 min read · Starting Up How to Use Reddit for Market Research ZoomInfo
24. Your short answer tells founders to design the cheapest test that would move one of them, and this is the clearest write-up of... ModelThinkers Article · 10 min read · Starting Up Riskiest Assumption Test ModelThinkers

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