Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. A two time unicorn founder's answer to the exact fear behind giving it away: the belief that a low or zero price wins you... A Smart Bear Article · Starting Up Should I Price My Product Low? Jason Cohen
2. This is the Figma half of your short answer, told with the CEO's own account. Field cold emailed designers he admired and... Fortune Article · 5 min read · Starting Up How Dylan Field cold-emailed his heroes to build Figma Fortune
3. Talking to prospects only pays off if you capture what you hear in a way you can act on. This free Google Doc gives you a... Kromatic Template · Google Doc template · Starting Up Customer Discovery Note-Taking Template Kromatic
4. Fishkin pushes back on the fuzzy way founders talk about fit and argues for tracking concrete behaviors like usage, retention,... SparkToro Article · 12 min read · Starting Up Product-Market Fit is a Broken Concept. There's a Better Way. Rand Fishkin
5. A practical conversation on validating demand through structured customer research rather than gut feel or friendly signups.... First Round Review Podcast Podcast · 50 min · Starting Up How to find product-market fit before you start building (with UserLeap's Ryan Glasgow) Ryan Glasgow
6. Your question is really about a denominator, and this piece gives realistic stage-by-stage conversion benchmarks. It helps you... Close.com Article · ~12 min read · Starting Up Understanding Your Sales Funnel Conversion Rate Steli Efti
7. Hoffman turns the Airbnb story into four transferable lessons, including the crucial one about when to stop. The manual,... Reid Hoffman (Medium) Essay · 12 min read · Starting Up How to Scale a Magical Experience: 4 Lessons from Airbnb's Brian Chesky Reid Hoffman
8. A short, honest founder writeup that echoes the heart of our answer: a handful of real conversations with people in your target... Indie Hackers Thread · approx 10 min read · Starting Up How I got my first 100 users Alexander Chen
9. Early sales is not about volume, it is about finding the few customers who want your vision badly enough to bet on an unproven... Andreessen Horowitz Article · Starting Up When Sales Isn't Just Selling: Advice for Founders in Early Markets Martin Casado
10. This reframes early customers as something you win through effort rather than something you stumble onto, which directly... Medium Article · Starting Up Early Stage Sales: Why Every Startup's First Customers Are Won, Not Found DC
11. A calm, practical guide to founder-led selling from zero, built around the idea that you close early deals through warm... Stripe Atlas Article · Starting Up Your first 10 customers Patrick McKenzie
12. If you are unsure whether it is your price stopping the sale, start here: figure out which order of magnitude you are in (a 10... Naomi Ionita, Lenny's Newsletter Article · Starting Up How to price your product Naomi Ionita
13. Sometimes the stall is your pitch: you demo features instead of framing the problem and the cost of not solving it. Dunford... April Dunford, Lenny's Newsletter Article · Starting Up A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins April Dunford
14. Your short answer says to ask what would have to be true for someone to pay today, and this book is the toolkit for exactly... Chris Voss Book · Starting Up Never Split the Difference Chris Voss
15. Practical scripts for the exact moment interest collides with price, so you have something better than a nervous discount. It... HubSpot Article · Starting Up 14 responses to the objection "Your price is too high" Davidson Hang
16. A companion breakdown of how early users became paying customers, including companies that had no paid plan at launch and... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up How today's fastest-growing B2B businesses turned their early users into paying customers Lenny Rachitsky
17. A grounded walkthrough of where first customers realistically come from, starting with the people you already know. It treats... Startups.com Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up How to find the first 100 customers for your startup Startups.com
18. A concrete, tactical guide to working through your own network toward paying customers without awkward pitches. It walks... UniTel Voice Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up How to Get Your First 10 Paying Customers Using Your Personal Network UniTel Voice
19. The other half of the problem: once you have supply, how do you get the first buyers so sellers do not churn out of an empty... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 15 min read · Starting Up Cracking the Chicken-and-Egg Problem: Growing Initial Demand (Part 4) Lenny Rachitsky
20. Balfour, who led growth at HubSpot and founded Reforge, breaks the cold start into the mechanics of how you actually reach... Brian Balfour Essay · 20 min read · Starting Up The Network Effect: Solving the Chicken or the Egg Brian Balfour
21. A grounded, tactical read on the leaky bucket problem for founders who just closed their first handful of customers. It covers... Vitally Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up Turning Your First Customers Into Recurring Revenue Ian Russell
22. Balfour (Reforge) makes the case that retention and engagement, not raw acquisition, decide which company wins. It explains the... Brian Balfour Essay · ~15 min read · Starting Up Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough Brian Balfour
23. Intercom's team, led by Des Traynor's thinking, argues onboarding is the new conversion: keeping customers matters more than... Intercom Blog Article · ~12 min read · Starting Up Onboarding Strategies to Drive Long-Term Customer Retention Intercom
24. From India's largest community of SaaS founders, this is peer advice on landing and holding early customers without spray and... SaaSBoomi Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up How to Get Your First 10 B2B Customers SaaSBoomi (Raviteja Dodda, Mohit Garg, Sahil Aggarwal)

Show the next 24