Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. Written by the founder who runs a fully distributed company of thousands across every time zone, this gives you a ladder from a... Matt Mullenweg (Automattic / ma.tt) Essay · ~2,500 words · Starting Up Distributed Work's Five Levels of Autonomy Matt Mullenweg
2. This makes the case that working software should be produced and integrated constantly, so a broken or stalled build is caught... Joel on Software Article · ~1,500 words · Starting Up Daily Builds Are Your Friend Joel Spolsky
3. This is the piece specifically about people whose working hours barely overlap, which is your exact problem. It shows how to... The GitLab Handbook Article · Long reference page · Starting Up The complete guide to asynchronous and non-linear working GitLab
4. Doist built a fully remote company across dozens of countries and wrote down how they structure communication so nobody in an... Doist / Twist Article · Multi-chapter guide · Starting Up The Art of Async: The Remote Guide to Team Communication Doist
5. A founder walks through actually cutting almost all standing meetings and running the company on written updates, with the... First Round Review Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up The Secret to an In Sync Startup? Ditch Your Meetings and Try an Asynchronous Culture First Round Review
6. Built from running a large fully remote team, this is a tactical field guide to keeping distributed people aligned and... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read · Starting Up Struggling to Thrive as a Large Team Working Remotely? This Exec Has the Field Guide You Need First Round Review
7. Your short answer calls for a shared board, and this is the clearest primer on what a good one actually does: make every piece... Atlassian Agile Coach Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up What is a Kanban board? Atlassian
8. A short listen on why defaulting to real-time communication quietly hurts a team, from the people who run Basecamp remotely. It... 37signals REWORK Podcast · ~30 min episode · Starting Up The Wrong Time for Real Time (REWORK podcast) 37signals
9. Video · ~35 min video · Starting Up Kevin Hale: How to Work Together (YC Startup School) Kevin Hale, Y Combinator
10. A free, dead-simple Kanban board is often all a small offshore team needs to make work-in-progress visible to everyone at once.... Trello (Atlassian) Tool · Starting Up Trello (shared Kanban board) Trello (Atlassian)
11. A concrete, copyable pattern for the written weekly update that replaces the status meeting, straight from a team that lives by... The GitLab Handbook Template · Short reference page · Starting Up Weekly Async Updates GitLab
12. Written directly for the non-technical founder trying to tell whether engineering is on track, which is the heart of this... Tech for Non-Techies Podcast · Starting Up How to lead a development team when you're not technical Sophia Matveeva
13. This is the single most on-point read for your question: it explains bus factor and lays out six concrete ways to stop one... Founders Bar Article · 12 min read · Starting Up Bus Factor: The Silent Startup Killer Aneesh Mohanachandran
14. Written from a fractional CTO's chair, this reframes your best solo developer as a risk to actively de-risk, not just an asset... MindCTO Article · 10 min read · Starting Up Your 10x Engineer Might Be a Bus Factor of 1 Pavel Shpin
15. A software house lays out the exact practices that let any competent engineer take over a codebase: clean structure, standard... Bright Inventions Article · 9 min read · Starting Up How to Protect Software Development Projects from the Bus Factor Problem Bright Inventions
16. DHH argues that modern tools let a single individual build a genuinely competitive product, which is the strongest version of... world.hey.com Essay · 8 min read · Starting Up The One Person Framework David Heinemeier Hansson
17. This spells out the ownership rules that protect you when one person builds everything: you hold the GitHub organization, the... Outsourced.sg Article · 10 min read · Starting Up Hire Your First Developer as a Non-Technical Founder Outsourced.sg
18. A plain checklist of what you must control so your product does not walk out the door with one developer: source code, the... AllCode Article · 8 min read · Starting Up Take Ownership of Your Outsourced Software Development Project AllCode
19. When you cannot read the code yourself, an independent audit is how you get a second developer's eyes on what your one builder... SaaS Tune Article · 11 min read · Starting Up The Non-Technical Founder's Guide to Code Audits SaaS Tune
20. This zooms out from developers to the general pattern of key-person risk: any company where one person holds all the... Allied Venture Partners Article · 15 min read · Starting Up 10 Operational Risks That Sink Startups Matthew Wilson
21. Written for the Indian hiring market, this covers building a tech team from scratch, including the trap of leaning too long on... Savanna HR Article · 12 min read · Starting Up How to Build a High-Performing Tech Team: A Guide for Indian Startups Swati Sinha
22. Open source is the most public, most honest signal of what a developer can do, and this walks you through finding and... daily.dev Article · Starting Up How to Hire Developers from Open Source Communities daily.dev
23. A paid trial task only works if the task itself is well scoped, and this is a practical guide to writing one. It covers... DevSkills Template · Starting Up How to Create a Great Take-Home Coding Test Anton Fenske
24. This is a three-minute list of yes/no questions you can literally walk through with the developer you hire, or use to size up... Joel on Software Essay · 10 min read · Starting Up The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code Joel Spolsky

Show the next 24