Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. Kahl argues that half of good customer discovery is ignoring the wrong people, and he is explicit that supportive friends and... Arvid Kahl, The Bootstrapped Founder Essay · Starting Up Problem Validation: Making Sure You're Talking to the Right People Arvid Kahl
2. Video · Starting Up Customer Discovery: Who Do You Interview Justin Wilcox
3. This Notion template turns the Mom Test's rules into a fill in the blank interview and synthesis workflow, which is useful once... Mari Luukkainen Template · Starting Up Master Customer Interviews with a Mom Test-Based Notion Template for Startups Mari Luukkainen
4. This thread is a candid, unfiltered discussion of a question every founder eventually asks out loud: how do you actually get a... Hacker News Thread · Starting Up Ask HN: How to Actually "Talk to Your Customers"? Hacker News
5. Nick Swinmurn tested whether people would actually buy shoes online by photographing shoes he did not own and buying them at... Alex Ponomarev Article · 8 min read · Starting Up How Zappos Built a Product By Faking It Alex Ponomarev
6. The book's central case study of an entrepreneur with six beta commitments and zero dollars spent on development is a direct... Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom Book · ~230 pages · Starting Up Nail It Then Scale It Nathan Furr, Paul Ahlstrom
7. Young's method pushes you past what people say they do and toward the reasoning underneath it, the guiding thoughts and... Rosenfeld Media Book · Starting Up Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior Indi Young
8. This article names the specific ways a survey misleads you: people rush through it, answer the way that feels acceptable rather... Harvard Business Review Article · Starting Up Customer Surveys Are No Substitute for Actually Talking to Customers Graham Kenny
9. The switch interview technique here is the deepest version of the live conversation approach: instead of asking what someone... jobstobedone.org Tool · Starting Up Jobs-to-be-Done: The Switch Interview Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek
10. Cohen has run this exact process since before he sold his first company, and he is unusually candid about the mechanics: write... A Smart Bear Essay · Starting Up The Iterative-Hypothesis Customer Development Method Jason Cohen
11. Nielsen Norman Group has run user research for decades, and this short video lays out plainly which questions each method... Nielsen Norman Group Video · Starting Up Comparing Qualitative and Quantitative UX Research Nielsen Norman Group
12. Podcast · Starting Up Principles of Building Great Products with Julie Zhuo Amit Somani and Julie Zhuo
13. A checklist you can run your actual call script against before you place the calls. It catches the specific phrasing habits,... Nielsen Norman Group Article · ~8 min read · Starting Up 6 Mistakes When Crafting Interview Questions Maria Rosala
14. Cohen goes straight at the founder self-deception in the question: a room full of enthusiastic yeses is not validation unless... A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen) Essay · ~15 min read · Starting Up Yes, but who said they would actually buy the damn thing? Jason Cohen
15. This essay is the clearest explanation of why stated preference and revealed preference diverge, with a concrete example of... UX Tigers Essay · ~10 min read · Starting Up Watch What Users Do, Don't Listen to What They Say Jakob Nielsen
16. Meyer's framework classifies India as a high-context culture, where meaning is layered and read between the lines rather than... Erin Meyer Book · ~280 pages · Starting Up The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business Erin Meyer
17. This walks through exactly the analysis step your question is stuck on, how to go from a stack of interview notes to a small... Nielsen Norman Group Video · Starting Up Thematic Analysis of Qualitative User Research Data Maria Rosala
18. Affinity diagramming is the literal, hands on version of sorting your transcripts by who the person is and how badly they hurt:... Nielsen Norman Group Article · Starting Up Affinity Diagramming: Collaboratively Sort UX Findings and Design Ideas Rachel Krause and Kara Pernice
19. Paras Chopra describes losing seven to eight months building Wingify's first version without talking to users at all, then the... The Neon Show Podcast · Starting Up How To Build A Successful Startup In India, ft. Paras Chopra (sold Wingify for 200 million dollars) Paras Chopra
20. Chesky describes flying across the country to personally sit in hosts' living rooms because nothing in a survey told them why... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~40 min · Starting Up Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb Brian Chesky
21. This is the original milkshake essay: researchers sat in a parking lot and watched who bought milkshakes and when, instead of... Harvard Business Review Essay · ~20 min read · Starting Up Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, Taddy Hall
22. Drew Houston did not build Dropbox before testing demand, he filmed a video showing how it would work and posted it to Hacker... Shortform Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up The Original Dropbox MVP Explainer Video Shortform
23. Before building any shoe inventory or logistics, Nick Swinmurn photographed shoes from local stores, posted them online, and... What Is MVP Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up Zappos MVP Case Study: How a Wizard of Oz Test Built a Billion Dollar Shoe Empire What Is MVP
24. A practical walkthrough of building only the button or menu item for a feature that does not exist yet, then measuring who... Amplitude Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up What Is Fake Door Testing: Methods and Best Practices Amplitude

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