Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. The other side of the discount question: sometimes a genuinely low price is the right strategy, not a concession. Jason Lemkin... SaaStr Article · Starting Up Dear SaaStr: When Does It Make Sense to Price Low in the Market? Jason Lemkin
2. A practical, no-nonsense walkthrough of what a pipeline is for and how to keep it honest, written by a company that sells CRM... Close Article · Starting Up The Ultimate Sales Pipeline Guide: How to Build, Manage, & Measure Close
3. A short, honest account of the exact failure mode this question warns about: a solo founder loses a good prospect purely from... Indie Hackers Thread · Starting Up Built a dead-simple pipeline tracker after losing a deal because I forgot to follow up Indie Hackers
4. Welsh shows the exact two-step process he used to build a million-dollar pipeline from cold DMs: find people already talking... Justin Welsh Essay · 10 min read · Starting Up How to Get Replies from Your Dream Customers Justin Welsh
5. This is the LinkedIn half of the question: a simple system using alerts and triggers (funding news, new hires, press mentions)... Justin Welsh Essay · 10 min read · Starting Up How to Find More Customers on LinkedIn Justin Welsh
6. Ferriss writes from the other side of the inbox: what actually gets a reply from someone who gets hundreds of pitches a day.... Tim Ferriss Essay · 5 min read · Starting Up 5 Tips for E-mailing Busy People Tim Ferriss
7. Sethi gives word-for-word scripts and, more usefully, the follow-up move almost nobody does: closing the loop by telling... Ramit Sethi Article · 10 min read · Starting Up How To Connect w/ Busy People (& actually get HAPPY replies) Ramit Sethi
8. A straightforward six-part checklist (subject line, personalization, benefit to them, credibility, one call-to-action, respect... Noah Kagan Article · 8 min read · Starting Up Cold Email Tips: 6 Steps to Write Great Cold Emails Noah Kagan
9. Caponi's argument is that admitting what your product is not good at, early and clearly, closes deals faster than trying to... Todd Caponi Book · Starting Up The Transparency Sale Todd Caponi
10. Steli Efti has run and coached thousands of SaaS demos, and this is the clearest single write-up of what separates a demo that... Close (Steli Efti) Article · Starting Up A Guide to Sales Demos That Sell Close (Steli Efti)
11. This book is the practical, step-by-step companion to the essay above, built from Dunford working the same structure with over... April Dunford Book · Starting Up Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win April Dunford
12. Gallo breaks down, keynote by keynote, how Jobs turned deeply technical hardware into a demo a room full of non-engineers could... Carmine Gallo Book · Starting Up The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience Carmine Gallo
13. Gong analyzed over 67,000 recorded sales demos and found the actual, measurable habits of the ones that closed, not opinion.... Gong Labs Article · Starting Up Effective strategies for conducting successful sales demos Gong Labs
14. This essay is not about demos, it is about the underlying test our short answer relies on: if you cannot explain something... Farnam Street Essay · Starting Up Feynman Technique: The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster Farnam Street
15. The condensed, skimmable version of Blond's YC talk, written up as a thread after he spoke to a live batch. Good for a quick... X (Twitter) Thread · short read · Starting Up How to succeed with founder led sales Sam Blond
16. A practicing operator's version of our own bar: Girdley says you need a proven, repeatable process and something like 15... Michael Girdley Essay · 12 min read · Starting Up Playbook: When & how to hire your first salesperson Michael Girdley
17. Jason Lemkin has watched thousands of SaaS founders make this hire, and this is his running list of what goes wrong. The number... SaaStr Article · 12 min read · Starting Up The Top 10 Mistakes Folks Make Hiring Their First Sales Team Jason Lemkin
18. Written for the stage right after your first hire works, this explains why hiring account executives before product-market fit... a16z Article · 15 min read · Starting Up Your product won't sell itself: How to build a world-class sales team Jason Rosenthal
19. Lemkin has watched thousands of SaaS companies go through this exact stage and is blunt about where founder led sales quietly... SaaStr Article · Starting Up Why Founder-Led Sales Breaks Earlier Than You Think Jason Lemkin
20. Spolsky's classic essay explains why willingness to pay for the identical product varies wildly by customer, using the image of... Joel on Software Essay · ~20 min read · Starting Up Camels and Rubber Duckies Joel Spolsky
21. Fried's answer is deliberately unromantic: pick a number, put it in front of real people, and let the market correct you... Signal v. Noise (37signals) Essay · ~5 min read · Starting Up How to price something Jason Fried
22. This lays out the mechanics of anchoring price to the value a customer gets rather than to what competitors charge, which is... Harvard Business Review Article · ~8 min read · Starting Up A Quick Guide to Value-Based Pricing Utpal M. Dholakia
23. A short, free book written by a bootstrapped software founder specifically for people who have never priced anything before and... Neil Davidson / Red Gate Software Book · ~80 pages · Starting Up Don't Just Roll the Dice: A Usefully Short Guide to Software Pricing Neil Davidson
24. A concise, practical guide written for founders setting SaaS pricing for the first time, with none of the consulting-firm... Stripe Atlas Guides Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up Pricing low-touch SaaS Patrick McKenzie

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