Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. Written in 1999, this book named the exact tension you are living through: interruption based outreach gets harder every year... Amazon Book · Starting Up Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers Seth Godin
2. Barry built ConvertKit's growth almost entirely on flywheels, content, community, and audience, rather than outbound, and this... nathanbarry.com Essay · Starting Up Creator Flywheels: The Operating System for Your Business Nathan Barry
3. Sheridan's pool company went from near bankruptcy to a category leader by answering every question a buyer might have in public... marcussheridan.com Book · Starting Up They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer Marcus Sheridan
4. This is a VC's field guide to the small community half of the short answer: what makes a founder built community actually drive... Bessemer Venture Partners Essay · Starting Up Five laws for community-led growth Bessemer Venture Partners
5. Zerodha reached crores of customers in India without ever running an ad or an outbound campaign, growing almost entirely on... Indian Startup News Article · Starting Up 'Customer love is a real superpower for us': Nithin Kamath on how Zerodha grew without advertising Indian Startup News
6. Dozens of founders answer in the comments with what actually worked for them, and cold email is a minority answer among stories... Hacker News Thread · Starting Up Ask HN: How do you get first 10 customers? Hacker News
7. Written for founders who would rather be building product than selling, this is a grounded guide to identifying and... Y Combinator Article · Starting Up Sales Advice for Technical Founders Y Combinator
8. Lemkin has watched thousands of B2B SaaS companies try outbound and this piece is his blunt verdict: it works, but only when it... SaaStr Article · 8 min read · Starting Up Outbound Always Works. If You Do It Right. And You Put In The Time. Jason Lemkin
9. A concise reference sheet that names the exact failure modes this question is about: leading questions like wouldn't you agree... Harvard Business School, Rock Center for Entrepreneurship Article · 5 min read · Starting Up Customer Discovery Basics Harvard Business School, Rock Center for Entrepreneurship
10. Alvarez names the specific mistakes founders make even after reading the theory: multi part questions that let people dodge the... cindyalvarez.com Essay · 8 min read · Starting Up 5 Common Customer Development Mistakes Cindy Alvarez
11. Wunker's Jobs to Be Done framework gets an Indian audience through this YourStory piece, useful if you want the underlying... YourStory Article · ~8 min read · Starting Up Unlocking customer-centric innovation with author Stephen Wunker Stephen Wunker
12. Wilcox tackles this exact question head on, and rejects the tempting stop when you stop learning something new answer since you... Customer Dev Labs Article · Starting Up How Many Customers Should You Interview? Justin Wilcox
13. A companion piece to the article above, this one focuses on the practical am I done yet moment inside a single discovery... Customer Dev Labs Article · Starting Up When Are You Done Interviewing Customers? Justin Wilcox
14. This is the academic study behind the qualitative research idea of saturation, the point past which new interviews stop adding... Field Methods (Sage) Article · Starting Up How Many Interviews Are Enough? An Experiment with Data Saturation and Variability Greg Guest, Arwen Bunce, Laura Johnson
15. A concise, practical primer on structuring an interview, from writing questions to avoiding leading language to taking useful... Nielsen Norman Group Article · Starting Up User Interviews 101 Maria Rosala and Kara Pernice
16. Zhuo, former Facebook VP of Product Design, gives seven specific questions for interviewing a prospective user, moving from... The Looking Glass Essay · Starting Up The Looking Glass: You Cannot Teach Wisdom Julie Zhuo
17. This is a straightforward, tactical rundown of where to source interviewees when your customer base is zero: relevant... Grow and Convert Article · ~12 min read · Starting Up How to Conduct Customer Interviews (Even When You Don't Have Customers) Thomas Carney
18. Once you've found someone willing to talk, this thread collects the actual questions other founders use, crowdsourced from... Indie Hackers Thread · ~5 min read · Starting Up Top Questions to Ask Customers During Their Interviews Indie Hackers
19. A specific, first-person account of finding an audience on Reddit from nothing, including which subreddits worked and how the... Indie Hackers Thread · ~8 min read · Starting Up How I Got My First 100 Users via Reddit Indie Hackers
20. This is the most exhaustive single list we found of concrete channels for sourcing interviewees, from personal network to... mfishbein.com Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up Customer Development: 14 Best Ways to Find Customers to Interview Mike Fishbein
21. This book documents how Indian and other emerging-market entrepreneurs build with severe resource constraints and turn... naviradjou.com Book · Starting Up Jugaad Innovation Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Simone Ahuja
22. A concrete case study of a founder team that got out of the metro bubble and found a market (women resellers in smaller towns)... YourStory Article · Starting Up UpClose: How Meesho Turned Housewives Into Entrepreneurs YourStory
23. Savoia's pretotyping approach forces you to define, before you show anyone anything, exactly what a real reaction would look... pretotyping.org Book · ~80 pages · Starting Up Pretotype It Alberto Savoia
24. If a cofounder or teammate is going to sit in on the session, this is the two-minute brief you send them beforehand. It spells... Nielsen Norman Group Article · Starting Up Observer Guidelines for Usability Research Nielsen Norman Group

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