Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. This names biases beyond the obvious one: task-selection bias (users assume whatever you ask them to find must exist), social... MeasuringU Article · Starting Up 9 Biases in Usability Testing Jeff Sauro
2. Useful once you've run a few in-person sessions and want to test with more people than you can personally sit with. It's honest... Maze Article · Starting Up Moderated vs. Unmoderated Usability Testing: Which One is Right for You? Maze
3. Written for solo and early founders rather than VC backed teams, this is blunt about why family and friends are usually the... Indie Hackers Article · Starting Up How To Validate a Business Idea Indie Hackers
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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
8. 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
9. 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
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. 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
12. 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
13. 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
14. 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
15. 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
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. This is a reference document more than a read: thirty concrete before and after examples of leading questions rewritten into... CXL Article · 15 minute read · Starting Up Leading Questions: Definition, Types and 30 Examples CXL
21. This walks through Jobs to Be Done interviewing, which is built entirely around reconstructing a real past decision rather than... CXL Article · 18 minute read · Starting Up Customer Interviews: How to Use the Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework CXL
22. This is the academic name and definition for exactly the failure mode in the question: people systematically overstate what... Catalog of Bias Article · 3 minute read · Starting Up Hypothetical bias Catalog of Bias
23. A short, practical rewrite guide showing three specific question types to swap in for what do you want, each anchored to... Medium Essay · 5 minute read · Starting Up Never Ask What They Want: 3 Better Questions to Ask in User Interviews Chuck Liu
24. Garbugli, a three-time B2B founder, lays out the actual questions to ask about business drivers, pain intensity, and who owns... Lean Startup Digest (Medium) Essay · 10 min read · Starting Up B2B Customer Discovery Interview Questions: A Master List Etienne Garbugli

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