Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. 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)
2. 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
3. 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
4. Video · Starting Up Steve Jobs introduces the original iPhone, Macworld 2007 Apple / Macworld keynote
5. Duarte studies presentations for a living, and this talk (using the Jobs iPhone launch as one of her two case studies) shows... TED (TEDxEast) Video · Starting Up The secret structure of great talks TED (TEDxEast)
6. 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
7. 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
8. 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
9. 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
10. 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
11. A free grab-bag of the actual artifacts (email templates, qualification checklists, call scripts) you need to run consistent... Close Template · 9 email templates, 3 checklists, 2 scripts, 5 books · Starting Up The Startup Sales Resource Bundle Close / Steli Efti
12. A plug-and-play spreadsheet for calculating win rate, average deal size, and churn from your own numbers. Use it to actually... HubSpot Tool · spreadsheet tool · Starting Up Sales Metrics Calculator HubSpot
13. 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
14. A US buyer deciding whether to trust an unfamiliar Indian vendor reads your contract as closely as your product. YC's free,... Y Combinator Template · Starting Up YC Standard Sales Agreement Template Y Combinator
15. 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
16. The cheapest way to bridge a twelve hour timezone gap is to stop scheduling a live call for everything. Loom lets you record a... Loom Tool · Starting Up Loom for Sales Loom
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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
22. This explains the actual mechanism behind starting higher than feels comfortable: whoever names a number first shapes the... Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School Article · ~7 min read · Starting Up Price Anchoring 101 Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School
23. A real thread of solo founders arguing through exactly your problem in the comments, including pushback from Indie Hackers... Indie Hackers Thread · ~10 min read · Starting Up How do you "charge more" as an indie hacker? Courtland Allen
24. This piece names the exact trap founders fall into: sending the same generic "just checking in" message everyone else sends,... Predictable Revenue (Steli Efti) Article · Starting Up Why Your Competitors' Follow-Ups Aren't Working (and Yours Can) Collin Stewart

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