Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

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

1. Meesho's co-founder describes how the company's first idea (a hyperlocal shop-discovery app) failed and how the real business... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · Starting Up On Starting and Scaling Meesho Vidit Aatrey
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. A short video showing exactly what neutral prompting sounds like when a participant goes quiet mid-task. Watching the actual... Nielsen Norman Group Video · ~5 min · Starting Up Help Users Think Aloud Nielsen Norman Group
8. Shows an actual demonstration of a facilitator's opening script, the part of the session most founders wing and accidentally... Nielsen Norman Group Video · ~6 min · Starting Up Introducing a Usability Test to the Participant Nielsen Norman Group
9. A ready-to-use script and structure for the five-act interview, so you're not writing your test flow from scratch. Having the... Design Sprint Kit (Google) Template · Starting Up Conduct a 5-Act Interview Design Sprint Kit (Google)
10. A simple tool for a narrow but useful version of unbiased reaction testing: show someone a screen for five seconds, then ask... Lyssna Tool · Starting Up Five Second Testing Lyssna
11. 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
12. 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
13. Video · Starting Up Customer Discovery: Who Do You Interview Justin Wilcox
14. 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
15. 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
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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
22. 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
23. Podcast · Starting Up Principles of Building Great Products with Julie Zhuo Amit Somani and Julie Zhuo
24. 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

Show the next 24