Build the product

Ship an MVP, work with builders, and iterate toward something people use.

What founders use for build the product, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

  1. A clear, example rich walkthrough of Hick's Law with the history and the practical moves side by side. It shows how to figure... Interaction Design Foundation Article · 8 min read Hick's Law: Making the Choice Easier for Users Mads Soegaard
  2. A hands on explainer of how size and distance shape whether a control feels easy or fiddly. It uses concrete UI examples,... Interaction Design Foundation Article · 8 min read Fitts's Law: The Importance of Size and Distance in UI Design Interaction Design Foundation
  3. A clear Hick's Law primer from one of India's established design studios, so the framing sits close to home. It lays out four... Think Design (India) Article · 7 min read Understanding Hick's Law and Its Application in UX Design Stuti Mazumdar
  4. Spool, who has studied usability since the 1970s, reframes testing from a pass-or-fail exam into a habit of regularly watching... Medium (Jared Spool) Essay A Fundamental Mind Shift for Usability Testing Jared Spool
  5. A founder-framed walkthrough of running a lightweight usability test and why five users catch roughly 80 percent of issues. It... UXReactor Article Usability Testing: A Founder's Guide (test with 5 users) UXReactor
  6. Written for Indian founders, it names the local trap of jumping straight to wireframes and dev without watching a single real... Vamos Digital Article UX Design vs UI Design: What Indian Founders Need to Know Before Building a Product Vamos Digital
  7. Hulick pulls apart the first run experience of well known apps screen by screen, showing what each step costs and what it... UserOnboard Article User Onboarding Teardowns Samuel Hulick
  8. A comic style teardown of Blinkist onboarding grounded in behavioral psychology, showing why each step helps or hurts. It gives... Growth.Design Article One Simple Psychology Framework To Improve Your Onboarding (Blinkist) Growth.Design
  9. Duolingo lets people finish a full lesson before it ever asks them to create an account, and this study breaks down why that... Growth.Design Article Duolingo's User Retention: 8 Tactics Tested On 300 Million Users Growth.Design
  10. Research backed rules for making forms feel effortless, which is where much of onboarding drop happens. It directly supports... Nielsen Norman Group Article Few Guesses, More Success: 4 Principles to Reduce Cognitive Load in Forms Huei-Hsin Wang
  11. Bush's straight line onboarding and bowling alley frameworks are built to strip steps and shrink time to value. He gives you a... Wes Bush (ProductLed) Book Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself Wes Bush
  12. A structured guide to diagnosing and fixing onboarding from one of the most respected growth education teams. It helps you map... Reforge Article Optimize new user onboarding Reforge
  13. A pointed case study in obvious labels over clever ones. A vague "Get Started" button reads as friendly but leaves people... Nielsen Norman Group Article · ~6 min read "Get Started" Stops Users Aurora Harley and Kim Flaherty
  14. Eye tracking evidence for how people actually scan a screen, which tells you where to put the things that matter. If your... Nielsen Norman Group Article · ~12 min read F-Shaped Pattern of Reading on the Web: Misunderstood, But Still Relevant Kara Pernice
  15. A former Facebook design VP walks through how to look at a screen and judge whether it works, from first impression to first... Julie Zhuo (The Year of the Looking Glass) Essay · ~12 min read How to Do a Product Critique Julie Zhuo
  16. Norman's own short essay on the idea that decides whether a control looks usable: affordances and signifiers. It is the crisp,... Don Norman (jnd.org) Essay · ~10 min read Affordances and Design Don Norman
  17. Concrete evidence for what originality in the wrong place actually costs. It shows how novel patterns confuse users and slow... Nielsen Norman Group Article · 8 min read Breaking Web Design Conventions = Breaking the User Experience Katie Sherwin
  18. This separates internal consistency (within your product) from external consistency (matching the wider world of apps your... Nielsen Norman Group Article · 7 min read Maintain Consistency and Adhere to Standards (Usability Heuristic #4) Nielsen Norman Group
  19. Argues for stripping the interface down to essentials, which pairs neatly with copying conventions: keep the common parts quiet... Nielsen Norman Group Article · 7 min read Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (Usability Heuristic #8) Therese Fessenden
  20. Alex Russell, a Chrome engineer, puts hard numbers on what most of the world's phones can actually do, and the gap between them... Infrequently Noted (Alex Russell) Essay · Long read The Performance Inequality Gap, 2024 Alex Russell
  21. Every kilobyte of JavaScript costs far more on a cheap phone than on your machine, because the phone has to download it and... Addy Osmani (Dev Channel, Medium) Article · 20 min read The Cost Of JavaScript Addy Osmani
  22. A small download is the first thing a data conscious user notices, and the official guide is the practical how to: app bundles,... Android Developers Article · Reference Reduce your app size Android Developers
  23. This is the developer side of the entry level phone: an OS tuned for 4GB RAM and under, with guidance on optimizing your app to... Android Developers Article · Guide hub Android (Go edition) and Build for Billions Android Developers
  24. Facebook made its engineers spend an hour every Tuesday on a simulated 2G connection so they would feel what most of their... Engineering at Meta Article · Short read Building for emerging markets: the story behind 2G Tuesdays Meta Engineering

Show the next 24

The questions

Building your MVP 18

Build the smallest thing that tests the biggest risk.

What actually counts as an MVP, and what's the smallest one I can get away with? 20 → How do I decide which features to cut from v1? 18 → How long should building an MVP take? 19 → Should I build an MVP at all, or can I validate without one? 20 → How do I get my first users for the MVP? 17 → All 18 questions in Building your MVP →
No-code & low-code building 18

Ship a product without writing code.

Which no-code tool should I use to build my first product? 20 → Can I really build a serious business on no-code, or will I hit a wall? 18 → Should I use an AI app builder like Lovable or Replit instead of traditional no-code? 20 → How do I connect payments and handle data if I'm building no-code in India? 20 → What can I build with just a spreadsheet as the backend? 20 → All 18 questions in No-code & low-code building →
Finding & working with developers 18

Get it built when you can't build it yourself.

I'm non-technical, do I actually need a technical co-founder? 18 → How do I actually find a technical co-founder? 19 → Should I hire an agency or a freelancer to build my MVP? 17 → How do I hire good engineers in India when everyone's competing for the same talent? 18 → How do I evaluate a developer's skill if I can't code? 19 → All 18 questions in Finding & working with developers →
Product design & UX basics 18

Make it obvious, not clever.

I'm not a designer, how do I make my product not look terrible? 18 → What are the core UX principles every founder should know? 20 → How do I know if my product is confusing to users? 17 → Should I learn Figma, and how much design do I really need? 19 → Why does good design actually matter for an early-stage startup? 19 → All 18 questions in Product design & UX basics →
Shipping, iterating & roadmap 18

Ship weekly, learn constantly, prioritise ruthlessly.

How do I decide what to build next? 19 → How often should an early-stage startup ship? 19 → How do I build a roadmap without over-planning? 19 → How do I keep talking to users while I'm heads-down building? 18 → How do product teams keep a consistent shipping rhythm as they grow? 18 → All 18 questions in Shipping, iterating & roadmap →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →