📖 Book
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Paid
Beginner
Why we picked it
The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past behaviour, not your idea, so you can't be lied to. If a founder reads one thing before talking to a single customer, it's this.
From
momtestbook.com
by Rob Fitzpatrick
~130 pages
- Talk about their life, not your idea.
- Ask about specifics in the past, not opinions about the future.
- 'That's so cool, I'd totally buy it' is a compliment, not data, dig for commitment and evidence.
Open
momtestbook.com →
📖 Book
✓ Link checked
Paid
Intermediate
Why we picked it
The book behind the "One Metric That Matters" discipline, which is exactly the mindset you need to judge whether a ship worked instead of drowning in vanity numbers. It ties the right metric to your business type and stage, so you know which signal to watch after a launch. Read it as the reference that makes the rest of this list make sense.
From
O'Reilly / Lean Series
by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
440 pages
- Pick the One Metric That Matters for your stage and business model, and let it settle the "did it work" argument.
- Vanity metrics feel good but do not tell you a shipped thing is working: draw a line to real behaviour.
- Match the metric to where you are (empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, scale), because the right signal changes as you grow.
Open
leananalyticsbook.com →
✍️ Essay
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Free
Intermediate
Why we picked it
Chen lays out the clearest early signal that people actually value your product: do cohorts keep coming back over time. He shows how to build a simple retention table by signup cohort rather than trusting raw totals. This is the one analytics view worth setting up even when everything else is noise.
From
andrewchen.com
by Andrew Chen
Medium read
- Retention by cohort is the truest sign users love it
- Pick the key action that represents real product value
- Watch whether the curve flattens instead of falling to zero
Open
andrewchen.com →
📄 Article
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Free
Intermediate
Why we picked it
Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer use the product, then track the share who say 'very disappointed'. Under 40 percent means keep working. A test you can run on an idea long before you scale it.
From
First Round Review
by Rahul Vohra
~20 min read
- The 40 percent 'very disappointed' benchmark for product-market fit.
- Segment to your high-expectation customers and build for them.
- Make the fit score a metric you improve quarter by quarter.
Open
review.firstround.com →
📄 Article
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Free
Beginner
Why we picked it
Once you know your curve should flatten, the next question is where it should flatten, and this piece answers it with concrete benchmark ranges by business type instead of hand-waving. Lenny pooled numbers from 20-plus growth leaders and investors, so you can put your own 6-month retention next to a real bar for your category. Treat the ranges as a starting point for judgment, not a pass-fail line, since a consumer social product and an enterprise SaaS live in completely different worlds.
From
Lenny's Newsletter
by Lenny Rachitsky
~10 min read
- The bar is category-specific: roughly 25% good / 45% great for consumer social, 40% / 70% for consumer subscription, and 70% / 90% for enterprise SaaS at 6 months.
- Judge yourself against your own business type, not a global average. Comparing a marketplace to a SaaS number will just mislead you.
- It also splits user retention from net revenue retention, a useful reminder that a subscription business can look flat on users while still growing revenue per account.
Open
lennysnewsletter.com →
📄 Article
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Free
Beginner
Why we picked it
A short, opinionated guide to tracking the events that actually matter, your growth events like signup, activation, and purchase, before anything else. It gives naming conventions so your data stays usable as you add more. This is the antidote to instrumenting every click on day one.
From
PostHog Docs
Short read
- Track your core growth events first
- Use consistent, lowercase, present tense event names
- Add events as questions arise, not all upfront
Open
posthog.com →
📄 Article
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Free
Beginner
Why we picked it
A hands on walkthrough of capturing events, from autocapture to naming custom events for the moments you care about. It is concrete enough to implement in an afternoon without over building. Good if you want the how right after deciding the what.
From
PostHog Tutorials
Medium read
- Autocapture gets you basic data with almost no setup
- Name custom events for your key product moments
- Start minimal and expand deliberately
Open
posthog.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked
Free
Intermediate
Why we picked it
A tracking plan is the single document that keeps your analytics from rotting into noise. This guide shows how to define events and properties around your top questions and cap the count so it stays navigable. Read it to keep instrumentation deliberate instead of sprawling.
From
Amplitude Blog
Long read
- Start from your top business questions, not every action
- Keep events to a manageable, named set
- One shared plan prevents messy, duplicate data
Open
amplitude.com →
📖 Book
✓ Link checked
Paid
Advanced
Why we picked it
The foundational text of customer development, 'get out of the building' started here and became the backbone of the Lean Startup. Steve Blank's own site is the primary source.
From
steveblank.com
by Steve Blank
~370 pages
- The biggest risk isn't building wrong tech, it's building something nobody wants
- Customer discovery: test your hypotheses with real customers before scaling
- Separate customer development from product development as parallel processes
- Search for a repeatable business model before you try to execute one
Open
steveblank.com →
Why we picked it
The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few customers. The cheapest, most honest way to validate demand is to go get it one person at a time.
From
paulgraham.com
by Paul Graham
~15 min read
- Recruit your first users manually, don't wait for them to come.
- A tiny group of users who love you beats a big group who like you.
- Manual, unscalable effort early is a feature, not a failure.
Open
paulgraham.com →
