Starting Up

The resources founders actually use.

Every essay, video, podcast, book and tool behind 1,046 answered founder questions, in one place, each with a note on why it is here.

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

  1. Hansen, a bootstrapped SaaS founder herself, talks through the practical mechanics of running interviews as one more task in an... Startups For The Rest Of Us Podcast Mastering Customer Interviews with Michele Hansen Rob Walling with Michele Hansen
  2. The Clozd founders explain exactly how to run a churn interview well: who should conduct it, why a neutral third party gets... CHURN.FM Podcast · 35 min Qualitative churn analysis Andrew Peterson and Spencer Dent
  3. Fried and Hansson argue for asking customers a small number of open ended questions rather than running formal surveys, and... REWORK, 37signals Podcast · 25 min Question Your Customers Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
  4. This episode treats ICP as company strategy, not a marketing artifact, and it's specific about how the exercise changes as you... SaaStr Podcast SaaStr Podcast 457: Building Your Ideal Customer Profile: Target Your Product, Sales and Marketing Effectively SaaStr
  5. Revella explains her five-question framework for what actually needs to be in a persona, priority, success factors, barriers,... Pragmatic Institute (Adele Revella) Podcast The Five Rings of Buying Insight Pragmatic Institute (Adele Revella)
  6. A deeper follow-up conversation on the same theory, with more of the reasoning behind why circumstance matters more than... HBR IdeaCast Podcast · ~25 min Revisiting Jobs to Be Done with Clayton Christensen Clayton Christensen
  7. This episode is a direct case study in the buyer/user split: developers are your user and increasingly your champion, but... a16z Podcast Podcast Selling to Developers Andreessen Horowitz
  8. Kushwaha built Bluestone in Indian jewellery e-commerce, a category everyone assumed was too niche and infrequent to fund a... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~50 min Reasons to Buy, Right Attribution Models & CAC/LTV Fallacy with Gaurav Singh Kushwaha, Founder & CEO Bluestone Prime Venture Partners, with Gaurav Singh Kushwaha
  9. Wang argues that the TAM slide investors ask for is often meaningless because Uber and Airbnb both started with tiny quoted... SaaStr Podcast · ~35 min SaaStr Podcast #227: Alexandr Wang, Founder & CEO @ Scale, on Why TAM In The Traditional Sense Barely Matters SaaStr, with Alexandr Wang
  10. This conversation walks through the difference between a persona and a real segment, and why founders default to segmenting by... Lenny's Podcast Podcast April Dunford on product positioning, segmentation, and optimizing your sales process Lenny's Podcast
  11. Bier has built and sold two viral consumer apps by deliberately starting with a narrow, high urgency audience like teenagers... Lenny's Newsletter Podcast · 45 min How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier's playbook for winning at consumer apps Nikita Bier, interviewed by Lenny Rachitsky
  12. Lauzier has run marketplace growth at Lyft, Thumbtack and Reforge, and this conversation gets into how a precise definition on... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · ~1 hr How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more Benjamin Lauzier
  13. Agarwal describes how OYO had to define its ideal hotel partner precisely, small, underperforming, willing to be upgraded,... SeedToScale (Accel India) Podcast Ritesh Agarwal on Building OYO, the Decacorn of India's Hotel Industry Ritesh Agarwal, hosted by Anand Daniel
  14. This traces Urban Company's earliest days recruiting and defining their first service professionals in one city before... SeedToScale Podcast Untold Seed Stories: The First 500 Days of Urban Company Abhiraj Bhal, hosted by Abhinav Chaturvedi
  15. Gebbia tells the founding story from the side of the person actually going door to door defining who their first hosts should... How I Built This with Guy Raz, NPR Podcast · ~45 min Airbnb: Joe Gebbia Joe Gebbia, hosted by Guy Raz
  16. Podcast Anjali Sardana on Obsession, $11M Funding & Building Pronto at 23 Anjali Sardana
  17. Dunford's own show applies her positioning framework to live founder situations, including cases where a product is priced or... positioning.show Podcast · ~30 min per episode Positioning with April Dunford April Dunford
  18. A long conversation with the founder of TSMC, one of the most consequential companies most people have never studied. It is a... Acquired Podcast · ~1 hr 30 min TSMC Founder Morris Chang (Acquired) Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
  19. A concrete B2B founder story rather than theory, and one that happens to come from an India-built company (Paperflite,... The SaaS Podcast Podcast · ~55 min How They Closed 500 SaaS Customers With No Outbound Sales Omer Khan
  20. Podcast · ~45 min Tech Billionaire Sridhar Vembu On Building Zoho, Village Economy, Silicon Valley & AI Sridhar Vembu (Josh Talks)
  21. An Indian investor who has watched dozens of consumer businesses talks plainly about when Indian users actually start paying... The Neon Show Podcast · ~45 min Pratik Poddar, Nexus VP on the Growth & Monetization of EdTech Startups in India Siddhartha Ahluwalia (host), with Pratik Poddar (Nexus Venture Partners)
  22. Sizing a non-metro market is easier once you hear how founders actually reach it. This Forbes India episode profiles... Forbes India Podcast Small-town founders: Fearless entrepreneurs building new empires Forbes India
  23. Jason Rosenthal ran Lytro, whose light-field camera was a real technology bet that got overtaken because smartphone cameras got... a16z Podcast Podcast · ~40 min Stories of Startup Survival Mode (with Jason Rosenthal, former Lytro CEO) Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal
  24. A market-size fight is rarely just about the numbers, it is often power, recognition, and who gets the final say wearing a... The Startup CEO Show Podcast · ~45 min Why Startups Fail Due to Co-Founder Conflict and How to Fix It (with psychologist Matt Jones) Mark MacLeod (host), Matt Jones (guest)

Show the next 24

Playbooks

A goal, and the route through it a step at a time.

Find an idea worth pursuing Spot problems worth solving and find the one that actually fits you. 4 steps Validate before you build Get real evidence people want it before you write a line of code. 4 steps Understand your customers Talk to real users, define who you're for, and read the market clearly. 4 steps From idea to first customers The idea-stage spine: find a problem, prove it, talk to customers, and land the first ten. 4 steps Build an MVP without code Ship a first version with no-code tools before you hire anyone. 4 steps Build and launch your first product Turn a validated idea into something real people can use. 6 steps Find and work with developers Hire, brief, and work with builders without getting burned. 4 steps Name and brand your startup Name it, design an identity, and say what it does in a line. 3 steps Build a landing page that converts A page that loads fast, earns trust, and turns visitors into signups. 4 steps Get your first customers The scrappy, unscalable work of going from zero to your first paying users. 5 steps Sell it yourself, founder-led Reach out, run the conversation, and close before you have a sales team. 4 steps Grow with content and SEO Compound reach with content, search, and a founder audience. 3 steps Grow with paid ads Spend that returns: the channels, metrics, and loops behind it. 4 steps Price and package your product Charge for value, package it right, and check the numbers work. 3 steps Bootstrap instead of raising Fund growth from revenue, and keep control of your company. 4 steps Raise your first round Understand the game before you pitch: whether to raise, from whom, and on what terms. 5 steps Find a co-founder, split equity Find the right partner and split equity without regret. 3 steps Set up the company right Incorporate, split equity, protect your IP, and make your first hires. 4 steps Survive founder life Mindset, burnout, the leap, and the parts nobody warns you about. 5 steps Build in India The India-specific playbook: schemes, government, enterprise, and the local market. 5 steps

The questions founders start with

I want to start a startup but I don't have an idea. Where do I even begin? Stop hunting for a billion-dollar idea and start collecting problems. The best ideas come from noticing things that annoy you or people around you ... Beginner 19 resources → What does 'validating an idea' actually mean? Validation is gathering real-world evidence that a specific group of people has a painful problem AND will change their behaviour (pay, sign up, sw... Beginner 20 resources → Do I actually need a co-founder, or can I go solo? You don't strictly need one, but the data says teams outlast solos: complementary skills, shared load, and someone to argue you out of bad calls al... Beginner 3 resources → What actually counts as an MVP, and what's the smallest one I can get away with? An MVP is the least you can build (or fake) to test your single riskiest assumption, not a shrunken version of your dream product. Ask 'what's the ... Beginner 20 resources → How do I talk to customers without them just telling me what I want to hear? Stop pitching and start interrogating their past. Ask about what they actually did last time the problem hit, what it cost them, and what they trie... Beginner 23 resources → How do I actually get my first 10 customers when nobody has heard of me? You go get them by hand, one at a time, email people you already know, people your investors/friends know, and strangers in the exact niche you're ... Beginner 19 resources → How do I decide how much to charge for my product? Stop guessing and stop pricing off your costs, price off the value the customer gets and their willingness to pay. Talk to customers about pricing,... Beginner 3 resources → Should I raise venture capital or bootstrap my startup? Raise VC only if your business needs a big pile of cash to reach escape velocity before someone else does, and if a 10x-in-a-few-years outcome is g... Beginner 3 resources →

Questions for your situation

The Aspiring Founder The Idea-Stage Founder The Builder The Launcher The Grower The Student Founder The Indie Hacker The Technical Solo Founder The Non-Technical Founder The Domain Expert The Women Founder The Anywhere Founder The Corporate Switcher The Repeat Founder
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