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.

Intercom's team, led by Des Traynor's thinking, argues onboarding is the new conversion: keeping customers matters more than... Intercom Blog Article · ~12 min read Onboarding Strategies to Drive Long-Term Customer Retention Intercom
From India's largest community of SaaS founders, this is peer advice on landing and holding early customers without spray and... SaaSBoomi Article · ~10 min read How to Get Your First 10 B2B Customers SaaSBoomi (Raviteja Dodda, Mohit Garg, Sahil Aggarwal)
This companion piece warns about the opposite failure: cutting so hard that the thing is minimal but not actually viable or... Silicon Valley Product Group (Marty Cagan) Article · ~6 min read Viable Product vs. Minimal Product Marty Cagan
This chapter is the clearest argument for our claim that a long timeline means your scope is wrong. Basecamp starts with a... Basecamp / 37signals Book · 15 min read Shape Up: Set Boundaries (Appetite) Ryan Singer
A dense list of hard won lessons, several of which land directly on speed and iteration as a startup's main edge over big... Sam Altman Essay · 8 min read Startup Advice Sam Altman
Drew Houston validated Dropbox with a three minute demo video before building the hard sync engine, and the waitlist jumped... YourStory Article · 7 min read Dropbox's Demo Video That Got 75,000 Signups Overnight YourStory
The author of Running Lean tackles the exact trap in our short answer: founders confuse a wrong timeline with a wrong scope. He... Ash Maurya (Lean Stack) Article · 9 min read Getting to the Right Minimum in a Minimum Viable Product Ash Maurya
DoorDash started as PaloAltoDelivery.com, a static page with a phone number and no app, delivering orders by hand. This is the... Stanley Tang (DoorDash co-founder) Essay · 10 min read A New Beginning: The DoorDash Story Stanley Tang
A compact YC piece that reframes the MVP as a minimum evolvable product, something you keep changing in response to your... Y Combinator Startup Library Article · 12 min read How to Get Your First Users Y Combinator
Years on, Ries revisits what the lean method got right and where the MVP idea gets abused, which is precisely the trap in your... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~4,000 words Reflections on a Movement: Eric Ries on the Lean Startup Lenny Rachitsky and Eric Ries
This is where the phrase undifferentiated heavy lifting comes from, and it names exactly the trap you are trying to avoid. The... AWS News Blog Article · 6 min read We Build Muck, So You Don't Have To Jeff Barr
Auth is the piece founders most often assume is easy, and this walks through why it quietly is not: password storage, resets,... With Blue Ink (Alessandro Segala) Article · 15 min read Please everyone, stop writing your own user authentication code Alessandro Segala
Once you have decided to buy auth, this independent hands on comparison helps you actually pick one. It weighs developer... Hyperknot blog Article · 20 min read Comparing Auth providers (Supabase, Firebase, Clerk, Auth.js, Ory and others) Zsolt Ero
Cohen, who built WP Engine into a unicorn, shows how he validated it by getting real people to commit real money before... A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen) Essay Vetting a startup: The systematic birth of WP Engine Jason Cohen
This addresses your actual fear head on: what a migration off no-code really looks like once you succeed. It lays out the... Lowcode Agency Article What Happens When You Outgrow Bubble Lowcode Agency
A concrete Indian example: Flexiple, started by IIM Ahmedabad grads, ran early on Google Sheets, Airtable, and Zapier held... Bubble Blog Article How Flexiple Uses Bubble to Match Tech Talent to Jobs Bubble Blog
Tossell built Makerpad, the best known no-code education community (later acquired by Zapier), so his orientation to the... Codecademy Blog Article Getting to know no-code with Makerpad's Ben Tossell Ben Tossell
Context on how far no-code has come and how seriously it is taken, from a major tech publication. It helps you see that... TechCrunch Article No-code Bubble raises $100M to make technical co-founders obsolete TechCrunch
DoorDash started as PaloAltoDelivery.com, a one-hour landing page with PDF menus and a phone number, and the founders... Startup Archive Article · 5 min read Stanley Tang: Three Lessons from the Founding of DoorDash Startup Archive
A clear, careful definition of the landing-page test from a respected product discovery teacher, including its real limits. It... Product Talk (Teresa Torres) Article · 6 min read Landing Page Test Teresa Torres
Maurya gives you a repeatable way to rank risk instead of guessing at it. He points you at the universal early risks (do these... LEANSTACK blog (Ash Maurya) Article · 10 min read How to Identify Your Riskiest Business Model Assumptions Ash Maurya
This is a concrete workshop method for exactly the ranking step in our answer. You list every desirability, viability, and... Strategyzer (David J. Bland) Article · 9 min read How Assumptions Mapping Can Focus Your Teams On Running Experiments That Matter David J. Bland
Cohen names the perfectionist's core bug: maximizing every decision when good enough would do. He gives you a rule for when to... A Smart Bear Essay · 12 min read Satisficing vs Maximizing Jason Cohen
Your short answer says polishing is often fear of the market's verdict, and this is the book about exactly that fear, which... stevenpressfield.com Book · 190 pages The War of Art Steven Pressfield

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

eChai Partner Brands The partnership →