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.

The practical companion piece: what to actually show and say when your largest account asks where their features sit on the... Aha! Article · 6 min read A Big Customer Wants to See Your Roadmap. Now What? Brian de Haaff
Shows the healthy version of working closely with big customers: a deliberate design partner program where a handful of... First Round Review Article · 15 min read The Hard Way Pays Off: Inside Sierra's Design Partner Strategy First Round Review
Practical scripts for turning down or deferring a request without blowing up the relationship, which is the skill you need when... Lenny's Newsletter (Lenny Rachitsky) Article · 10 min read On Saying No Lenny Rachitsky
Deals with the specific pressure of a request that arrives wrapped in a deal, where sales and a big customer both want a yes... Saeed Khan (On Product Management) Article · 9 min read How to Deal with B2B Sales-Driven Feature Requests Saeed Khan
Goldfein ran engineering at Facebook and VMware and lays out how release process should change as a team grows from one person... First Round Review Article · 20 min read The Right Way to Ship Software Jocelyn Goldfein
Holman was an early GitHub engineer and this is the single most complete plain English essay on what a healthy deploy looks... zachholman.com Essay · 30 min read How to Deploy Software Zach Holman
Orosz maps the full spectrum from YOLO shipping (change it in prod and watch) to heavy multi stage verification, and explains... The Pragmatic Engineer Article · 25 min read Shipping to Production Gergely Orosz
Majors argues that instead of piling on pre deploy gates, you invest in fast deploys, good observability, and quick rollback so... Honeycomb Blog Article · 12 min read I Test in Production Charity Majors
Flags let you merge and deploy unfinished or risky work while keeping it switched off, so you avoid long lived branches and can... martinfowler.com Article · 30 min read Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags) Pete Hodgson
Once a second person is committing, the first real risk is two branches drifting apart, and this essay explains the one habit... martinfowler.com Article · 30 min read Continuous Integration Martin Fowler
A focused reference on the simplest branching model that works for small teams: short lived branches off one trunk, merged... trunkbaseddevelopment.com Article · Reference site Trunk Based Development Paul Hammant
The most practical single lever for making code review fast and painless is keeping each change small, and Google's guide... Google Engineering Practices Article · 10 min read Small CLs Google
Founders often swing between rubber stamping and nitpicking every line, and this sets a sane bar: approve once the change... Google Engineering Practices Article · 10 min read The Standard of Code Review Google
When a deploy breaks and it is no longer just you, how you react sets the culture for years, and this chapter makes the case... Google SRE Book Article · 20 min read Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure Google SRE
This short principle explains why separating the build, the release, and the run steps gives you clean versioned releases you... 12factor.net Article · 5 min read Build, release, run (The Twelve-Factor App) Adam Wiggins
A real company shows exactly how it opened its roadmap to users as a public board organized by stage, with voting and comments,... Buffer Article Introducing Buffer's Transparent Product Roadmap Jim Hitch
A frank product manager take arguing that sharing roadmaps often hurts more than it helps, and offering a lighter alternative:... SaaS Product Chat (saaspm.com) Article Should I Publicly Share a SaaS Startup's Product Roadmap? SaaS Product Chat (saaspm.com)
A discussion among small, bootstrapped founders wrestling with this exact decision, so you get lived experience rather than a... Indie Hackers Thread Thoughts on making your roadmap public? Indie Hackers
A practical how to for the mechanics once you have decided to share: what to include, what to hold back, and how to keep it... ProdPad Article The Public Roadmap: Why You Need One, and How to Create It Megan Saker
The original short argument for replacing a list of features with a set of outcomes, which is the core mindset shift behind... Product Talk (Teresa Torres) Article Drop Feature-Based Product Roadmaps Teresa Torres
Built around picking one Highlight per day and defending it, which maps cleanly onto shipping one small thing in every build... Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky Book · Book, ~300 pages Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
A collection of what founders and operators actually do to protect time, including treating the calendar as a strategy document... Lenny's Newsletter Article · Long-form newsletter post Time management techniques that actually work Lenny Rachitsky
Barry built his career on a daily writing streak, and his story is the clearest argument for shipping one small thing every day... Nathan Barry Essay · ~1,200 words The commitment that changed my career Nathan Barry
Solo weekly shipping is a long game, and this short essay makes the case that endurance, showing up week after week, is what... Nathan Barry Essay · ~1,000 words Endure long enough to get noticed Nathan Barry

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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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