Starting Up

The resources founders actually use.

Every essay, video, podcast, book and tool behind 1,327 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. 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
  2. Video · 50 min watch Building for the Enterprise Aaron Levie
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Video · 35 min How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub Zach Holman
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. This is a ready made, minimal workflow you can adopt as is on your first hire: branch, open a pull request, review, merge,... GitHub Docs Template · 10 min read GitHub Flow GitHub
  15. 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
  16. An open source, self hostable feature flag service that gives you gradual rollouts and instant kill switches without building... Unleash Tool · Tool Unleash (open source feature flags) Unleash
  17. The free home of the four delivery metrics plus a quick check that tells you where your team stands, so you can judge process... dora.dev Tool · Reference and quick check DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) DORA
  18. 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
  19. 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)
  20. 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
  21. 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
  22. 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
  23. A ready made now, next, later template plus guidance so you can build a date free roadmap today instead of starting from a... ProdPad Template The Ultimate Product Roadmap Template and How to Use It ProdPad
  24. A dead simple paper tool for the exact habit this question needs: give every part of your day a job before it starts, including... Cal Newport Tool · Physical daily planner The Time-Block Planner Cal Newport

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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

What are good startup ideas in India right now? The ideas Indian investors are backing in 2026 sit in a few places: AI built into one industry's daily work (vertical AI for B2B, where software fu... Beginner 5 resources → How do I find product-market fit? Narrow until a small group cannot do without you, then widen. Pick the segment where usage is strongest, talk to those people every week, and chang... Intermediate 9 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 → How do I build an MVP for my startup, step by step? Write down the one assumption that kills the idea if it is wrong, then build the cheapest thing that tests it and get it to real users within weeks... Beginner 9 resources → Which tool should I use to analyse qualitative data like interview notes? For a founder with a dozen interviews, Gemini Notebook, which is free, or Claude, free or $20 a month on Pro: load the transcripts, ask for the rec... Beginner 6 resources → How do I get my first client as a freelancer? Your first client is most likely someone who already knows you or someone they know, so start there before marketplaces. 1) Pick one service for on... Beginner 6 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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