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. A practical, hands-on checklist of frameworks, sources, and search techniques for finding trends before others, including how... Startup GTM (Substack) Article Find trends before others: Frameworks, Techniques, Sources and Prompts Ayush Poddar
  2. A deliberate rebuttal to the safe advice, arguing that in deep tech the only way to own a category is to commit before it is... Michael Dempsey (Medium) Essay · 12 min read If You're Not Too Early, You're Too Late Michael Dempsey
  3. Indian early stage investors talk through which trends they think are actually turning in India versus which are still hype,... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · Approx 45 min 2025 Predictions for Indian Startups, Funding, AI and IPOs Prime Venture Partners
  4. Evans is the clearest writer on separating what a technology can actually do from the story being told about it. He repeatedly... ben-evans.com Essay · 10 to 20 min each Essays by Benedict Evans Benedict Evans
  5. A calm, long-form conversation that models how to hold two ideas at once: AI is genuinely important, and most of the loud... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · ~90 min A rational conversation on where AI is actually going (Benedict Evans) Lenny Rachitsky and Benedict Evans
  6. Willison is a working engineer who writes plainly about what the technology can and cannot reliably do, which is the single... simonwillison.net Article · ~30 min Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 Simon Willison
  7. Mollick is a business professor who tests AI hands-on and reports what actually works, not what a vendor promises. The book... Penguin Random House Book · ~256 pages Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI Ethan Mollick
  8. This is the ongoing, free version of Mollick's testing: regular posts that run real experiments and show the results, good and... oneusefulthing.org Article · 10 to 15 min per post One Useful Thing Ethan Mollick
  9. Video · 60 min Intro to Large Language Models (1 hour talk) Andrej Karpathy
  10. Course · ~6.5 hours Making Friends with Machine Learning (full course) Cassie Kozyrkov
  11. A short, neutral explainer of the pattern nearly every technology follows: a burst of inflated expectations, a trough of... Wikipedia Article · ~10 min Gartner Hype Cycle Wikipedia
  12. Our answer tells you to ask builders what breaks in production, and this is a concrete checklist of what that actually means.... startupctobook.com Article · ~20 min Technical Due Diligence Preparation Guide (The Startup CTO's Field Guide) Gareth Price
  13. When you want to go deeper than headlines, this is a curated map of the resources that actually explain modern AI, sorted from... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Article · curated list AI Canon Derrick Harris, Matt Bornstein, Guido Appenzeller
  14. Two India-based early-stage investors talk through exactly this question: what separates AI hype from defensible value. They... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~45 min AI x SaaS: How PrimeVP Thinks About the Next Wave Shripati Acharya and Gaurav Ranjan
  15. An India-rooted show that asks an experienced investor how to tell a substantive AI company from a wrapper riding the wave. It... The Neon Show (Neon Fund) Podcast · ~60 min What Top 1% Investors Look For in AI Startups Siddhartha Ahluwalia
  16. A trend only matters against the real market you are selling into, and this annual report is the clearest sober picture of... Blume Ventures Article · ~130 slides Indus Valley Annual Report Sajith Pai and team
  17. A free, focused essay version of the inflection idea if you do not want the whole book yet. It explains why timing and a... Pattern Breakers (Substack) Article · ~12 min read How Inflections Let Startups Change The Rules Mike Maples Jr.
  18. This directly addresses the fork in your question: are you entering a known market or betting a new one will grow. It lays out... NFX Article · ~14 min read Reinventing Existing vs. Creating New Markets Pete Flint
  19. Data from hundreds of startup post-mortems showing how often failure traces to no real market need or a trend that never... CB Insights Article · ~20 min read The Top Reasons Startups Fail CB Insights
  20. This is the constructive version of your strategy: use a single feature or channel to pull people in cheaply, then give them a... cdixon.org Essay Come for the tool, stay for the network Chris Dixon
  21. Chen watched a whole generation of startups build on Facebook's platform and then get squeezed as the platform protected... andrewchen.com Essay Why developers are leaving the Facebook platform Andrew Chen
  22. Jin makes the case that the durable way to build on platforms is owning your audience, your monetization, and your direct... andrewchen.com (guest essay) Essay The Passion Economy and the Future of Work Li Jin
  23. This piece gives you a simple spectrum for judging how exposed you are, using the Zynga and Facebook story as the cautionary... Entrepreneur Article The Spectrum of Platform Risk Tiger Henderson
  24. A clean, structured guide to spotting where your platform exposure lives and building a more resilient business around it. It... Stripe Article Platform risk: How to identify it, assess it, and build a more resilient business Stripe

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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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