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. If you have no warm intros, you need a pond stocked with people who actually want startup work, and Wellfound (formerly... Wellfound Tool · Ongoing platform Hire Startup Talent on Wellfound Wellfound
  2. When referrals are not available, you have to manufacture signal yourself, and this is the canonical piece on doing that... Y Combinator Essay · ~15 min read How to Hire Your First Engineer Harj Taggar
  3. When you inherit a build from an agency, this walks through exactly what an independent technical review examines: code quality... Codacy Blog Article · About a 12 minute read Technical Due Diligence for Startups: A Complete Guide Codacy
  4. This piece is useful because it separates the question of who owns the tech stack from job titles and points it at the real... platvix.com Article · ~10 min read Technical Cofounder vs CTO Hire: What to Do If You Are Non-Technical Platvix
  5. Frameworks are useful, but sometimes you just want to hear how real founding teams actually got through a hard disagreement.... Apple Podcasts Podcast · Episodes ~30 to 60 min How I Met My Co-Founder Annie Garofalo
  6. Samuel Hulick tears down real onboarding flows slide by slide, and the Slack one shows how a product teaches itself inside the... UserOnboard Essay · 79-slide teardown, ~20 min How Slack Onboards New Users (User Onboarding Teardown) Samuel Hulick
  7. Video · about 4 minutes Understanding the Material Design type system Google Design
  8. This is the honest counterweight to just copying everything: it lays out exactly when breaking a convention earns its keep and... Laws of UX Article · 8 min read Familiar vs Novel Jon Yablonski
  9. Video · ~38 min Designing for the Next Billion Users (Google I/O '17) Astrid Weber and Nithya Sambasivan, Google
  10. Use this as the checklist you run before you ship. It walks through 18 specific tells that make an early product feel amateur... mockflow.com Article · Long read, 18 mistakes plus a pre-ship checklist 18 Common UI Design Mistakes and How to Fix Them MockFlow
  11. UX Writing Hub is a well known home for this craft, and this guide is a browsable reference of real product screenshots showing... UX Writing Hub Tool Microcopy in a Nutshell: Past, Present and Future Anja Wedberg (UX Writing Hub)
  12. This is the practical answer to the scariest part of multilingual design: a button that reads Submit in English can blow out to... Lokalise Tool · Plugin, set up in minutes Lokalise for Figma (localization plugin) Lokalise
  13. If Few's book is the deep dive, this is the practical checklist you can act on this afternoon. It walks through visual... UXPin Studio Blog Article · ~15 min read Dashboard Design Principles: The Definitive Guide UXPin
  14. Video · ~18 min The beauty of data visualization David McCandless
  15. Video · About 40 minutes Prioritizing Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matters Adam Tornhill
  16. If you cannot yet get your agency or freelancers to ship weekly, the usual reason is the work reaches them half-defined. This... Designli Article · ~12 min read How to Write a Feature Brief: A Guide for Non-Technical SaaS Founders Keith Shields
  17. A weekly ship cadence needs a container that resets every week on its own, otherwise the discipline lives in your head and... Linear Tool · Docs page plus free tool Cycles (Linear Docs) Linear
  18. This is the rare show built entirely for founders who are shipping a product without being the one who writes the code. Host... Tech for Non-Techies Podcast · Ongoing, ~30 to 45 min episodes Tech for Non-Techies Sophia Matveeva
  19. This is the fullest, most honest version of the Reid Hoffman line you have heard quoted ("if you're not embarrassed by the... Next Big Idea Club Essay · ~6 min read The Entrepreneur's Greatest Asset: Embarrassment Eric Ries
  20. "Ship ugly" and "wait until it's good" are not the only two options, and this piece gives you the vocabulary to tell them... Eleken Article · ~8 min read MLP vs MVP: Which Should You Build First (and Why)? Eleken
  21. This is the cleanest answer we have found to your exact question: it names five buckets a roadmap actually pulls from (new... Intercom Essay Where do product roadmaps come from? Paul Adams
  22. Once you accept that not every bug earns roadmap time, you need a repeatable way to decide which ones do, and this piece lays... Plane Article Bug triage process: How to run it and what to prioritise Sneha Kanojia
  23. This is the book that gives you a discipline for the problem: build only to test a specific hypothesis, then measure and learn... Crown Business Book · About 336 pages The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Eric Ries
  24. This is the rare sunset guide that walks through a real decision, Pendo retiring its own Trends report when usage fell to about... Pendo Article · About 8 minute read How to effectively remove and retire a feature from your product Mei Luo

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

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
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →