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. Once you know you should ask about real behavior, this guide gives you the concrete phrasing rules to keep your wording from... kantar.com Article Writing unbiased survey questions: complete guide with best practices and examples Kantar
  2. Once you have found the job and written behavior-based questions, Typeform is a fast, accessible way to field them. Its... typeform.com Tool Typeform Survey Maker Typeform
  3. Once you know the three layers exist, you need to see them in real products, and this piece is concrete about it: a luxury... SIVO Insights Article · about 10 min read Understanding the Types of Jobs Consumers Hire Products For (Functional, Emotional, and Social) SIVO Insights
  4. This is the short, canonical piece that popularized the painkiller versus vitamin test, from a founder who has actually built... David Cummings on Startups Essay · About a 3 minute read Candy, Vitamins, or Painkillers for Startups David Cummings
  5. When a competitor shares no numbers, their own website still leaks signal, and BuiltWith reads it for you. Paste a private... BuiltWith Tool · Free lookup, instant per-site scan BuiltWith Technology Lookup BuiltWith
  6. A private competitor that hides its numbers still has to post honest job descriptions to hire, and this piece walks through... Intervue Article · About a 10 minute read Competitor Hiring Analysis: How Job Postings Reveal Market Strategy Sugandha Srivastava
  7. The strongest way to research a private competitor is to talk to the people who left them, and this essay grounds that tactic... Product Talk Essay · About a 12 minute read Ask Teresa: How Do You Select Customers for Customer Interviews? Teresa Torres
  8. A feature comparison matrix quietly assumes the goal is to match or beat every box a competitor ticks. The value curve flips... Blue Ocean Strategy Book · Short read (the underlying book runs about 240 pages) Blue Ocean Strategy: The Value Curve and Four Actions Framework W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
  9. Graham's honest counterweight to feature-list anxiety: he argues the startups that actually kill you are usually the ones you... paulgraham.com Essay · About a 12 minute read The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn Paul Graham
  10. A VC names the exact failure mode a solo founder falls into: researching and deliberating so long that competitors ship while... itamarnovick.com Article · About a 6 minute read Startup Anti-Pattern #8: Analysis Paralysis Itamar Novick
  11. In 1996 search was a backwater and the dominant portals (Yahoo, AOL) treated it as a commodity feature to outsource. Google... Acquired Podcast · About 3 to 4 hours Google: The Origin of Search (Acquired) Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
  12. This is the piece that names the exact fear: a big player with more money, data, and talent can copy anything you build that is... Harvard Business Review Essay A Survival Guide for Startups in the Era of Tech Giants Thales S. Teixeira
  13. When a big platform ships the same feature you are known for, this article explains why that feature buried inside a broad... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Article Platforms vs. Verticals and the Next Great Unbundling Jeff Jordan and D'Arcy Coolican
  14. A short, concrete piece that names the competitor founders most often miss: the customer simply doing nothing. Morin cites... Forbes Article · Short read, about 5 minutes Your Competitor Isn't Your Real Competition: Status Quo Is Amy Morin
  15. When you are defining a category instead of entering one, the usual competitor grid does not exist yet, so this book reframes... Goodreads Book · 272 pages Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney
  16. An empty competitor field feels like a moat, but this piece is honest that it often means the market has not proven it will pay... Escalon Essay · About a 6 minute read Why a lack of competition may be the worst thing for new startups Escalon Services
  17. This piece names the exact trap you are trying to avoid: googling an industry stat and assuming you just need 1 percent of it... TechCrunch Article · Short read, roughly 8 to 10 minutes 5 critical pitch deck slides most founders get wrong Jose Cayasso
  18. Written by a non-technical founder who built a tech company, this piece draws the line that matters: you need the concepts... Forbes Article · ~7 min read What Non-Technical Founders Really Need To Know About Tech Sophia Matveeva
  19. This short post names the exact trap behind competitor anxiety: studying rivals feels like work but takes almost no effort,... David Cummings on Startups Essay · About a 3 minute read Customer Obsessed and Competitor Aware David Cummings
  20. Instead of refreshing competitor pages all day, you set up an alert once per competitor and let the updates come to you in a... Google Tool · A few minutes to set up Google Alerts Google
  21. Jason Cohen names the exact mechanism you are trying to size: a big company has a materiality threshold (it needs a new line to... A Smart Bear Essay · about 25 min read How Startups Beat Incumbents Jason Cohen
  22. This is a plain-language breakdown of what no-code is genuinely good for and the specific points where it stops being enough.... NoCode MBA Essay · About a 10 minute read Code vs No-Code: What's Best for Startups? NoCode MBA (Seth Kramer)
  23. This is the essay that named the problem: an MVP quietly pushes you to build a whole product when what you actually need is to... HackerNoon Essay · 8 min read The MVP is dead. Long live the RAT. Rik Higham
  24. Once you know your riskiest assumption, this book tells you which experiment actually tests it. It carries 40 plus illustrated... Strategyzer (Wiley) Book · Book, around 320 pages Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder

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
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