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 calm, practical guide to founder-led selling from zero, built around the idea that you close early deals through warm... Stripe Atlas Article Your first 10 customers Patrick McKenzie
  2. If you are unsure whether it is your price stopping the sale, start here: figure out which order of magnitude you are in (a 10... Naomi Ionita, Lenny's Newsletter Article How to price your product Naomi Ionita
  3. Sometimes the stall is your pitch: you demo features instead of framing the problem and the cost of not solving it. Dunford... April Dunford, Lenny's Newsletter Article A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins April Dunford
  4. Your short answer says to ask what would have to be true for someone to pay today, and this book is the toolkit for exactly... Chris Voss Book Never Split the Difference Chris Voss
  5. Practical scripts for the exact moment interest collides with price, so you have something better than a nervous discount. It... HubSpot Article 14 responses to the objection "Your price is too high" Davidson Hang
  6. A companion breakdown of how early users became paying customers, including companies that had no paid plan at launch and... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How today's fastest-growing B2B businesses turned their early users into paying customers Lenny Rachitsky
  7. A grounded walkthrough of where first customers realistically come from, starting with the people you already know. It treats... Startups.com Article · ~15 min read How to find the first 100 customers for your startup Startups.com
  8. A concrete, tactical guide to working through your own network toward paying customers without awkward pitches. It walks... UniTel Voice Article · ~15 min read How to Get Your First 10 Paying Customers Using Your Personal Network UniTel Voice
  9. The other half of the problem: once you have supply, how do you get the first buyers so sellers do not churn out of an empty... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 15 min read Cracking the Chicken-and-Egg Problem: Growing Initial Demand (Part 4) Lenny Rachitsky
  10. Balfour, who led growth at HubSpot and founded Reforge, breaks the cold start into the mechanics of how you actually reach... Brian Balfour Essay · 20 min read The Network Effect: Solving the Chicken or the Egg Brian Balfour
  11. A grounded, tactical read on the leaky bucket problem for founders who just closed their first handful of customers. It covers... Vitally Article · ~10 min read Turning Your First Customers Into Recurring Revenue Ian Russell
  12. Balfour (Reforge) makes the case that retention and engagement, not raw acquisition, decide which company wins. It explains the... Brian Balfour Essay · ~15 min read Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough Brian Balfour
  13. Intercom's team, led by Des Traynor's thinking, argues onboarding is the new conversion: keeping customers matters more than... Intercom Blog Article · ~12 min read Onboarding Strategies to Drive Long-Term Customer Retention Intercom
  14. From India's largest community of SaaS founders, this is peer advice on landing and holding early customers without spray and... SaaSBoomi Article · ~10 min read How to Get Your First 10 B2B Customers SaaSBoomi (Raviteja Dodda, Mohit Garg, Sahil Aggarwal)
  15. 37signals built durable products on treating customers with genuine respect, and this episode captures their philosophy of... REWORK by 37signals Podcast · ~30 min Let Your Customers Outgrow You Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
  16. Sean Ellis coined growth hacking and built the 40 percent product market fit test, and here he explains why retention, not... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · ~70 min The Original Growth Hacker Reveals His Secrets (Sean Ellis) Sean Ellis, Lenny Rachitsky
  17. This companion piece warns about the opposite failure: cutting so hard that the thing is minimal but not actually viable or... Silicon Valley Product Group (Marty Cagan) Article · ~6 min read Viable Product vs. Minimal Product Marty Cagan
  18. The Kano model gives you a simple way to sort features into must-haves, performance features, and delighters, so you can see... Folding Burritos (Daniel Zacarias) Tool · ~30 min read The Complete Guide to the Kano Model Daniel Zacarias
  19. Video · ~90 min Product Thinking Workshop ft. Kunal Shah and Shreyas Doshi Kunal Shah and Shreyas Doshi
  20. This chapter is the clearest argument for our claim that a long timeline means your scope is wrong. Basecamp starts with a... Basecamp / 37signals Book · 15 min read Shape Up: Set Boundaries (Appetite) Ryan Singer
  21. A dense list of hard won lessons, several of which land directly on speed and iteration as a startup's main edge over big... Sam Altman Essay · 8 min read Startup Advice Sam Altman
  22. Drew Houston validated Dropbox with a three minute demo video before building the hard sync engine, and the waitlist jumped... YourStory Article · 7 min read Dropbox's Demo Video That Got 75,000 Signups Overnight YourStory
  23. The author of Running Lean tackles the exact trap in our short answer: founders confuse a wrong timeline with a wrong scope. He... Ash Maurya (Lean Stack) Article · 9 min read Getting to the Right Minimum in a Minimum Viable Product Ash Maurya
  24. DoorDash started as PaloAltoDelivery.com, a static page with a phone number and no app, delivering orders by hand. This is the... Stanley Tang (DoorDash co-founder) Essay · 10 min read A New Beginning: The DoorDash Story Stanley Tang

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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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