Entrepreneurship resources
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Generic resources
- Topics
- Acquisition
- Attention to details
- Attitude
- B2B
- CEO
- Communication
- Competition
- Data (analytics)
- Design
- Ethics
- Finding an idea
- Funding
- Growth
- Hiring
- IP (Intellectual Property) and patents
- Learning
- Marketing
- Meta: advice about advice
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Mindset
- Pitch decks
- Pivoting
- Pricing
- Prioritization
- Processes
- Product management
- Product-market fit
- Prototyping
- Rituals
- Sales
- Scaling the team (org & management)
- Security
- Stories of startups
- Strategy
- Toolkits
- UX
- Wireframing
- Writing
- Other lists
Introduction
This repository offers a list of resources (books, articles, videos, etc.) related to entrepreneurship.
Items:
🧰 : list of resources📖 : book🎞 : video/movie extract/movie/talk🏙 : slides/presentation⭐️ : must-read
My other lists
Feel free to checkout my other lists:
Generic resources
Books and playbooks
- The Startup Playbook, Sam Altman (President of Y Combinator)
- Summary: How to Start a Startup (YC)
- Founder Books: a compilation of books recommended by 100+ entrepreneurs.
- YC Startup Library
Articles
- 12 Things I Learned from Chris Dixon about Startups
- The 10 most common entrepreneurial mistakes I’ve seen students make
- Not really getting what a startup is
- Focusing on a junk market
- Why aren’t you starting TODAY?
- Pirates are in rare supply these days
- You have to put in more intensity
- Alter Ego vs. Alter Zero
- True fans vs. Too good friends
- Good money vs. bad donations
- Do you really want to be mentored? Incubated!?
- Is a startup really what you want right now?
Topics
Acquisition
- The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!, Andrew Chen
Attention to details
Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder
Attitude
B2B
- The “One Big Customer” Trap
- Don’t target large customers first
- Avoid scope of work (SoW)
- Don’t be “open for business” until you have multiple customers
- Spread revenue across customers
- Don’t eat your seed corn
- How to test a B2B startup idea
CEO
- The role of the CEO
- YCombinator, What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?
- Mindsets and practices of the best CEOs, McKinsey
Communication
Competition
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
Henry Ford
Data (analytics)
- Analytics Academy, Segment. Contains lots of processes and ideas about how to be data-driven.
Design
- 10 Small Design Mistakes We Still Make
- 7 tips to design faster
- Principles For Designing Better Products
- How to simplify your design
- Checklist Design: a collection of the best UX and UI practices.
- 7 simple & effective methods to get better at Visual/UI Design
- Get familiar with design patterns
- Train your eye for good design * Learn by copying top designers
- Nodesign.dev: a collection of tools for developers who have little to no artistic talent
Tools:
Ethics
Being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world
G. K. Chesterton
Finding an idea
- How To Decide What To Build, Daniel Gross (partner at Y Combinator).
- Are you put off building something because it already exists?: a great discussion on HackerNews. * "Next time you come up with that great idea, don’t Google it for a week. Let your mind fester on the idea, allow it to grow like many branches from a trunk."
- Startup idea checklist
- First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge
- Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis.
- A common way that people limit what’s possible is to tell themselves that all the good ideas are taken. Yet, people have been saying this for hundreds of years — literally — and companies keep starting and competing with different ideas, variations, and strategies.
- The iPhone wasn’t first, it was better. Microsoft wasn’t the first to sell operating systems; it just had a better business model.
- Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible. * Many people mistakenly believe that creativity is something that only some of us are born with, and either we have it or we don’t. Fortunately, there seems to be ample evidence that this isn’t true.
As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
— Harrington Emerson
Funding
Money is like gasoline on a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.
Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media founder, and CEO
Growth
- UX Case Studies: a list of growth and UI case studies. The comics format is very engaging.
Hiring
Checkout the hiring section on my charlax/engineering-management.
- Good Job Descriptions: good job descriptions from the most loved companies
IP (Intellectual Property) and patents
- How to Change the World: Defensibility, Guy Kawasaki
- Counterpoint: Patents and Defensibility, Guy Kawasaki
Learning
It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
Elon Musk
Marketing
Check out the Sales section as well.
- The Best Elevator Pitch Examples, Templates, and Tactics, Kurian Tharakan
- Writing copy for landing pages, Stripe Atlas
- The man who produced Steve Jobs’ keynotes for 20 years
- goabstract/Marketing-for-Engineers
- How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users
Resources:
Meta: advice about advice
- Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
- Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to? Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend?
- The most satisfying thing about being an entrepreneur is that you can do what you think makes sense. That doesn’t mean don’t get advice. But get advice from people who know you, who you know, and most importantly, learn how to apply that advice.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Considering App vs. Website? Build a Website.
- Avoiding The Wrong MVP Approach
- Signs You Aren't Really Building a Minimum Viable Product
- A MVP is not a minimal product, it is a strategy and process directed toward making and selling a product to customers.
- You should start with the riskiest assumptions that you can test and try to make them fail.
- A Smart Bear, I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead.
- MVPs are too M and almost never V.
- An experiment should be Simple, Lovable and Complete.
The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.
-- Eric Ries, Lean Startup
MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don’t need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.
-- Eric Ries, Lean Startup
Mindset
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
Pitch decks
- Funded pitch decks
- 30 Legendary Startup Pitch Decks And What You Can Learn From Them
- The Only 10 Slides You Need in Your Pitch, Guy Kawasaki
- Start House
Pivoting
- Knowing When to Pivot, Stanford eCorner
Pricing
- Pricing model at GitLab
🎞 Startup Pricing 101: Growth, Marketing, Monetization, Y Combinator- It’s Price Before Product. Period.
- Have the Willingness-to-Pay talk early.
- Curb your instincts to please customers by giving away too much value unless people will pay for it.
- Slapping on a price just before going to market is a recipe for failure.
- Investigate how you charge as much as what you charge
- Don’t try to serve every segment
- Nine Rules from Monetizing Innovation
- Pricing Your Product, Sequoia
Prioritization
- RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers
- My Billion Dollar Mistake: why having a prioritisation process is key to keeping your edge.
Processes
- Startup bibles: curation of internal processes and resources that successful companies have publicly shared, including pitch deck.
Product management
- Forget the MBA. Here’s the fastest way to become a product manager
- What distinguishes the Top 1% of product managers from the Top 10%? (Quora)
- How to Hire a Product Manager, Ken Norton (and its 10th birthday look back)
- Startups don’t need product managers who are visionaries
- Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling Applied to Product Managers & UX Designers
- Free Resources for Product Management
- Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager, Ben Horowitz.
- PM Starter Pack: how to get started in product management
- Don’t trust agile alone to build successful products, UI patterns.
- Too much focus on what and when to build without asking why, creates tunnel vision.
- Shape Up: free book about product management from Basecamp.
- A Letter To A New Product Manager, The Coinbase Blog
- Building Products
- A product succeeds because it solves a problem for people. This sounds very basic, but it is the single most important thing to understand about building good products.
- Scaling Product Delivery: The "Dirty" Secret of High Performing Product Teams
- My favorite product management templates
- Effective Product Management
Product-market fit
🎞 How to Find Product Market Fit, Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment.- The First 100 Course: a very complete handbook about getting to 100 customers.
- I'm Walking Away From the Product I Spent a Year Building: failing to find a product-marking fit.
Prototyping
- The joy of sketch(ing)
- Sketching stops you wasting your effort
- Sketching encourages you to focus on the steak, not just the sizzle
- Sketching opens up design to everyone
- Includes practical tips.
📖 Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, Bill Buxton- Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool, A List Apart * Includes practical tips and references.
- Prototyping, Usability.gov
- High-Fidelity and Low-Fidelity Prototyping
- Creating Paper Prototypes
Rituals
Sales
- The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen
- Three Sales Mistakes Software Engineers Make
- How Jeff Johnson sold Nike's first shoes
- Every time Johnson sold a pair of shoes he’d create an index card for that customer. He’d jot down all manner of minutiae details: shoe size, shoe preference, favourite distance, etc…
- Johnson used this handcrafted database to keep in touch with customers. He’d send birthday cards, training tips, notes of encouragement before big races.
- 23 rules to run a software startup with minimum hassle
- Recurring revenue is the way to go
- Stick everybody on a month-by-month plan
- Don’t do freemium
- Don’t apply for grants
- No patents
- Don’t do trade shows/conferences
- A Simple Sales Methodology for B2B SaaS Startups
- Five ways to build a $100 million business, The Angel VC
- Growth Handbook: How startups run B2B sales
🎞 Enterprise Sales Basics, Y Combinator🎞 B2B Sales Q&A: B2B, B2B Sales, Y Combinator- Why Big Deals Are Bad for Startups, Y Combinator
🎞 Enterprise Sales Basics, Y Combinator- How to sell a B2B product
Check out those list of resources:
Scaling the team (org & management)
Security
Stories of startups
- From Show HN to Series D
- What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble
- Choose your partner wisely
- Start with a t-shirt
- Your first 100 members are critical
- Pave the cowpaths
- Persistent iteration over flashy launches
- Grow thick skin. Quickly.
- Trends come and go and come back again
- People and relationships are what’s most important
- Stay sharp with side projects
- Identify when you’re being stubborn
- Write, teach, and share what you’re learning
- Don’t take funding
- Take care of yourself first
- Knowing when to let go
- Lessons for early stage founders by Calvin French-Owen
Strategy
- A New License to Future Proof the Commoditization of Data Integration lays out the rationale behind Airbyte's business model and open sourcing strategy.
- If it helps individual contributors or small teams, then it should be free and open source; if it serves an organization’s needs, then it should be monetized.
- They use the Elastic License v2 (ELv2) to prevent "some huge companies [from taking] the Airbyte project and start offering a clone of Airbyte Cloud".
Toolkits
UX
UX Design
See also the relevant section on my professional-programming list
- Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes, Nielsen Norman Group
- A comprehensive (and honest) list of UX clichés
- Why Everyone Should Read Customer Support Emails
- 4 Rules for Intuitive UX
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example
- 10 Usability Heuristics Every Designer Should Know
📚 Selected Books on Design, User eXperience, Mobile, Accessibility & more, Stéphanie Walter. Includes books about UX research, UX design, psychology, information architecture, content strategy, web design, typography, methods, collaboration, mobile, accessibility...- BATUX - Using a UX process to redesign Batman’s classic outfit: a very engaging way to learn about the UX process.
- Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool
Resources:
- UX Frameworks: A resource to find and share frameworks for design research, synthesis, and ideation.
UX Research
Wireframing
🎞 Wireframing for UX: What it is and how to get better at it🎞 Wireframing for Newbies (with Balsamiq)- Wireframes are becoming less relevant — and that’s a good thing
- Validate product design ideas with wireframes * Low-fidelity wireframes can confirm the validity of your product ideas
Writing
Other lists
- Road to Scale: a curated knowledge library for every stage of your startup journey.