A reading list that gave me an insane competitive advantage in startups

2021-12-25

Top Blog Posts

Coming up with idea

The Dumb Idea Paradox
https://andrewchen.com/dumb-idea-paradox/

The idea maze
https://cdixon.org/2013/08/04/the-idea-maze

Why Build Toys?
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3U-why-build-toys

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy
https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy

Crazy new ideas
http://www.paulgraham.com/newideas.html

Organic startup ideas
http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html

Why smart people have bad ideas
http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

How to get startup ideas
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

"Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most people who try fail so miserably. It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But even then, not immediately. It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting."

"Sam Altman points out that taking time to come up with an idea is not merely a better strategy in an absolute sense, but also like an undervalued stock in that so few founders do it. There's comparatively little competition for the best ideas, because few founders are willing to put in the time required to notice them. Whereas there is a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, because when people make up startup ideas, they tend to make up the same ones."

Stupid Apps and Changing the World
https://blog.samaltman.com/stupid-apps-and-changing-the-world

"There are two time-tested strategies to change the world with technology. One is to build something that some people love but most people think is a toy; the other is to be hyperambitious and start an electric car company or a rocket company. Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact."

Requests for Startups
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

Idea Generation
https://blog.samaltman.com/idea-generation

Frighteningly ambitious startup ideas
http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

"Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. People can notice you've replaced email when it's a fait accompli.

Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another.

Empirically, it's not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you'll get it wrong.

I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.

The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one."

Early stage of a startup

Ramen Profitable
http://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html

Do Things That Don't Scale
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

What Does It REALLY Mean To Do Things That Don't Scale?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RMjQal_c4U

Startup = Growth
http://paulgraham.com/growth.html

The only thing that matters
https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

The Real Product Market Fit
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5z-the-real-product-market-fit

YC’s Essential Startup Advice
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startup-advice

12 Things About Product-Market Fit
https://future.a16z.com/about-product-market-fit/

A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It's a Process
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4Q-a-minimum-viable-product-is-not-a-product-it-s-a-process

How to Plan an MVP
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvp

How to get your first 10 customers?
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/9h-how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers

How To Decide What To Build
https://dcgross.com/decide-what-to-build/

Five ways to build a $100 million business
https://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build-100-million-business.html

How to Become a Magnet for Talent and Assess Talent
http://delian.io/lessons-5

When there is no map, you need a compass
https://jasoncrawford.org/when-there-is-no-map-you-need-a-compass

Jeff Bezos On Innovation: Stubborn On Vision; Flexible On Details
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110608/23514814631/jeff-bezos-innovation-stubborn-vision-flexible-details.shtml

If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is-great-it-doesnt-need.html

Elon Musk & The Midwit Meme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYLVhk7yaaw

Simple Products That Became Big Companies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7TMqY7gkGY

Successful Founders Are OK With Rejection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_SkaERWZY

Read stories of other founders

I found that one of the most efficient way to learn about startups is by reading stories of what successful founders used to do early.

How Unsplash got started
https://www.nfx.com/post/future-digital-advertising-unsplash/

How Fiverr got started
https://www.nfx.com/post/fiverr-road-to-growth/

How We Grew Linktree to 3 Million Users in 3 Years
https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-we-grew-linktree-to-3-million-users-in-3-years-a72fbf5700b5

How to build network and find customers

This Calvin & Hobbes resume got me interviews at 21 startups (I applied to 24)
https://medium.com/@dchopra/this-calvin-hobbes-resume-got-me-interviews-at-21-24-tech-startups-i-applied-to-cc52fdce562e

How we wrote and sent the “best cold email ever”.
https://ramptshirts.com/blog/2018/01/12/wrote-sent-best-cold-email-ever/

Eric Migicovsky - How to Talk to Users
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT4Ig2uqjTc

"The 5 questions to ask a user:
1. What's the hardest thing about [doing this thing]?
2. Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem
3. Why was that hard?
4. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem?
5. What don't you love about the solutions you've tried "

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
https://senrigan.io/blog/book-summary-the-mom-test-by-rob-fitzpatrick/

What is the next step if no response from cold email outreach sequence?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-next-step-if-no-response-from-cold-email-outreach-sequence/answer/Stanley-Mungwe-Ph-D

Engineering the World’s Most Shareable Email
https://medium.com/@talraviv/engineering-the-worlds-most-shareable-email-6efc38cfd9ca

Growth and Defensibility

“This 1 User Acquisition Hack” That Took Us from 150K users to 2 MILLLION in 170 Countries in 5 Months
https://500.co/theglobalvc/social-tools-growth

Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing
https://andrewchen.com/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study

Growth Loops are the New Funnels
https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops

The Network Effects Manual
https://www.nfx.com/post/network-effects-manual/

Two SEO Strategies to Grow Your Business Beyond $100M+ in ARR in 2021
https://alexnech.com/blog/seo-strategy

Social Products

Status as a Service (StaaS)
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

"This isn’t to say that proof of work is bad. In fact, coming up with a constraint that unlocks the creativity of so many people is exactly how Status as a Service businesses achieve product-market fit. Constraints force the type of compression that often begets artistic elegance, and forcing creatives to grapple with a constraint can foster the type of focused exertion that totally unconstrained exploration fails to inspire."

How to solve the cold-start problem for social products
https://andrewchen.com/how-to-solve-the-cold-start-problem-for-social-products/

Social products win with utility, not invites (Guest Post)
https://andrewchen.com/social-products-win-with-utility-not-invites-guest-post/

Tomas Blog