Awesome
Awesome Startup
A curated list of awesome books, videos, courses and resources about making a startup.
- Books
- Videos
- General
- Resources
- Accelerators
- Finance
- Reading
- Engineering
- Venture Capital and Raising Money
- Marketing, Sales & metrics
- Task Management & Collaboration
- Marketing Tools
- Coworking & Virtual Offices
- Leadership & People
Books
- Quotes / Lessons / Videos for Entrepreneurs and Startups
- For Entrepreneurs
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
- Startup Notes
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder
- The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank - The Startup Owner's Manual lays out the best practices, lessons and tips that have swept the startup world, offering a wealth of proven advice and information for entrepreneurs of all stripes.
- Running Lean by Ash Maurya - A practical guide to the Lean Startup
- Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston - A collection of interviews about the early days of popular technology companies
- The Founder's Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman - Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.
- Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
- Venture Capitalists at Work by Tarang Shah and Sheetal Shah - Venture Capitalists at Work: How VCs Identify and Build Billion-Dollar Successes offers unparalleled insights into the funding and management of companies like YouTube, Zappos, Twitter, Starent, Facebook, and Groupon. The venture capitalists profiled—among the best in the business—also reveal how they identify promising markets, products, and entrepreneurs.
- Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
- Hello, Startup - The "Hello, World" tutorial for building a startup
- The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action - The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. This is a great tool for all companies, but importantly early stage companies, to help them translate data to data execution into actionable and measurable outcomes, across the business.
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't - Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
- The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth - Helpful to growth stage companies who are moving beyond their initial successful product, provides a great framework for how to invest beyond the core.
- Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us - Seth Godin stresses the importance and benefits of knowing your audience and staying hyper-focused on them to build a loyal following. “With his signature wit and storytelling flair, Godin presents the three steps to building a tribe: the desire to change things, the ability to connect a tribe, and the willingness to lead.
- Rise of the Revenue Marketer - The role of Marketing has dramatically evolved over the last decade. Historically seen exclusively as a cost-center for the business, this shift tasks Marketing with generating revenue. This book highlights these changes and outlines the organizational structure necessary to drive this accountability and growth.
- Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies - Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the 21st century and beyond.
- Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results - shows how leaders can achieve record-breaking results by quickly and effectively shaping their organizational culture to capitalize on their greatest asset-their people.
- Think Like a Founder - Discover the good, the bad, and the ugly of succeeding with a tech startup from nine-time company founder Jothy Rosenberg.
- Think Like a CTO - A book that shares the experience and advice of veteran CTOs and industry experts for handling IT crises, leading tech teams, and creating an inspiring vision for your company.
Videos and Courses
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The Lean Launchpad by Steve Blank (Udacity) - Learn the key tools and steps to build a successful startup (or at least reduce the risk of failure). An introduction to the basics of Steve Blank's famous Customer Development process, where entrepreneurs "get out of the building" to gather massive amounts of customer and marketplace feedback, and then use that feedback to continuously iterate and evolve their startup business models, improving the chances of success at every step.
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Startup Engineering (Coursera) - Learn the engineering skills needed to build a technology startup from the ground up.
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Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies (Coursera) - Explore how to identify and develop great ideas into great companies. Learn how to identify opportunities based on real customer needs. Develop solid business models. Create successful companies.
- Startup courses at Edx - Learn how to start your new business venture with free online entrepreneurship and business development courses from MIT, IIMB and other top schools.
- Authors @Google: Eric Ries "The Lean Startup"
- Marc Andreessen & Dave McClure: The Future of Startups, VC's, and Technology
- Foundation 37 // David Byttow
- How to Start a Startup - IIM A
General
- The Lean Startup - Eric Ries (book)
- Running Lean - Ash Maurya (book)
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank (book)
- Sam Altman's blog
- Startup advice, briefly
- Paul Graham's essays
- How to get startup ideas
- Do thing's that don't scale
- 18 Mistakes that kill startups
- How to raise money
- High Output Management - Andrew S. Grove (book)
- Three business fables by Patrick Lencioni that are powerful tools to be a better leader:
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni - Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team.
- The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni - Patrick Lencioni delivers a provocative message. CEOs mainly have themselves to blame when things go wrong. If you're a CEO (or a manager for that matter), do you have the courage to face it? Doing so could change your future -- for the better.
- The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: The Four Disciplines at the Heart of Making Any Organization World Class by Patrick Lencioni - In this follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni's focus is on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization--an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success.
Resources
Accelerators
- Alchemist - Enterprise sales accelerator
- YCombinator - Seed funding for startups (from the creators of HackerNews)
- 500 Startups - One of the top accelerators with a global presence
- Techstars - One of the world's leading accelerators offering a range of programs
Finance
- Brex - Banking for newly-founded tech startups made easy
- Revolut Business - Control your payments, company cards, expenses and more from one app
- Ramp - Cards, bills, payments, approvals, and more for startups
Reading
- Ideas are just a multiplier of execution
- Do things that don't scale by Paul Graham
- Startup = Growth by Paul Graham
- What startups are really like by Paul Graham
- Startup Advice by Sam Altman
- My Best Advice for Entrepreneurs: Learn to Speak
- Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth
- The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2013
- The Dentist Office Software Story
- 27 books every startup ought to read by Hiten Shah
Engineering
- Argonaut - Deploy apps and infrastructure on your cloud in minutes. Support for custom and third-party app deployments on Kubernetes and Lambda environments. Free forever startup tier allows unlimited apps and deployments for 5 environments and 2 users.
- Datadog - Modern app monitoring and security for applications
- The one cost engineers and product managers don't consider
- Software Engineering and Development is expensive and delicate. Use Spurwing instead of reinventing the wheel when it comes to time management solutions. Spurwing is like Stripe but for appointment scheduling. This API makes it easy to add robust appointment booking and calendaring features to any application. The Spurwing API is a secure and feature-rich, accessible product for building custom solutions, product integrations, scheduling and calendaring widgets. You are only limited by your own imagination. Reach out to ilya@spurwing.io for an intro call.
Venture Capital and Raising Money
- Black Swan farming by Paul Graham
- How to convince investors by Paul Graham
- Breaking Down a Typical VC/Startup Diligence Process
- Fundraising Mistakes Founders Make
- Pitch Decks for VCs - You’re doing it wrong.
- Raising Capital: This is the Advice We Give Our Founders
- Free Startup Pitch Deck Templates for Figma
Marketing Sales & Metrics
- The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters
- Startup Metrics for Pirates by Dave McClure
- How New User Acquisition Channels Drive Change
- Guide to SaaS metrics by David Skok
- Free Marketing guides by Kissmetrics
- Elements of a viral launch page by SmashingMagazine
- Self-Service SaaS: A Beginner’s Guide to Maximizing Growth - There aren’t many resources available that thoroughly outline the basics of managing self-service revenue at a SaaS company, but Chargebee does a nice job of it in this guide. By explaining the basics, providing a framework, including real-world examples from the SaaS space, and linking out to additional resources this asset is a solid place to start!
Task Management & Collaboration
- Asana - Track your team's work & manage projects
- Trello - Create and manage kanban boards
- Todoist - The to do list to organize work & life
- Monday.com - One platform, better teamwork
- Taskade - Collaborative task lists and outlines
- Airtable - Build flexible spreadsheets that behave like a database
- Jira - Issue tickets, keep track of progress and plan your agile projects
- Microsoft Teams - Business communication platform that offers workspace chat, videoconferencing, file storage and 3rd party app integration
- Wire - The most secure collaboration platform
- Feedbear - Prioritize feature requests to build your roadmap.
- Notion - All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
- Logit.io - Collaborative visualisation platform with no limits on the number of users or teams.
Marketing Tools
- Buffer - Social Media analytics and Scheduling
- BuzzSumo - Find Most Shared Content and Key Influencers
- QuickTwit - Tools for finding Trends in Topics
- Hootsuite - Social Media Management Tools
- SocialBlade - Social Media Statistics
- IFTTT - Create custom triggers to automate social media workflows
- Zapier - Alternative to ifttt : triggers based automated workflows
- Phantombuster - Automate social media via webscraping
- QApop - Find relevant Quora questions to answer
- Smartlook- Understand how people interact with your website and improve conversion
- SocialDog - All-in-one Twitter marketing tool.
Coworking & Virtual Offices
Leadership & People
- How to Start a Movement - 3 minute video drawing parallels to leadership and the importance of the people that follow the leader. Critical for a start-up to achieve and maintain alignment
- Employee Engagement: The Wonder Drug For Customer Satisfaction - short article showing the high correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers and happy/engaged employees produce the most amazing start-ups - or any type of company for that matter.