I decided to add to my first Letter to a Startup Wannabe more new resources that I discovered in the last 2 years, which I think are an essential list of knowledge to be learned before even thinking on building a Tech Startup:
Fundamentals:
Paul Graham – The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
Ash Maurya – “Lean Startup, or Business Model Design, or Design Thinking ?” is the Wrong Question
Tren Griffin – 12 Things about Product-Market Fit
Forbes – Entrepreneurs, Don’t Fail Or Fall Short For The Wrong Reason. Twelve Benefits Of A Mentor.
Forbes – 11 Ways To Find And Build Your Perfect Advisory Board
The Next Web – Don’t even think of naming your business until you read this
Customer Development:
Bas Wenneker – A curated list of customer development resources
Greenice – What Type of MVP is Right for Your Startup?
MobileSpoon – 10 shades of MVP (or: how to develop a product without developing a product…)
Dan Brown – How to Build a Problem Statement
Nikki Anderson – 5 ways to reframe a solution to a problem statement
Ash Maurya – Find Better Problems Worth Solving with the Customer Forces Canvas
Erik van der Pluijm – How to find your Riskiest Assumption
Chris Cannon – What a Journalist Can Teach Lean Startups about Customer Interviews
Tools & Resources:
YCombinator Resources – Articles, Videos, Documents (especially the template of seed note, sales contract and term sheet)
Alejandro Cremades – 300 Best Tools And Resources For Entrepreneurs
Google for Startups is Google’s initiative to help startups thrive across every corner of the world. We bring the best of Google’s products, connections, and best practices to enable startups to build something better.
Maxime Blondel – 100 tools to launch & grow your start-up without web developer, without graphic designer and (almost) without money
Growth Supply – 400 Awesome Free Tools & Resources for Entrepreneurs and Startups
Askalmanac – A knowledge base that combines wisdom from tech leaders with your team’s own practices. Access to tools, templates, and guides from top startup minds. Save guides and tools to your own playbook where you can edit, comment, and make them useful for your team.
ToolBox ToolBox – A curated list of the best business, design, and organisational change toolboxes built by some of the most influential companies, institutions and thinkers.
Adalo – Turn Your Startup Idea Into Reality Without Coding! We believe anyone should be able to make an app, regardless of technical skill. Adalo is a platform that makes creating apps as easy as putting together a slide deck. What WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace have done for websites, Adalo does for apps.
SeedLegals – Launched as the world’s first platform that lets founders and investors easily create, negotiate and sign all the legal agreements they need to do a funding round. In less than 3 years, SeedLegals is now the largest closer of funding rounds in the UK.
Sales & Marketing:
Hubspot Academy – Sales and Marketing free online courses
Chris Hawkins – Selling the Invisible: How to Sell Your Services
Sarah Nöckel, Dawn Capital – The Guide To Crushing Enterprise Sales
First Round – The 39 Best Pieces of Sales Advice You’ll Hear This Year
Stormpath – Sales for Hackers
Scoro – 16 Sales KPIs that Every Team Should Measure
Rain Group – 21 Powerful, Open-Ended Sales Questions
Publicize – We’ve developed a PR resource hub to help startups and growing businesses win media coverage, develop their marketing strategies and attract new customers. Download our databases to access the contact details of 100s of journalists and reporters from the world’s most prestigious publications.
DataReportal – We offer thousands of free reports that help you make sense of what people are really doing online. Essential global and regional insights, with comparisons across key economies. In-depth local findings for more than 230 countries and territories around the world. Data and trends for specific topics, with regional overviews and local insights.
Human Resources:
Founder Institute – Startup Hiring: A Step-by-Step Guide to Recruiting Your First Team Members
Google Guide – Setting goals with OKR can help an organization get to where it wants to be. Learn how setting goals can help align efforts, communicate objectives, and help teams achieve more
Collective Campus – 20 Remote Working Tools That You Didn’t Know You Needed
15Five – A leading people management solution dedicated to creating highly engaged and passionately fulfilled workforces. With OKRs that align everyone around top priorities, weekly check-ins that take the pulse of team morale, 1-on-1s that remove roadblocks, High Fives that recognize success, and our trademark Best-Self Review that supports employees on their journey; we use proven development methods to drive businesses forward.
Alex Vermeer – How to Get Motivated: A Guide for Defeating Procrastination
Niklas Göke – How To Develop Self-Awareness With These 27 Exercises
Online Learning:
Javelin Academy – Learn the principles of the Lean Startup method and how to maximize the power of Javelin tools.
Sam Altman – Startup Playbook
Techstars Entrepreneurs Toolkit – An online educational resource to help you learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and accelerate your success.
Google Digital Garage – 126 of free classes, covering all aspects of a Tech Startup (strategy, marketing, data, HR, soft skills, etc.)
Quantic – A new online business school that’s connecting a rigorous MBA education directly to positive career outcomes and a global alumni network. Quantic offers two highly selective, accredited business degree programs — the free MBA and radically affordable Executive MBA.
Google Ventures – The Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at Google Ventures, it’s the greatest hit of business strategy, innovation, behaviour science, design thinking, and more – packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.
Fundraising:
Preethi Kasireddy – What I wish I knew about fundraising as a first-time founder
Founder Institute – Startup Guide: How to Raise the First Round of Funding for Your Startup
Iman Abuzeid – How I Raised VC From Top-Tier Funds
YCombinator – This guide is a distillation of everything we know about successfully raising an A. It includes insights learned from watching hundreds of founders succeed in raising, and in watching dozens fail.
Investors:
Sifted – 25 UK’s Venture Capital funds founders should know: who they are, what they’re looking for and why they’re worth getting to know.
CB Insights – The Top 100 Venture Capitalists in 2019: a data-driven ranking of the world’s best venture capital partners.
Techstars – VC Investors in Europe
Shai Goldman – US Seed/Micro Funds
Kanso – COVID-19 European Investor Status List
Unicorn Nest – A free list with 26.500 VC, 33.000 key decision-makers, 500,000 cells with information