Field Guide

The Market Curve

The market you choose to serve is one of the most important factors for an early-stage startup. And for most technologists, it’s a blind …

The Startup Marketing Checklist

I tried dozens of side projects before starting Draft.dev, and now I’ve worked with hundreds of early-stage startups and established enterprises to help with growth marketing. So, a lot of founders ask me how to get started in marketing when your marketing budget is small and your product is new. I created this list to […]

When To Join A Startup

<p>Something has changed in the last few years which has made an increasing number of people want to join startups. It seemed to start around ...

Introducing The Unusual Method

From Unusual Ventures’ inception, our mission has been clear: to redefine seed stage investing and build a firm that would provide founders with a distinct advantage through the hardest leg of a startup journey—from Idea to Product Market fit. Today we’ve taken an important step towards fulfilling our mission. We are proud to officially make available The Unusual Method and our Unusual Field Guide.

Idea Generation

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea...

Founders Hub | Transform Finance

The founder playbook for building a company that lasts and stays true to why you started it. Research, case studies, and practical tools for incorporation, fundraising terms, board structure, ownership, and culture.

Advice for First Time Founders | Y Combinator

We operate a platform called Bookface for YC founders to connect with each other, ask questions, find intros, and share advice. Recently on Bookface Zach Dixon [https://twitter.com/zachdixongg], cofounder of the gaming company Players’ Lounge [https://playerslounge.co/] (W18), asked a great question: 1. What are some things that you should’ve known as a first-time founder but did not? 2. How did you learn them? 3. How did they help? There were so many useful answers that we’re going to share

StartupWiki - AI Startup Research Directory

Community-driven AI-powered research directory of global startup ventures.

WRKSHP.tools | Startup Readiness Level

It is very difficult to judge how far a startup has progressed. What is needed is an evidence based, measurable progression towards a viable business, with clear next steps and milestones. The Startup Readiness Level (inspired by Steve Blank’s Investment Readiness Level) tries to give you that map.

Financial Modeling for Startups: An Introduction | Fivecast Financial

Founders and executives of new companies, particularly those seeking to raise capital, will inevitably be confronted with the prospect of building a financial model. The goal of this guide is to give you an idea of what a financial model is, why you might want one, and how to go about building one.

Startup Playbook

We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies.

Interviews with Failed & Successful Startup Founders

+200 interviews with the brains behind shut down and active startups. Learn from their wins and their mistakes and become a better founder.

Jessica Livingston – Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing

The most important thing an early-stage startup should know about marketing is rather counterintuitive: that you probably shouldn’t be doing anything you’d use the term “marketing

Startup idea checklist

I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release, and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match my model of the world, so I wrote up my own list.

Media Startup Fellowship: Startup funding & coaching

Media Startup Fellowship: Do you have an innovative media idea? ★ Benefit from funding ► Suitable for every start-up phase!