The Official Guide & Index to the“Actionable Learning for Startup Founders” Collection
All stories added to this collection are categorized & linked to on this page for easier findability. Latest additions are listed at the top of the page.
Pssst…If you’re looking for the full article index, it’s below the FAQ.
Psssst again…Bookmark this post for easy reference, you’ll be happy that you did. ☺
Latest Updates [April 10 ‘14]:
In ‘Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)’:
Stop Making Customers Puke by Stephen Woessner
In ‘Email Marketing’:
Emailing as a secret weapon for engagement! by Muhammed Tüfekyapan
In ‘Engagement’:
Is Your Product Too Engaging? by Ryan Hoover
Emailing as a secret weapon for engagement! by Muhammed Tüfekyapan
In ‘Enhancing Your Offering’:
How we made the Atlassian Design Guidelines by Matt Bond
In ‘Landing Pages’:
How I hacked @Unbounce to make better landing pages by Alexandre Deschamps
In ‘Lessons Learned’:
#startupstories by seth goldstein
In ‘Marketing’:
Tap that SaaS; 7 Growth Tips Your SaaS Startup Needs by Sean Smith
In ‘Operational Details’:
How To Value Your Startup Stock Options— Discount Value by Jared Cohen
In ‘User Experience’:
The Right Way to Ask Users for iOS Permissions by Brenden Mulligan
FAQ
What’s the link to this amazing collection you speak of?
https://medium.com/great-reading-for-startup-founders
Why should I bother with this guide?
Two reasons:
1) As it’s name suggests, this collection is about high quality content on Medium that will help startups do things measurably better.
Inspirational content & opinion pieces have it’s own place but that’s not the goal of this collection.
2) Medium doesn't allow you to categorize stories within collections. Despite being extremely selective about the articles that I was adding to this collection, after 20+ articles it became quite painful to go back & find any article of interest.
This guide is an effort to organize these articles so that anyone viewing or following this collection can get the maximum (& repeat) value out of all this great content.
Bottom line: If even one post in here makes you feel like you wasted your time, then I've failed.
Is there any logic to the order of categories/subcategories?
They are presented alphabetically.
Is there any logic to the order of articles within categories?
No. But if I start to see patterns, I will change this.
Why are some stories in multiple categories?
Some posts span or apply to multiple topics.
I put such posts in all categories that I thought they belonged to.
What is your process to update this list?
On any day that I add posts to this collection, I do two things before the end of that day:
a) Add it’s link to the appropriate category in the index below.
If I add a post that does not belong in an existing category, I will add a new one.
b) Create a summary of the update(s) made at the top of this post so you don’t have to go scrolling through the entire index to find what’s new.
What If I have suggestions on category names (existing/new), other categories that I think posts belong to or anything to do with how this collection is organized?
I’m actually super flattered that you care so much!
My goal is to make this collection as valuable as possible to anyone viewing or following this list. Any suggestion you have to make this collection better will by extremely helpful.
Please leave a comment at the appropriate spot on this list or reach out to me on twitter at @AnujAdhiya & we can discuss your ideas further.
INDEX
C
Communication
How to Write Emails Like a CEO by Andrew Torba
Does everybody in your team know who you’re building stuff for? by Vlad Stan
Four types of business stories by James Buckhouse
What To Look for in Team Communication by Shanley
Building Technical Literacy in Business Teams by Shanley
How to ship good design by Cemre Güngör
How to get a busy person to respond to your email by Mattan Griffel
Communities
5 Ways To Give Thanks To Your Community by Ligaya Tichy
User Communities for Web Apps: 15 Amazing Examples by Aytekin Tank
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
How we tripled our revenue by adding one button by Michael Sacca
Good Copy / Bad Copy (Tests) by Yammer Product Team (Kate Harris)
How to Localize Your App by Craig Watson
Growth Hacking Uber by Ramya Gogineni
How To A/B Test Your Facebook Posts Without Spending A Penny by Michael Taylor
Learning Why Users Leave by Laura Klein
The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data by Julie Zhuo
Stop Making Customers Puke by Stephen Woessner
Customer Service
How To Suck at Email: Company Edition by Dan Friedman
D
Developers & Development
You need a maintenance team by Aytekin Tank
Do it once. Do it right by Ryan Clark
E
Engagement
Hunting for Habits by Ryan Hoover
An Addicting Secret by Matt Crowley
Is Your Product Too Engaging? by Ryan Hoover
Emailing as a secret weapon for engagement! by Muhammed Tüfekyapan
Enhancing Your Offering
Don’t ruin push notifications for your app and you users by Haris Ikram
How to Localize Your App by Craig Watson
How we made the Atlassian Design Guidelines by Matt Bond
F
Frameworks For Thinking & Doing
Systems Thinking by Charles Denault III
Why Online Business Models Fail by Sangeet Paul Choudary
How A Football Coach Taught Me To Product Manage Like a Boss by Mike Su
Making Decisions Under Uncertainty by Ameet Ranadive
7 Step Process to Repeat Success by Sean Smith
Funding, Fundraising & Investors
Tell a four-word story by James Buckhouse
Four types of business stories by James Buckhouse
The Single Most Important Startup Lesson: How to Perform Inception on Your Customers by James Faghmous
Vesting, vesting, vesting by Alejandro Burato
What Are Convertible Notes? by seedchange
Convertible Notes will be the death of us all!! by Josh Cook
How to raise your first VC round like Zuck, Larry & Sergey, Evan & Bobby, Patrick & John by Niko Bonatsos
Top 5 Things to Look for When Evaluating a Startup by seedchange
Tips for Non-Pitchers by Ben De Rienzo
G
Getting Feedback
You’re probably asking for feedback the wrong way by Ken Mazaika
The Customer Is Not Always Right by Jesse Middleton
The One Thing You Absolutely Need To Do To Grow Your Startup by Margaux Viola
Learning Why Users Leave by Laura Klein
Growth Hacks
The 10 minute growth hack that gave us our most signups in a week… in its first 2 hours by Chris Duell
Mentioning Pending Users by Jason Shah
Best Posts on B2C Growth Hacking by Suren
How to Attract a Lot of Eyeballs to Your Startup by BeTweet
The Case of Grim5Next And How I “Hacked” Goodreads to Kickstart My Project by BeTweet
From a Mailchimp email and Wufoo form to $25k in 3 months by Mikael Cho
Growth hacking: A Black Art? by Seys Constantijn
The Perpetual Motion Machine Called Quora by Steve McGarry
How to hack User-generated Contributions by Sangeet Paul Choudary
Stealing Traction: How Youtube, Paypal, StumbleUpon and AirBnB Grew Through Piggybacking by Sangeet Paul Choudary
How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction by Sangeet Paul Choudary
10 Effective Growth Hacks to increase your SaaS Revenue by Thomas Schranz
A Twitter follow “hack” I’m using in my latest product by Kyle Bragger
How I Got My Startup Profitable in 6 Weeks by Chris Bolman
How Wallaby Got a 326% Increase in Signups by Kenny Chen
The Growth Hacker’s Guide to Building Target Groups for Facebook Ads by Gagan Biyani
How Bidsketch Leverages App Integrations to Drive Growth by Joelle Steiniger
H
Hiring & Firing
Interviewing UX: Designing a Design Team’s Hiring Process by Yammer Product Team (Aaron VanSchyndel)
Recruiting or Root Canal: What’s less painful? by Paul Ruderman
I
Idea Validation
How to successfully validate your idea with a Landing Page MVP by Joel Gascoigne
How We Rode 167 Customer Interviews to a Validated Launch by Michael Sacca
How We Got Our First 2,000 Users Doing Things That Don’t Scale by Ryan Hoover
The no-code prototype by James Dong
Pain = Validation by Ryan Hoover
The One Thing You Absolutely Need To Do To Grow Your Startup by Margaux Viola
Conducting customer development with Clarity by Paul Ruderman
K
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) & Metrics
It’s launch day. Do you know the KPIs for your mobile app? by Daniel Doebrich
SaaS Benchmarks: How does your startup stack up? by Ryan Fukushima
The only metric that matters by Josh Elman
When to Listen & When to Measure by Laura Klein
L
Landing Pages
Do more with your Thank You page by Kamil Rextin
How I hacked @Unbounce to make better landing pages by Alexandre Deschamps
Launching
Why Product Launches Still Matter by Craig Watson
Durnken Lnauch Avdcie — Huors bferoe Our Frist Luanch by Matt Goldman
It’s launch day. Do you know the KPIs for your mobile app? by Daniel y Doebrich
How We Rode 167 Customer Interviews to a Validated Launch by Michael Sacca
Startups, Go Big Or Die by Ligaya Tichy
Launching Potluck by Hursh Agrawal
Quibb: The 10 Right Ways to Launch a Modern Web App by Chris Bolman
Lessons Learned
3 Lessons from 3 Years on the App Store by Robleh
30 Things to Stop Doing As A Startup Founder by Lucas Carlson
The Long, Slow Overnight Sensation by Mike Rohde
What I Learned Building A Startup like Dogster, Inc. by Ted Rheingold
How I Got My Startup Profitable in 6 Weeks by Chris Bolman
#startupstories by seth goldstein
M
Marketing
General
Early Stage Marketing by Pedro Pereira
How To Market a Boring Business by Ryan Holiday
The 4 Simple Steps you must to Understand to Go Viral by Ashok
Tap that SaaS; 7 Growth Tips Your SaaS Startup Needs by Sean Smith
Advertising
The Growth Hacker’s Guide to Building Target Groups for Facebook Ads by Gagan Biyani
Branding
Faceless Brands Suck by Roy Steves
Startups: how to define the brand? by Fadi Karam
Why You Should Focus On Branding First by Jeremiah Smith
Competition Research
How to research your competition to create customer personas for your “initial” marketing campaigns by JaiTheArchitect
Content Marketing
Content Déjà Vu, Again by Matt Gartland
Four types of business stories by James Buckhouse
6 steps to write a crystal clear marketing message that drives people to you by Thomas Pichon
Blogging is the New Resume by Ryan Hoover
An Easy-to-Follow Format for Writing Captivating Headlines by Benedict Ursal
How My First Article Ever Topped the HN Front Page by Matt Goldman
The Secret to Writing Incredible Blog Posts by Matt Schlicht
Stock photos that don’t suck by Dustin Senos
7 Step Process to Repeat Success by Sean Smith
The Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing by Nate Desmond
Email Marketing
Email Patterns for Web Apps by Aytekin Tank
My Email List: 58% Open Rate, 23% CTR by Ryan Hoover
How to run your mailing list like a total jerk by Paul Jarvis
An Easy-to-Follow Format for Writing Captivating Headlines by Benedict Ursal
Stock photos that don’t suck by Dustin Senos
5 Lessons From 2 Years of Using Email Newsletters by Guillaume Decugis
How Wallaby Got a 326% Increase in Signups by Kenny Chen
How to Write Email Copy which Helps Blog Posts Go Viral by David Tuite
Custom Emails from a Spreadsheet by Sebastian Fung
Conversion Emails 101 for Startups by Sebastian Fung
Emailed Receipts: A Missed Opportunity by Ryan Hoover
Emailing as a secret weapon for engagement! by Muhammed Tüfekyapan
Inbound Marketing
Who Wants A Powerful Inbound Marketing Plan For Free? by Jeremiah Smith
Media & PR
Stop Complaining about Your PR Firm. Here’s How the Media Works by amywestervelt
I Got A Press Hit. Now What? by Shawn Roberts
Four types of business stories by James Buckhouse
How to Get Press for Anything by Matt Schlicht
Confessions of an ex-tech journalist by Bekah Grant
How to pitch the [tech] press by Bekah Grant
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Climbing up Google’s search rankings by Christina Ng
Social Marketing
How To Build A Following On Instagram and Vine by Steve McGarry
How to Help anyone on Twitter by Neeraj Thakur
I asked for eggs by Daniel Bentley
The Growth Hacker’s Guide to Building Target Groups for Facebook Ads by Gagan Biyani
The Internet Loves Anonymity but Hates Dishonesty by Adam Saven
Viral
10 ways to make your video go viral by Karen X. Cheng
I asked for eggs by Daniel Bentley
Promoting virality by making member to non-member connections by Ryan Fujiu
How to Write Email Copy which Helps Blog Posts Go Viral by David Tuite
N
Networking
Maximizing business travel by Matthew Romaine
Designing for Serendipity by Mattan Griffel
O
Onboarding
The Best Damn Onboarding Flow I’ve Ever Seen* by Samuel Hulick
Redesigning user on-boarding flow by Christina Ng
Operational Details
Vesting, vesting, vesting by Alejandro Burato
How to Write a Monthly Update (Hint: Use Numbers) by Mike Collett
How To Value Your Startup Stock Options— Discount Value by Jared Cohen
P
Post Mortems
Tab: Startup To Shutdown by Shawn Zvinis
Postmortem of a Venture-Backed, Acquired Startup by Hsu Ken Ooi
Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup by Brett Martin
Startups: Vision is great but it doesn’t pay the bills by Matt Wallington
14 Startup Postmortems by Ryan Hoover
Productivity
Best Productivity Tools for Small Teams by Christina Popova
5 Benefits to Saying No by Mike Collett
Psychology
An Addicting Secret by Matt Crowley
The Secret to Making People Want What You Got by Nir Eyal
How To Build Habits In A Multi-Device World by Nir Eyal
The Science Behind Lift by Tony Stubblebine
R
Remote Teams
Building a Successful Remote Team by Aytekin Tank
Remote workers changed my small business by Stephen V. Smith
5 Secrets of Effective Distributed Teams by Thomas Schranz
U
User Experience
Experience Design: Every detail matters edition by communicable
Your website should stop doing this right now (pt. 1) by Goran Peuc
Your website should stop doing this right now (pt. 2) by Goran Peuc
Writing Notifications That Don’t Suck by Dave Feldman
Doing Without Thinking by Saffad Khan
Stop Making Users Explore by Laura Klein
Growth Hacking Uber by Ramya Gogineni
Usability Test on Quora: Browse & Search Results by Norman Tran
Responsive Design: Why and how we ditched the good old select element by Mikkel Bo Schmidt
Responsive Design: Getting Advanced Filtering Right by Mikkel Bo Schmidt
“View mode” approach to responsive web design by Daniel Wiklund
The Right Way to Ask Users for iOS Permissions by Brenden Mulligan
If you think this guide will be useful to you or your audience, please press the green Recommend button below this section.
Anuj Adhiya wrote this guide as a thank you to everyone who wrote the great content and to those that follow “Actionable Learning For Startup Founders”.
This collection is nothing without them.
You can connect with him on Twitter.
