Startup Resources
I’ll be keeping this list up-to-date with the best startup resources I’m coming across. If there’s anything missing that you’d like to see on there
— reach out to me on Twitter.
This list contains some of the best advice I’ve read on Benchmarks, Growth, Sales, Marketing, Fundraising, Investors, Board meetings, Finance, etc.
High-Level Advice
Monthly Updates
If there’s one thing you take away from this page — then let it be this one:
- Write Monthly Updates → Here’s more info + a template
Learn How to Email
Truth
- Telling the truth to customers and employees, especially when it’s difficult, is how you earn trust and loyalty.
Focus on Priority
- Your product must materially impact one of your customer’s top three priorities. Otherwise, they don’t have time to talk to you.
Crisis
- 28 ways to manage your company through it
Strategy — your starting point (medium here)
Strategy — the Product Strategy Stack
Product Market Fit Framework — by Sequoia based on customer problems
Ideation
Startup Idea Checklist — questions to answer before you get started
How to Interview Customers
Validate a Business not a Pain
Most of the time, real pain points addressed by great products are not a business. A business also requires that there are many potential customers, who realize they have the problem, who you can reach at a reasonable cost, and then convince to convert, at a profitable price, against existing market dynamics, and last for years.
Early on, your job is to validate that there’s a business, not to validate that your idea is good or that a pain exists.
Sell value, not more time
People don’t value their time. They will do crazy things to save $2.
Growth — Benchmarks
Default Dead or Alive >> check on a pre-built graph yourself
How to Launch on ProductHunt
Growth Calculator — benchmark yourself
SaaS startups should grow at 15–20% MoM
How long it takes to get to $100M ARR
The top 25 percentile of public cloud companies spends 5.3 years on average to reach the $100 million milestone.
The median 50 percentile spends 7.3 years to reach $100 million in ARR.
The bottom 25 percentile spends 10.6 years to reach $100 million in ARR.
👆and that would include survivor bias 🤯
CAC / LTV / MRR — rules
- LTV = MRR x 20
- CAC = LTV / 5
- CAC = MRR x 4
- Conversion Rate = 1%
- CPC = MRR / 25
Retention — what’s good and great retention?
Metrics to track
LTV is invalid until the company is more than five years old; even then it’s more noise than signal. Instead,
- watch payback period for acquisition efficiency,
- watch retention for product/market fit,
- watch expansion revenue for long-term growth, and
- watch gross margin for long-term profitability.
Churn Benchmarks
PLG metrics to watch out for
Churn < 3%
- Churn needs to be lower than you think; 3% monthly churn is too high, and means you’re either not delivering recurring value, haven’t found product/market fit, the market stinks, or some other critical problem.
Growth — Sales / Marketing
Product / Market Fit — A Metric to track and obsess over
High Sales/Marketing expenses
If your sales and marketing expenses are high, that either means your marketing is extremely competitive, or that people don’t naturally believe they need your product. If the latter, they might be right. If the former, you need large differentiation — more than a feature or two. If you don’t solve this problem, the company is ultimately unsustainable.
How to Book Cold Meetings on Scale
A/B Testing — when do I know if which variant is better?
SEO — how Canva build an SEO empire
How to start a Blog
Pricing / Revenue
Pricing
Pricing determines everything else. Price must be part of your initial customer discovery, not an afterthought after you “first make sure there’s a pain.“
Free Trials
- Aim for 90%+ Logo Retention after one year
- Target 100–140% Net Dollar Retention
- Time and Usage Based Free Trials Convert Better than Seats and Feature
- Conversion Rates Aren’t Impacted by Trial Length. Shorten Trial Length.
- Salespeople Increase Conversion by 3.5x
- Target 4%+ Unassisted Conversion.
- Target 15%+ Assisted Conversion
- Requiring payment Increases Conversion Rate by 2.5x.
SaaS Pricing Guide
SaaS pricing — low to high
- When to charge $0 vs $10 vs 10,000 / month
Paid vs Free
- I don’t like freemium; I want to learn from people who care enough to pay, not from the 20x more who don’t.
Early Pricing
- It’s hard to get 1000 paying customers. It’s easy to get to 100 if you have a real product. Price so that 100–200 is enough for all the founders to work full-time. This means you have to charge $50-$500/mo, and make something of genuine value.
Underprice
- Leave money on the table. The customer should derive 10x more value than it costs them. You earn loyalty and future upgrades. Karma works.
How to Develop your Pricing Discovery Survey
How to Change Pricing
How to Work Out Your Product’s Price Point
Product
Build SLC not MVP
- These are the components of the correct alternative to the MVP: Simple, Lovable and Complete (SLC). At WP Engine we pronounce it “Slick.” As in: “What’s the ‘Slick’ version of your idea?”
Be excellent at 1–2 things
All startups are screwed up.
Even when they’re succeeding they are screwed up. A startup has to be so excellent at one or two key things, that they can screw up everything else up and not die. Sometimes that’s airtight product/market it. Sometimes that’s defensible distribution channels. Sometimes that’s product design so thrilling that every customer spreads the word to five more. Sometimes that’s a market insight that takes competitors five years to understand. Sometimes that’s a dream team that weathers the storm that sinks the other boats.
The bad news is, you don’t know ahead of time what that thing will be.
The good news is, it’s OK that most things are screwed up.
Reduce Friction
- Document your user journey from pre-app
- Create friction deck with stats and screenshots
- Awareness to worth it time — how quickly do they love it
- Optimise your New User Experience (NUX)
- Money button — don’t hide it
- Language matters
- Allow to share in two taps
- Impact / Effort graph re features
- Clarity over brevity
- Do it again from the beginning
People
How to Hire by Sam Altman
What do CEOs do? (medium here) + time-breakdown
Co-founder Relationship + how to avoid co-founder breakups
How to calculate how many Options Employees should get
How much Equity should Employees get
Operations and Internal Communication for Effective CEOs
How to do lay-offs — the practical no bullshit guide
Looking for Culture-Fit — Interview Questions (medium here)
1:1s done well (medium here)
Compensation Levelling for Startups
Good management
- If a talented person at your company does something “dumb,” the next question is: What did you fail to do as a leader? Did that person not have the right information, or enough context, or were they worried about something, or what?
How to Tell if you’re a Great Manager
Founder Org and Holidays
- If you can’t unplug for a month without adversely affecting the business, then you have a brittle business. If the business is young, this is inevitable. Otherwise, this is a failure of organizational development.
Be fast and decisive
Being a fast mover and being decisive.
It’s the only advantage that startups have or the biggest advantage that startups have over large companies is agility, speed, willing to make nonconsensus, concentrated bets, incredible focus.
Years ago I wrote a little program to look at how quickly our best founders — the founders that run billion-plus companies — answer my emails versus our bad founders.
It was a difference of minutes versus days on average response times.
All Things about Remote Work
7 Tips how to engage a community
Org Structure at different funding + reporting lines
Layoffs and how to do them well
Finance
- Financial Modelling- where to start + Template
- Financial Modelling — the structure
- Captable.io Scenarios
- Captable — SAFE genie
Strategy
Investment & Fundraising
- Mack’s Resources — lots of fundraising resources
- Rituals of Board Meetings — some interesting ideas to get the most out of your board
- How to run a Board Meeting — medium here
- 16 fundraising lessons
- Don’t over-optimise
- How to find investors and get email intros
- Full list of investors across industries
- How to Raise your First Round
- How to Qualify your Investors
- Free standard legal documents — AIC
- Founder’s Guide to Selling your Company
- How to Raise a Series A — YC Guide
Navigation on mobile is harder
— here are the other pages you might want to read:
