Startup Founder Career Path & Resources
Starting your company has never been easier than today. At the same time, the market is getting more competitive. As a startup founder, your job is to work out how to stay alive and thrive.
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Why should you become a
Startup Founder?
Startup tools are more accessible than ever. Million-dollar businesses are being built in bedrooms and during off-hours. The creator and entrepreneur scene is thriving!
With the rise of new opportunities, bigger niches and no-code tooling, everyone is able to build a first version of their startup, gain validation and build it into something big.
And yet – the market is getting more competitive. Where 20 years ago you had a little over 200 marketing tools, there are over 10,000 today! Can you gain an edge and differentiate yourself from the rest?
Best books to build Startup understanding.
A well-written and thorough book can be an amazing path to build deeper understanding and also act as a
handbook as you discover the internet's vast resources.
These are our and our experts top picks to get
started building career-relevant skills.
Zero to One
Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.
The $100 Startup
Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and focused on the 50 most intriguing case studies. In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment.
Zero to Sold
It's easy to build software products. The hard part is turning them into viable businesses that stand the test of time. If you want to build a business that survives, you have to know what challenges you will encounter. Zero to Sold tells the story of a sustainable, bootstrapped software business that grew to thousands of customers before it was acquired.
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Courses to deepen your Startup skills.
These days, courses are no longer a sequence of videos. They are usually accompanied by projects and a
learning community, keeping you accountable and on the path.
Our experts recommend these courses, from free
selections to paid programs.
Sam Altman: How to Start a Startup
Everything we know about how to start a startup, for free, from some of the world experts. How to Start a Startup is a series of video lectures, initially given at Stanford in Fall 2014.
How to Build a Startup
The main idea in this course is learning how to rapidly develop and test ideas by gathering massive amounts of customer and marketplace feedback. Many startups fail by not validating their ideas early on with real-life customers. In order to mitigate that, students will learn how to get out of the building and search for the real pain points and unmet needs of customers. Only with these can the entrepreneur find a proper solution and establish a suitable business model.
YCombinator Startup School
Learn how to start a company, with help from the world's top startup accelerator - Y Combinator. Meet with other founders through weekly live video chats and share tips on how you've grown your startup.
Keep track of your startup's progress with weekly updates and get ready to launch your product. Get access to more than $100,000 worth of deals on AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, Stripe, Brex, Segment, and more.
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The Startup must-reads you shouldn't miss.
Key articles and posts of industry experts can help you get a better picture of what you are getting
into.
In our opinion, these are some must-reads you really shouldn't miss.
Do Things that Don't Scale
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist.
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The 5 Minute Guide To Cheap Startup Advertising
Imagine that you've just completed version 1 of your product and you're preparing for launch. You’ve greased the wheels with a few bloggers, targeted some keywords with SEO, created a bit of linkbait, and scheduled the press release to launch in the morning. At this point your co-founder turns to you and says: “What are we going to do with the $300 we have stashed away for advertising?”
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The State of the SaaS Economy
As a leader in the recurring revenue world, your job is always getting harder. Competition is increasing. Your customers are expecting more from you. The relative value of your features is declining.
We found that you're going to need an entirely new approach to everything from your monetization strategy to your customer development efforts.
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Opportunities and projects in the Startup space.
In the end, advancing your career is all about getting the right opportunities at the right time and a
good portion of luck.
These are some interesting things going on in the Startup space and you
probably don't want to miss them.
IndieHackers: Build your own product
Building your very own product puts you on the radar of any product-focused organization hiring managers, designers and engineers. Going from nothing to something requires and builds top-notch prioritization skills, the ability to stay scrappy and shows that you can get things done.
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Discover no-code
Not much into coding? The rise of no-code tools like Zapier, Webflow and Carrd has enabled creators of all backgrounds to build sustainable businesses, without the need to hire upfront.
Sounds weird? Businesses like Makerpad and Lambda School built entirely or mostly out of no-code tools are making and raising millions of dollars!
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