Startup Guide for early startup founders who don't like to read, but rather listen. A collection of MUST read => listen guides, lessons, essays and more. 

We start with an essey with which all Startups should start with - Paul Graham's Do Things that Don't Scale. 

Here's the original content: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. 

Do Things that Don't Scale by Paul Graham

Startup Guide Podcasts presents. Startup Guide. Podcasts for early startup founders who don't like to read, but rather listen. A collection of MUST read guides, lessons, essays and more.


Today another remarkable essay by Paul Graham

How to Lose Time and Money

July 2010

When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.

So I started to (..)

How To lose time and money

Startup Guide Podcasts presents. Startup Guide. Podcasts for early startup founders who don't like to read, but rather listen. A collection of MUST read guides, lessons, essays and more.

Today Sam Altman on Advice for ambitious 19 year olds. 
June 2013

“I’m an ambitious 19 year old, what should I do?”

I get asked this question fairly often, and I now have a lot of data on what works, so I thought I’d share my response.

Usually, people are deciding between going to college (and usually working on side projects while they do so), joining a company, or starting their own startup.  (..)

Click here to read original post:  http://blog.samaltman.com/advice-for-ambitious-19-year-olds

Advice for ambitious 19 year olds by Sam Altman

Startup Guide Podcasts presents. Startup Guide. Podcasts for early startup founders who don't like to read, but rather listen. A collection of MUST read guides, lessons, essays and more.

Today How to Get Startup Ideas by Paul Graham

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

Problems
Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.
(..)
Buy the Framed cover here: https://behappy.me/poster/how-to-get-startup-ideas-by-paul-graham-lamp-898574

How to Get Startup Ideas by Paul Graham


Startup Guide Podcasts pre-sents. Startup Guide. Podcasts for early startup founders who don't like to read, but rather listen. A collection of MUST read guides, lessons, essays and more. Today The only metric that matters by Josh Elman. November 2012

Check the original article: https://medium.com/@joshelman/the-only-metric-that-matters-ab24a585b5ea#.1f8c6zgyl

Get merchandise here: https://behappy.me/andrismerkulovs/the-only-metric-that-matters-by-josh-elman-911650

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The only metric that matters

I've been lucky to be part of the early growth of several really interesting and now important networks including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. One of the things that I felt working on each of these is that we never looked at numbers or metrics in the abstract -- total page views, logged in accounts, etc, but we always talked about users. More specifically, what they were doing and why they were doing it. At LinkedIn we didn't talk about "total page views", but instead "profile views" - how many people were using LinkedIn to search for and find other people, and how many people were on LinkedIn being viewed. At Twitter while we had (and they still have) crazy page view numbers, we talked instead about how many people were looking at their timeline and reading tweets or tweeting.

When I meet new companies today, I often hear things like "We have 10 Million uniques with 30 Million page views per month." Or "We have a 25% D.A.U./M.A.U. with a 2-cent A.R.P.D.A.U.". All of these sound pretty interesting in the abstract. But when you really dig in you start to find out nearly all of the 10 Million uniques all come in from search engines, click on 2-3 pages, and never come back. Or that the 25% D.A.U./M.A.U. is because the app is spammy and drawing new users in very quickly but hardly any come back for a second session and no one ever pays.

While big numbers are a nice signal of, well, big numbers, I don't think they are an indicator at all for whether a product is really working. Whenever I hear some of these stats, I always ask the same question:

How many people are really using your product?

You need a metric that specifically answers this. It can be “x people did 3 searches in the past week”. Or “y people visited my site 9 times in the past month”. Or “z people made at least one purchase in the last 90 days.” But whatever it is, it should be a signal that they are using their product in the way you expected and that they use it enough so that you believe they will come back to use it more and more.

Once you can define a metric to answer this, then you can really track your growth on a day-to-day, week-over-week, month-over-month basis. And from there, you can identify the key supporting metrics that show you how likely it is more people will convert to using your product on a frequent basis, how likely they are to stay on your product vs churn out, etc.

At Twitter, we found that if you visited Twitter at least 7 times in a month, then it was likely you were going to be visiting Twitter in the next month, and the next month, and the next month. And we decided this was enough initially to be "really using it", though of course I think Twitter gets even better when people use Twitter every day or more.

More about the next most important metric -- what data shows you that more people will be using your product in the future, and how to use this focus to then refine your roadmap to get more people converted to using the product in another post.
- THE END -

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The only metric that matters by Josh Elman

Startup Guide. Podcasts for early startup founders who don't like to read, but prefer listening. A collection of MUST read guides, lessons, essays and more.

Today in Startup Guide an article by Brian Chesky, the Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. April 2014

Original article: https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9ee9d4#.grhudnmx1
Get merchandise here:https://behappy.me/andrismerkulovs/crown-dont-fuck-up-the-culture-brian-chesky-918045 
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Don’t Fuck Up the Culture

On Monday, October 21, 2013, I sent this letter to our entire team at Airbnb. I have decided to publish this in the event it is helpful to entrepreneurs building their cultures.
Hey team,
Our next team meeting is dedicated to Core Values, which are essential to building our culture. It occurred to me that before this meeting, I should write you a short letter on why culture is so important to Joe, Nate, and me.
After we closed our Series C with Peter Thiel in 2012, we invited him to our office. This was late last year, and we were in the Berlin room showing him various metrics. Midway through the conversation, I asked him what was the single most important piece of advice he had for us.
He replied, “Don’t fuck up the culture.”
(..)

Don’t Fuck Up the Culture by Brian Chesky

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