Excellent book on how to talk to users and ask the right questions. Main takeaways:
- Talk about their life instead of your idea
- Ask about specifics in the past, not generics or opinions about the future
- Talk less, listen more
- You're not looking for compliments — feedback like "wow, good job! this is such a great idea!" is practically worthless

The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick

An excellent interview of Brian Chesky by Reid Hoffman. The first 37 minutes cover Airbnb's journey from pre-idea to product-market fit.

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**On startup ideas**:

* ([9:12](https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo?t=552)): "All these really good \[startup\] ideas often sound like stupid ideas... Don't worry about anyone stealing your idea; if it's any good everyone will dismiss it."
* ([9:25](https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo?t=565)): "A lot of these ideas are you solving your own problem, and they're not like some life changing problem—it's in a nuisance."

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**On "launching" and getting press**:

* ([9:43](https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo?t=583)): "We kept doing launches to get a lot of press. If you launch and no one notices, you can actually just keep launching, and so we just kept launching...and people would keep writing about it!"

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**On product design**:

* ([12:15](https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo?t=735)): "We had a rule: 'three clicks to book it button.'... I remember hearing the story of when Steve Jobs was developing the iPod, no matter where he was on his iPod, he wanted to make sure he was always three clicks from a song. And well we said, we should always be three clicks from having a paid booking."

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**On growth and delighting users**:

* ([22:01](https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo?t=1321)): "\[Paul Graham\] said, it's better to have 100 people that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you. In other words, if you have 100 people that absolutely love your product, they'll tell 100 people, and then they'll tell 100 people (or even 10 people), and this thing will grow; we call it growing virally—in fact almost all movements in history have grown this way as well."
* ([34:45](https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo?t=2085)): "If what you need to do is just find 100 people to love you, then it's very easy to take for granted that a 5-star \[experience\] is what people expect, but to build something people love, you almost need to do something *more* than they expect. Every moment is an opportunity to do something slightly more than people expect."

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Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb

* **Building a great product is necessary but not sufficient for startup success. You can't just wait for users to come to you; you have to go out and get them.**
* The most straightforward way to recruit users manually is by solving your own problems—then you just need to find your peers.
* If you have some users, observe if there is a subset that is especially enthusiastic about your product and try to find more of them.
* **Go to extraordinary measures to make your initial users happy.** Do things that larger companies couldn't possibly do (e.g. Wufoo sent each new user a handwritten thank-you note).
* **Pay attention to your users and talk to them.** Get their feedback. Watch them use your product. The experience of being your user should be *insanely great*.
* **Release your product as soon as it has a quantum of utility**, and see what people do with it. Your initial assumptions are likely to be wrong; the only way to find out is to get something in the hands of users.
* **It can be valuable to focus on a deliberately narrow market at first. Look for "early adopters"—people who really want what you're making—and ask if you can get to a critical mass of them quickly.**
* The "Big Launch" tactic doesn't work—startups are powered aircraft, not projectiles. A startup must continue to manually recruit users and give them an overwhelmingly good experience.

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Do Things that Don't Scale — Paul Graham

* Startups can be evaluated on three axes: team, product, and market.
  * Team: the suitability of the founders relative to the opportunity in front of them
  * Product: how impressive the product is to one user who actually uses it (how easy it is to use, how fast it is, etc.)
  * Market: the number, and growth rate, of those users
* **The market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure.**
  * In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup. The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work.
  * Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter—*you're going to fail*.
* **The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.**
  * Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
  * *You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening.* The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
  * *And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening.* The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing. You start getting awards. Investment bankers are staking out your house.
* **Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit.**
  * Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.

\

The only thing that matters — Marc Andreessen

See also: Blake Masters’ original [course notes](https://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup), from which this book was written.

Zero To One — Peter Thiel

Traction — Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

"**People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.**"

Start with why — Simon Sinek

Startup = Growth — Paul Graham

How to Get Startup Ideas — Paul Graham

How Not to Die — Paul Graham

Be Good — Paul Graham

How to Start a Startup — Paul Graham

cdixon | The idea maze

Startup Playbook — Sam Altman

YC's Essential Startup Advice — Geoff Ralston and Michael Seibel

![](https://images.trove.to/2/2d9ffe37-bc2f-4140-b8da-2dbff84a2967)

The Angel VC: Five ways to build a $100 million business

Frameworks v0.2 — Chris Paik

My (always growing, never finished) library of content that helps inform my thinking about startups. Suggestions welcome!

My startup library

Mar 5, 2021 • 17 blocks •

goodreads.com

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youtube.com

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paulgraham.com

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pmarchive.com

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goodreads.com

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goodreads.com

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youtube.com

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paulgraham.com

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paulgraham.com

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paulgraham.com

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paulgraham.com

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paulgraham.com

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cdixon.org

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playbook.samaltman.com

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ycombinator.com

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christophjanz.blogspot.com

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docs.google.com

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