The Best Articles in Startups
The most useful articles and videos in Startups from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
Top 5 Startups Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Startups by Refind users in 2024 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
How We Got Our First 100 Customers (No Bulls**t, Specific Details) (#534)
No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrdEpisode 534: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and...
Building Confidence In Yourself and Your Ideas
One trait that many great founders share is conviction. In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we’ll talk about finding confidence in what you're building, the...
Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth
Annie Pearl is the Chief Product Officer at Calendly. Previously, she was Chief Product Officer at Glassdoor, as well as Director of Product Management at Bo...
The cult of the founder CEO
Big Tech is fascinated by founder-CEOs. But the very qualities that makes them so dynamic and attractive to venture capitalists can mean they’re not always t...
Should Your Startup Bootstrap or Raise Venture Capital?
Within the world of startups, you'll find lots of discourse online about the experiences of founders bootstrapping their startup versus the founders who have...
What is ...?
New to Startups? These articles make an excellent introduction.
Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile: What is the difference?
What is the difference between Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile?
How to ...?
How to Spot Business Ideas Worth Pursuing
Your company might be eager to innovate, but you'll want to have a strategy in place to govern the prioritization of ideas - and avoid chasing shiny objects.
How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale
Faire’s engineering team grew from five to over 100 engineers in three years. Throughout this growth, we were able to sustain our pace of engineering execution by adhering to four guiding principles.
How to build a growth team - lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others (50 slides)
Dear readers, Building a new growth team is hard. You have to figure out the macro organizational issues – how it fits in with marketing, product, and other functions – as well as the micro, like how…
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Startups on Refind.
Product Innovation: Stop Inventing Cool Sh*t Your Customers Don’t Want!
Why do so many innovations fail? We know from research and experience that more innovations and startups fail from a lack of customers than a failure of the product or technology. In other words, too…
Do Founders Even Care About Design?
I’ve encountered founders who disregard design entirely. I’ve collaborated with them, as best as possible, but the situation was always identical, as well as the outcome. They believed they had enough…
Rethinking the startup MVP: Building a competitive product
Today's startup MVP is about iterating early to build the highest quality competitor to an existing idea, not validating a novel one. This journey involves refining early ideas to compete in an…
«Today, the MVP is no longer about validating a novel idea as quickly as possible. Rather, its aim is to create a compelling product that draws in the early users in order to gather feedback that you then use to sharpen the product into the best version of many.»
A Guide to Product Market Fit Using Retention Rate Metrics
Founder shares insights on how to leverage product analytics and retention rates to identify product-market fit.
«Through talking to customers, I realized that a very small number of customers used that product in a way we had never predicted.»
Welcome to the Distribution-First Era, Where Strategy Starts With Channels and Ends With ROI
“If you build it, they will come” is a classic startup mistake. It’s the belief that customers will find your great product without a distribution strategy. Sometimes they do. Often, they don’t.…
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Startups—all under 10 minutes.
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are...
TAM, SAM, SOM: How to Calculate Them for Your Industry
They might look like alphabet soup, but TAM, SAM, and SOM are critical terms when creating a strategy. Find out what they mean and how to calculate them here.
How to avoid “death by LLM”
When Stack Overflow’s traffic apparently went into rapid decline this year, Elon Musk reacted on X with an epitaph: “Death by LLM.” (LLM stands for “large language model.”) His message initially sent…
«Create an AI roadmap now, not tomorrow»
How to do product positioning
Making products is hard. The advice you get doesn't help much; either it's too vague to be useful or too specific to be applicable to your situation. These notes build a model of how products work…
Breaking Down the Growth (PLG) Work
With examples and number (not just a theory fluff)
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Startups.
The 30 Best Pieces of Advice we Heard in 2023
For the 11th year in a row, we rounded up 30 essential company-building insights for startups to lean on in the coming year, no matter the climate.
35 Interview Questions for Manager Candidates
We asked top hiring managers and startup leaders to share their favorite questions for interviewing management candidates.
«You’re not looking for a mediocre manager to lead a team — you’re looking for someone exceptional. So ditch the rudimentary questions and dig deeper. »
How to Do Great Work
July 2023If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.Partly my goal was to create…
«The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve»
How to Build a Brand Without Breaking the Bank
In this exclusive interview, Studs co-founder and Chief Brand Officer Lisa Bubbers shares tips for launching and scaling a startup's brand on a budget.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice Ever Shared on First Round Review
We combed The Review archives for a special compilation of the 100 very best advice published on our digital pages over the last 10 years from folks like Stewart Butterfield, Claire Hughes Johnson and…
Podcasts
On the go? Listen to these Podcasts and audio in Startups.
Reid Hoffman | Crisis Management
A re-broadcast of our episode featuring Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman in conversation with his Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh. In this episode (originally recorded in May 2022), Hoffman and
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Startups, including:
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Startups?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Startups, including Sam Altman, steve blank, andrew chen, Ryan Hoover, Eric Ries.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
How can I report a problem?
When you’re logged-in, you can flag any link via the «More» (...) menu. You can also report problems via email to hello@refind.com
Who uses Refind?
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Keep Learning
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