awesome-startup
:sunglasses: All the required resources to build your own startup
https://github.com/KrishMunot/awesome-startup
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Accelerators
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Reading on AI Startups
- Alchemist Accelerator - Focused on enterprise sales.
- 500 Global - Global accelerator and seed fund, formerly 500 Startups.
- Techstars - One of the world's leading accelerators, with programs by city and vertical.
- Y Combinator - Seed funding, a strong network and the standard deal.
- Entrepreneur First - Funds individuals before they have a company or a cofounder.
- AI Grant - Non-dilutive-style funding and compute credits for AI-native startups.
- Antler - Day-zero investing with cofounder matching across many cities.
- South Park Commons - A community for people in the pre-idea stage.
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AI for Founders
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Building with Agents
- Cursor - AI code editor with agents that plan and execute multi-file changes.
- Claude Code - Anthropic's terminal-based coding agent.
- GitHub Copilot - Completions, chat and coding agents inside GitHub and your editor.
- Model Context Protocol - The open standard for connecting models to tools and data. Worth understanding early, because shipping an MCP server is now how you make your product addressable by other people's agents.
- Vercel AI SDK - TypeScript toolkit for streaming, tool calls and generative UI.
- LangChain and LangGraph - Orchestration for chains and stateful, multi-step agents.
- LlamaIndex - Data framework for retrieval over your own documents.
- Pydantic AI - Type-safe Python agents with structured, validated outputs.
- DSPy - Programming rather than prompting, with optimizers that tune prompts against your metric.
- Ollama - Run open models locally, which is the cheapest way to iterate and the simplest answer to "does our data leave the building?"
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Evaluation and Observability
- Braintrust - Evals, prompt playground and logging for LLM products.
- LangSmith - Tracing, evaluation and monitoring, usable without LangChain.
- Langfuse - Open-source LLM observability, self-hostable.
- Arize Phoenix - Open-source tracing and evaluation built on OpenTelemetry.
- Weave - Weights & Biases' toolkit for tracking and comparing LLM app versions.
- Ragas - Metrics for retrieval-augmented pipelines.
- OpenAI Evals - Framework and registry for benchmarking model behavior.
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Inference and Data Infrastructure
- Modal - Serverless GPUs with per-second billing, well suited to spiky inference and batch jobs.
- Replicate - Run and fine-tune open models behind a hosted API.
- Baseten - Production model serving with autoscaling.
- Fal - Fast inference for image, video and audio models.
- vLLM - High-throughput open-source serving engine, the standard for self-hosting.
- pgvector - Vector search inside Postgres. Try this before adding a dedicated vector database.
- Qdrant - Open-source vector database with hybrid search.
- Pinecone - Managed vector database.
- Turbopuffer - Vector and full-text search on object storage, priced for large, cold datasets.
- DuckDB - In-process analytics that removes the need for a warehouse until you actually need one.
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Models and Access
- OpenAI Platform - API docs, pricing and model comparisons for the GPT family.
- Anthropic - Claude API docs, including prompt caching, batch pricing and agent tooling.
- Google AI Studio - Free tier to prototype against Gemini models before committing to Vertex AI.
- Mistral AI - Open-weight and commercial European models, often the cheapest capable option.
- Llama Models - Meta's open-weight family and model cards, the default when you need to self-host.
- OpenRouter - One API and one bill across hundreds of models, which makes switching providers a config change rather than a migration.
- Hugging Face - Models, datasets and Spaces, plus the leaderboards worth checking before you pick a base model.
- Artificial Analysis - Independent benchmarks of quality, latency and price per token across providers.
- Arena - Blind human preference rankings, a useful sanity check against vendor benchmarks.
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Reading on AI Startups
- YC Requests for Startups - What YC currently wants funded, which is a live signal on where the openings are.
- a16z on AI - Market maps and infrastructure analysis.
- Generative AI's Act o1 - Sequoia on the shift from fast pattern-matching to models that reason, and what it means for products.
- Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications - The reference diagram for how these systems fit together.
- Anthropic's Building Effective Agents - Argues for simple, composable patterns over frameworks, and is right more often than not.
- Generative AI's Act o1 - Sequoia on the shift from fast pattern-matching to models that reason, and what it means for products.
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Trust, Safety and Regulation
- OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications - The security checklist to read before you ship prompt-driven features.
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework - The framework enterprise buyers increasingly ask about.
- EU AI Act Explorer - Browsable text of the Act, with obligations phasing in on staggered dates. Relevant to you if any user is in the EU.
- Microsoft Presidio - Open-source PII detection and redaction for data leaving your systems.
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Working with AI Day to Day
- ChatGPT - General-purpose assistant for research, writing, support drafts and operations.
- Claude - Long-context assistant suited to product specs, coding help and founder workflows.
- Perplexity - AI search with citations, useful for market research and competitive intel.
- NotebookLM - Ground a model in your own documents to interrogate contracts, research and transcripts.
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Books
- Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares - The bullseye framework for working through nineteen customer acquisition channels.
- Hello, Startup by Yevgeniy Brikman - The "Hello, World" tutorial for building a startup.
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - The build-measure-learn loop that named a generation of startups.
- Running Lean by Ash Maurya - A practical guide to iterating from plan A to a plan that works.
- High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove - The management text most operators keep returning to.
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni - The five dysfunctions at the heart of why even good teams struggle, and actionable steps to overcome them.
- The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni - A provocative message: CEOs mainly have themselves to blame when things go wrong.
- The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni - A leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization, the linchpin of sustained success.
- Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder - Origin of the business model canvas.
- Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston - A collection of interviews about the early days of popular technology companies.
- The Founder's Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman - Drawing on a decade of research, Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.
- Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson - Term sheets and deal mechanics explained by people who write them.
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel - Notes on startups, or how to build the future.
- The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank - Best practices, lessons and tips that have swept the startup world, offering a wealth of proven advice for entrepreneurs of all stripes.
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank - The book that introduced customer development.
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal - The hook model behind products people return to without prompting.
- Venture Capitalists at Work by Tarang Shah and Sheetal Shah - How VCs identify promising markets, products and entrepreneurs.
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz - Building a business when there are no easy answers.
- Amp It Up by Frank Slootman - Raising expectations, increasing urgency and narrowing focus, from the CEO who took Snowflake public.
- The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen - How network effects begin, scale and defend themselves.
- Good to Great by Jim Collins - Using tough benchmarks, Collins identified elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained them for at least fifteen years.
- Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras - A master blueprint for building organizations that prosper across decades.
- The Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christensen - Useful to growth stage companies moving beyond their initial product, with a framework for investing beyond the core.
- The Balanced Scorecard by Kaplan and Norton - Translates vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures across financials, customers, internal processes, and learning and growth.
- Tribes by Seth Godin - The importance of knowing your audience and staying hyper-focused on them to build a loyal following.
- Change the Culture, Change the Game by Connors and Smith - How leaders shape organizational culture to capitalize on their greatest asset, their people.
- Rise of the Revenue Marketer by Debbie Qaqish - Marketing's shift from cost center to revenue owner, and the org structure that shift requires.
- Think Like a Founder by Jothy Rosenberg - The good, the bad and the ugly of succeeding with a tech startup, from a nine-time founder. Published as *Tech Startup Toolkit*.
- Think Like a CTO by Alan Williamson - Veteran CTOs on handling IT crises, leading tech teams and creating an inspiring technical vision.
- Startup Notes - Condensed notes from founder talks.
- For Entrepreneurs - A reading shortlist for first-time founders.
- Tribes by Seth Godin - The importance of knowing your audience and staying hyper-focused on them to build a loyal following.
- Startup Notes - Condensed notes from founder talks.
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Coworking and Virtual Offices
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Reading on AI Startups
- Canada Virtual Office - Virtual addresses and mail handling in Canada.
- Regus - Offices, coworking and virtual addresses worldwide.
- WeWork - Coworking and private offices in most major cities.
- Industrious - Coworking aimed at small teams wanting quieter space.
- Staples Studio - Low-cost coworking in North America.
- Deskpass - On-demand access to many spaces on one membership, which suits distributed teams.
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Data and Market Research
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Reading on AI Startups
- Hacker News - Where a technical audience finds and criticizes new products.
- Crunchbase - Company, funding and investor data.
- Product Hunt - Daily launches, and a launch channel in its own right.
- Sacra - Research on private company revenue and growth.
- PitchWall - Discover and launch early-stage products, successor to BetaPage.
- One Person Company - Guides, tools and playbooks for building a profitable solo business with AI.
- Exploding Topics - Spot demand trends before they are obvious.
- Google Trends - Free validation of search demand and seasonality.
- Statista - Market size data for decks, with sources you should check.
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Design and Brand
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Reading on AI Startups
- Figma - Collaborative interface design, and the file format the industry speaks.
- Framer - Design and publish marketing sites without a front-end build step.
- v0 - Generate React and Tailwind interfaces from prompts or screenshots.
- shadcn/ui - Copy-paste accessible components you own outright, rather than a dependency you fight.
- Tailwind CSS - Utility-first styling that keeps small teams visually consistent.
- Radix Primitives - Unstyled, accessible component behavior.
- Lucide - Open-source icon set.
- Coolors - Fast palette generation.
- Refactoring UI - Practical visual design rules for developers without a designer.
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Engineering and Infrastructure
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Reading on AI Startups
- Datadog - Modern application monitoring and security.
- The One Cost Engineers and Product Managers Don't Consider - On complexity as a recurring cost rather than a one-time one.
- Vercel - Frontend and full-stack hosting with preview deployments per pull request.
- Railway - Deploy backends and databases without managing infrastructure.
- Fly.io - Run containers close to users in multiple regions.
- Render - Managed services, cron jobs and Postgres with a generous starting tier.
- Cloudflare - Workers, D1, R2 and queues, with egress pricing that matters at scale.
- Supabase - Postgres with auth, storage and realtime included.
- Neon - Serverless Postgres with database branching, which pairs well with per-PR environments.
- Clerk - Authentication and user management you do not have to build.
- Sentry - Error and performance monitoring.
- Grafana Cloud - Dashboards, logs and traces with an open-source core.
- Doppler - Secrets management across environments.
- Depot - Faster container and CI builds, a cheap fix for slow feedback loops.
- The Twelve-Factor App - Still the clearest baseline for building services that deploy cleanly.
- DORA - Research-backed metrics for delivery performance, and what actually improves them.
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Essays and Reading
- Sam Altman's blog - Short, dense posts on companies and ambition.
- Startup Advice, Briefly - Ninety points, no filler.
- How to Get Startup Ideas - Notice problems you have yourself rather than trying to think up ideas.
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - A checklist of failure modes worth rereading yearly.
- Ideas Are Just a Multiplier of Execution - Derek Sivers on why execution is the term that matters.
- What Startups Are Really Like - Founders describing what surprised them.
- Startup Advice by Sam Altman - The longer form version.
- My Best Advice for Entrepreneurs: Learn to Speak - Communication as a founder's highest-leverage skill.
- The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs - First Round Review's greatest hits.
- The Dentist Office Software Story - Fred Wilson on why incumbents lose to focused newcomers.
- 27 Books Every Startup Ought to Read by Hiten Shah - An opinionated reading path.
- Paul Graham's essays - The complete archive. Start with the four below.
- Do Things That Don't Scale - Recruit users manually and give them an experience that cannot last.
- Startup = Growth - What makes a startup a startup, defined precisely.
- The Pmarca Guide to Startups: The Only Thing That Matters - Marc Andreessen on product-market fit, from his own archive.
- First Round Review - Long-form operational advice, consistently among the best startup writing anywhere.
- Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth - Profile with useful detail on YC's early thinking.
- Stay Small, Be Agile, Grow Fast - Jason Cohen's long-form essays on bootstrapping, pricing and positioning.
- How to Start a One Person Company - A walkthrough of the solo, AI-assisted operating model.
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Finance and Banking
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Reading on AI Startups
- Revolut Business - Control payments, company cards and expenses from one app, useful for multi-currency operations.
- Ramp - Cards, bills, payments and approvals with automated expense controls.
- Guide to SaaS Metrics by David Skok - The definitive treatment of CAC, LTV and the cash flow trough.
- Mercury - Banking built for startups, with sensible treasury options.
- Brex - Corporate cards and spend management for newly founded tech startups.
- Wise Business - Low-cost cross-border payments and multi-currency accounts.
- Pilot - Outsourced bookkeeping, tax and CFO support.
- Puzzle - Accounting that stays close to real time, so your burn number is current.
- The SaaS Metrics That Matter - Bessemer's benchmarks for growth, efficiency and retention.
- Wise Business - Low-cost cross-border payments and multi-currency accounts.
- How Much To Start A Business - Estimate startup costs for 100+ business types, including legal, equipment, staffing and more
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Hiring, Remote and People Ops
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Reading on AI Startups
- Deel - Hire employees and contractors internationally without opening entities.
- Remote - Employer of record, payroll and benefits across many countries.
- Rippling - HR, IT and finance in one system, including device provisioning.
- Gusto - Payroll and benefits for US teams.
- Ashby - Applicant tracking with analytics that show where your funnel leaks.
- Wellfound - Startup jobs and candidate sourcing, formerly AngelList Talent.
- Welcome to the Jungle - Curated job marketplace skewed toward startup roles, which absorbed Otta.
- Levels.fyi - Compensation data for calibrating offers.
- The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation - Explain equity to candidates correctly, in detail.
- Who: The A Method for Hiring - A structured interview process that reduces expensive mis-hires.
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Incorporation, Legal and Equity
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Reading on AI Startups
- Clerky - Legal paperwork built specifically for startups raising money in the US.
- Carta - Cap table, equity issuance and 409A valuations.
- Pulley - Cap table management with modeling aimed at earlier-stage teams.
- Firstbase - Company formation and compliance for founders outside the US.
- Y Combinator SAFE documents - The standard post-money SAFE templates, free to use.
- Cooley GO - Free document generators and plain-language explanations of startup legal mechanics.
- Docusign - Electronic signatures.
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Leadership and People
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Reading on AI Startups
- Employee Engagement: The Wonder Drug For Customer Satisfaction - Short article on the high correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction.
- How to Start a Movement - Three-minute video on leadership and the followers who make a leader, critical for a startup achieving and maintaining alignment.
- The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier - What each rung of engineering leadership actually requires.
- An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson - Systems thinking applied to engineering organizations.
- Radical Candor - Care personally and challenge directly, with the failure modes named.
- Rands in Repose: The Management Bookshelf - A curated path through management writing.
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Marketing, Sales and Metrics
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Reading on AI Startups
- Elements of a Viral Launch Page - Old but the fundamentals of a landing page have not moved.
- Startup Metrics for Pirates by Dave McClure - The AARRR framework: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue.
- How New User Acquisition Channels Drive Change - Brian Balfour on channel timing and saturation.
- Four Fits for $100M+ Growth - Why product-market fit alone does not produce growth.
- Neil Patel's marketing blog - Successor home for the Kissmetrics marketing guides.
- Founding Sales - A free book on building the first sales motion when the founder is the salesperson.
- Pricing Low-Touch SaaS - Stripe's guide to the pricing decisions founders defer for too long.
- Pricing Low-Touch SaaS - Stripe's guide to the pricing decisions founders defer for too long.
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Marketing Tools
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Reading on AI Startups
- SocialBlade - Social media statistics and channel tracking.
- IFTTT - Custom triggers to automate social and device workflows.
- Zapier - Trigger-based automated workflows between apps.
- Phantombuster - Automate social media data collection via scraping.
- Smartlook - Understand how people interact with your site and improve conversion.
- SocialDog - All-in-one X and Twitter marketing tool.
- Buffer - Social media scheduling and analytics.
- Hootsuite - Social media management.
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Categories
Uncategorized
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AI for Founders
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19
Engineering and Infrastructure
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Venture Capital and Raising Money
13
Finance and Banking
11
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Hiring, Remote and People Ops
10
Design and Brand
9
Data and Market Research
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8
Marketing, Sales and Metrics
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Accelerators
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