Clifford Oravec

Great list. People interested should also check out Barnacl.es which is a low-noise site with lots of this kind of stuff: http://barnacl.es Also, before a developer considers doing a startup, they might want to read Clifford Oravec's write-up on how hard it will be constantly fighting uncertainty and indifference. If you want a challenge, it's one of the best ones to tackle, though. You might even get rich doing it. Might. ;) https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-unexpected-… Edit to add: Love his choice of opening picture to convey the feeling, too.

A great writeup is the No-BS Approach by Clifford Oravec. It's a splitted in 4 major parts. Check out https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-a-s…

i'm not this guy but this is a useful framework for sending cold emails: https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-a-s…

Thanks man, I wish it was that easy... also thats a pretty cool site that you sent me! and i read an interesting article about SaaS from there... https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-a-s…

There's actually one step before "build product" if you want to to play it a bit more safe and not gable on 4 years of your life. That part is "validate idea". I found this article https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstrapping-a-s… incredibly helpful, realistic and motivating in the sense that it sets realistic expectations. While i also skipped that step and went directly to build the product, i was lucky that when i got to the step of validating the idea it turned out to be ok. By the way, i am selling shovels over here :) http://graphqlapi.com

His "interlude" article on the same topic is epic: https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-unexpected-…

So much truth in this series. A lot of what he talks about I can back up with my own experience building and running SaaS apps. "I want you to understand first hand that building a SaaS startup is mostly a marketing optimization problem — not something that you can just code your way out of." Part 2 & 3 can be found here https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-no-bs-approach-to-building-your… https://hackernoon.com/make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-fun-and-profit…

Oh, and there are plenty of those! I've been trying to incorporate experiences as I go, and there's a good amount of nasty experiences I make mention of in this post: https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-unexpected-… But I will definitely look to put something together that incorporates more of what you're talking about - thanks for the input!

That really depends on what kind of MVP it is and what you're bringing to the table. Some startup ideas can be hacked together quite simply by reusing a few existing services, tools and a bit of programming. Others may require some prototyping and fund raising (e.g. hard tech). Whatever it may be, the MVP is a hack and experiment to prove product-market fit. It's the tiniest, minimal effort you can expend to build a test to prove that there are real people who desperately need something you could provide them. An MVP is more marketing and sales than it is developing. Building your MVP should consume a fraction of your time and resources compared to the effort you'll spend trying to get people to see your hack and validate it. It's more market research than product development. You just want enough proof there's a business opportunity to continue spending time, money and energy on it. For software startups, there's a few patterns you can employ to build an MVP. One of them is the Wizard of Oz test, where you provide a facade of a real product but do all the hard work behind the scenes manually (until you can automate the rest of it). Another is piggybacking on other existing services and solutions, modifying them to your specific business domain (e.g. form builders, communication services, integration services, open source, BaaS, etc). Then there's the launch page strategy, that attempts to lure sign ups or "beta subscriptions" to show demand without building anything more…