I save a lot of reading lists and open almost none of them. This one I got through, mostly because every entry ends with something you can go and do.
It's called Founder Reads. Nine pieces: six essays, a guide, a talk and a book. It wants an email to unlock it, and every link goes to the original, which is free anyway.
I'm not building a company alone right now. But I have a few side projects, and most of this applies to them too.
Where I'd start
Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" says startups don't take off on their own. You go and find your first users one at a time, then look after them so well they tell someone else. The maths is fun: start with 100 users, grow 10% a week, and a year later you're at about 14,000.
His "Startup = Growth" is the same idea from the other side. Pick one number and hit it every week. At 1% a week you end the year 1.7x bigger. At 5% it's 12.6x. Tiny differences in rate turn into a huge gap.
"Default Alive or Default Dead?" asks whether you reach profit on the money you have left, at your current spending and growth. Graham says about half the founders he talks to don't know. You need four numbers: cash, monthly burn, monthly revenue, and how fast revenue is growing. I'd bet most of us haven't written those down, me included.
Then The Mom Test, which is the one I'd push on a friend. Stop asking people about your idea. Ask about their life, and ask about the past. "I'd use that" costs nothing to say, so it tells you nothing. What people already do, and already pay for, is the real signal.
The last one on my short list is Amy Buechler's The User Manual. She was YC's first in-house founder coach, and the guide is about pressure, burnout and self-doubt. When you build alone, nobody notices you're off. So read it before you need it.
The other four
Brian Balfour's Four Fits, explained by Garrett Jestice, says product-market fit is only the first of four fits. Market, product, channel and business model all have to line up.
David Lieb's YC talk on retention is about cohorts. You want a curve that flattens out, not one that slides to zero.
James Currier at NFX covers the four kinds of moat: brand, scale, embedding and network effects. He thinks only one is close to unbeatable.
And the Product Death Cycle, from David J. Bland: nobody uses your product, so you ask what's missing, build that, and nobody uses it either. Repeat until the money runs out. I've seen this loop up close and it's not funny.
Why bother
Each entry ends with a "try this week" task. Most reading lists leave you feeling productive and change nothing. This one doesn't. Rewriting your interview questions so none of them mention your product takes ten minutes. So does picking one weekly number and writing it down every Monday.
If you only do one thing, fix your questions.
Everything on the list belongs to its authors, so go read the originals.