Startup advice has a perspective problem. It took me eleven years to see it.
Eleven years ago I set out to help startup founders. I didn't have a framework. I had a suspicion that most of what founders were being told was too generic to actually use. So I started doing customer discovery, not on customers: on founders. What they believed going in. What turned out to be true. What almost took them down. More than 100 early-stage startups later, that turned into tools, then books, then guides, then workshops.
What I learned is that this is a perspective problem, not an information problem. You're a first-time founder reading a successful founder's story, and the arc looks clean and the timing looks inevitable. You're a founder whose own journey stopped matching what you read, and you don't know which version to trust. You're a founder starting a second company after the first one didn't go as planned, carrying lessons that might not even be true. In all three cases you're reading someone else's edited highlight reel and using it as a map.
The arc almost everyone runs. Confidence first, then the pop when the market doesn't respond the way the story said it would, then real clarity once you start asking customers instead of guessing.
Six books came out of that. They're short on purpose, written to be read by founders who don't have a spare weekend.
Two books for the angle
These give you the way of seeing it. Read the first, then the second in one sitting after.
- The Winning Startup Perspective: a different way to see startup building, the goals, the frameworks, the sequence, so you waste less effort and get people trying and buying sooner.
- My 11 Startup Rules: the same perspective distilled into eleven rules, in the order you'll need them.
Four books that work as one system
Read them in sequence, or jump to whichever one names your situation.
- Founder Illusions: the things you're sure are true as a founder that turn out not to be, and the simple loop that gets you unstuck.
- Beyond Belief: eight full founder stories, each one going from deep inside an illusion to the moment they broke through it.
- Selling Outcomes: what a startup is actually doing, which is selling. What you're selling, and how to say it so people try it, buy it, adopt it, and refer it.
- Unlocking Yes: the language and the detail. How to see what holds people back, and what it takes to move them to yes.
The two definitions everything rests on
An outcome is the state change a customer pays to experience, not the product that produces it. When the outcome, the content describing it, and a market willing to pay for it all line up, things start moving.
T-BAR is try, buy, adopt, refer: the four behaviors that tell you whether a customer relationship is real or imagined.
After the books come three guides, which are how you apply any of it to your own startup, and the workshop and class material, which is the same thing taught live.
Download it and put it to work today
Everything here is free, and the books download as PDFs. Founder Illusions also has an audiobook you can listen to online.
So here's the shortcut a lot of founders take: download the books and guides, attach them to whatever AI tool you already use, and ask it about your own startup. The guides are built for exactly this. They come with copy-ready prompts designed to be run with the material attached, so you get the framework applied to your situation without reading all six books first.
The reading makes it stick. The attachment makes it useful this afternoon.
Run an accelerator, a chamber program, or a university course? See workshops and cohort resources →
Start with the outcome you're going after
Five situations, in the order they usually show up. Each one names what to read for the background, which guide to run, and where the live material sits if you'd rather work through it that way.
Understand why the work isn't turning into sales
You're getting interest. Nobody's paying yet. Before you change the product, find out which belief you've been working inside.
“Ran the last company's playbook. Different market. Not working.”
Get your first customers to actually try it
Content that earns a meeting, a conversation that finds what they'd pay for, then a product built to deliver it. The sequence does the work here, not the effort.
“Keeps building. The product gets better every week. Customers still don't know what it does for them.”
Say what you do so it lands with a stranger
Not what your product is. What changes for the person paying for it. That difference is usually the whole gap between interest and revenue.
“Twenty-three warm conversations this quarter. None of them converted.”
Turn content into booked conversations
A growing newsletter with flat revenue isn't a traffic problem. It's a problem with what the content is aimed at and who it's speaking to.
“Newsletter growing, engagement strong, product revenue flat.”
Work through all of it in order, with structure
Same framework, taught in sequence, with accountability and a room full of other founders instead of a weekend of reading.
The three-question conversation, word for word
This is the Try conversation from the T-BAR framework. You're not pitching. You show someone your content and listen for the words they use to describe what they want, then check whether your content is using those words back at them. Send this as written.
The books are coming to Amazon
Everything above is free to read online right now. Print editions are on their way. Join the list and you'll hear the moment they're live.
Join the list →Most founders are working hard on the wrong thing, because the advice they were given describes a phase they haven't reached yet.
See everything on the hub →