[ultrasounder]

Lots of good advice from a wide spectrum of HN. I am currently going through this as we speak. I am at the very early stages of Customer validation phase. I have mouths to feed and and hence need my job to keep me alive while I go through the whole startup phase. If you can get your hands on these two books, can’t recommend them enough; Ready Fire Aim- teaches you the mantra about selling first right from the get go. Also lays down actionable strategies to find your customer, how to sell them, how to price your product. Running Lean-Ash Maurya. Think of it as an amalgamation of Lean startup by Eric Ries and 4 steps to Epiphany by Steven Blank. Again the emphasis on customer development aka idea validation. You need to solve a problem that is worth solving. If you don’t have a problem that a customer wants solved, you don’t have anything to sell. Simple. The guy offers a lean canvas which you can use to develop your business model. Worth checking out.

Beyond these books, a few resources worth following are GetLatka, product habits by Hiten Shah and anything by Patio11 who was doing SAAS way before SAAS was even a term. One of the very early advice that Ash Maurya gives in his book is tat all the early stages of the startup phase can be done while being fully employed. ESP, the product/solution fit. Once you have validated the problem after countless customer interviews, you can start working on the actual solution to the Problem that you just validated and iterate on the build, measure learn loop. By the time you get to this stage, you are already a team of 2-3 early cofounders working out of an office space and ready to take in some external funding. When you get to this stage you can confidently quit! Good luck. EDIT MVE- minimum viable employment. Find a place that can employ you for your existing skills, pay market which provides you with the necessary resources(time) while you are involved with customer validation(problem/solution fit).