If you’re like me, and you did not end up going to a college like Babson to learn how to be an entrepreneur, you basically winged it to get to where you are. Along the way, you probably learned how to become an entrepreneur through reading an interesting blog post, watching an inspiring video, or listening to a though-provoking podcast. I decided to create my own list of useful articles, videos, podcasts and books that I think are essential to starting your first Web startup on the right foot. I will arrogantly title this post The Official Curriculum for a Degree in Startups. No tuition fees required.

I decided to create this list because there are so many great videos, podcasts and articles on operating a startup, I figured I needed a place to keep them organized. Hopefully, you will benefit as well. Feel free to suggest other resources in the comments. Of course, if you sound like a marketing person promoting a product I will have no choice but to delete the comment.

Curriculum

Lesson 1: Starting Up

• What You Need to Know Before Starting a Company – Alex Isklod
  ARTICLE – Alex takes a high level view of taking a startup from idea to formation of a company, and then financing.
• Bootstrapping: The Secret to Entrepreneurial Success – Greg Gianforte
  ARTICLE – Greg presents his reasons for why you should consider avoiding venture capital and try to build your business with other resources.

Lesson 2: Building Your Team

• How To Assemble a Board of Advisers – Inc Magazine
  ARTICLE – This in-depth article will help you navigate the murky waters of advisers, who’s motives can be great or one-sided depending on who you end up bringing on board. Learn how to find, engage and compensate great advisers.
• Scaling Your Tech Team – Joe Stump
  VIDEO – In this FOWA video, Joe explains how to organize and instill some good habits for a team of developers. If you are planning on growing a tech team soon, this video should be very interesting.

Lesson 3: Deciding on a Business Model

• The Secret to Making Money Online - David Heinemeier Hansson
  VIDEO - Using his unique blend of cynicism and insight, David presents a compelling case to develop a successful, profitable business by doing something radical—charging a price.
• Understanding and Calculating Cost Per Acquisition - Andrew Chen
  VIDEO – Numbers guru Andrew Chen demystifies the world of Cost Per Acquisition — an important number to understand when marketing your startup.
• Web App Autopsy – Ryan Campbell
  ARTICLE – Using real data from a few popular online businesses (including his own), Ryan exposes some of the surprising conversion metrics for free and subscription-based web applications businesses at scale. (Download slides here)
• Converting Free Users to Paid Users – Kevin Hale
  SLIDESHOW – Wufoo founder Kevin Hale walks through the process of converting free users to paid users, with strategies and benchmarks for you to use in your own business.

Lesson 4: Pitching to Investors

• The Art of the Start – Guy Kawasaki
  VIDEO – Guy teaches you how to successfully launch the early stages of your startup, and how those lessons will help you successfully pitch investors.
• Want My Money? Here’s My Criteria – Roger Ehrennberg
  ARTICLE – Roger’s to-the-point article on what he looks for in a startup team (and their idea) is an interesting view into the mind of an angel investor in today’s
• TechCrunch 50 – TechCrunch
  VIDEO – Watch nearly 100 videos (between two years) of video from entrepreneurs presenting demos of their software, and VCs commenting on their product. Good for seeing how to handle a five minute product demo and pitch.
• TechCrunch Pitch – FOWA
  VIDEO – This FOWA event was five companies pitching their company in one minute (basically an elevator speech). Presenters were critiqued based on their ability to pitch their company in 60 seconds. This sounds ridiculous, but this video is as close to simulating a stand up conversation with potential investors as you may find on the Web. You should take Jason Calacanis’ blunt criticism of the presentations very seriously. Despite what you think of him, he does a fantastic job of saying what everyone in the room is already thinking. The other panelists also do a great job of simulating the “peppering” you get from investors. Use this video to improve your elevator pitch.

Lesson 5: Building Your Web Application

• How to Build your App Quickly and Cheaply using the Cloud – Mark Masterson
  SLIDESHOW – Mark’s thorough presentation outlines how anyone can use the low-cost infrastructure of cloud computing for building a web application on the cheap.
• Getting Real – 37 Signals
  ARTICLE – Before you go off and build a bloated, unusable web application, read this book. Getting Real helps you learn how to focus on building the features most needed, and avoiding fringe features that make things too complex.
• Scaling Scribd - Scribd
  SLIDESHOW – Not that I want you to do premature optimization, but let’s say you get lucky and have a successful web app. This slideshow tells the story of how popular document sharing site Scribd reached millions of users a month.
• 14 Tips for Building Your Web App – Ryan Carson
  AUDIO – Ryan uses his real world experience of launching DropSend and Amigo to help you get a jump start on thinking about the easily-forgotten challenges and to-dos in building a web application. (Note: If someone has a link to this on the FOWA site, I will gladly change)
• Managing Software Releases - Cal Henderson
  AUDIO – Always entertaining, Cal shares some of the tools and processes he used at Flickr to make testing and releasing less painful. May be a little dated, but the information is useful.
  

Lesson 6: Operating Your Business

• Street Smarts: Secrets of a $110 Million Man – Norm Brodsky
  ARTICLE – Norm works through the 10 most important lessons he has learned (after 30 years as an entrepreneur) for running a business that he believes every successful entrepreneur should live by.
• How to Save Money Operating a Startup – Jason Calacanis
  ARTICLE – In addition to great advice like, “Buy cheap desks and expensive chairs”, Jason provides a great list of tips on how to spend less money on the things that don’t really help your business succeed.
• Employer Costs for Employee Compensation – Bureau of Labor Statistics
  ARTICLE – Learn how to calculate the real cost of having an employee.
• Work/Life Balance – Jason Calacanis and Tom Nixon
  VIDEO – Tom and Jason debate approaches to balancing your work and life when you’re an entrepreneur.
• What Do You Do After Selling a Business for One Billion Dollars? – Kevin Ryan
  AUDIO – This Venture Voice podcast is with former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan about what it takes to manage a rapidly growing business, and survive the hurdles. This podcast is a great example of the energy, passion and vision you need to be a successful entrepreneur.
• Creating an International Business – Fabrice Grinda
  AUDIO – This Venture Voice podcast is with OLX CEO Fabrice Grinda. Fabrice reveals many of the challenges and opportunities in building a business that targets a worldwide audience.
• Growing Your Team and Business – Aaron Patzer
  VIDEO – This incredible video is a very transparent story about the creation and exit of Mint.com. Aaron’s presentation is excellent in that he is not a “hot shot” entrepreneur who is just exiting another company, but rather a classic example of an ambitious hacker who methodically grew his business until it sold to Intuit for $170 million.

Lesson 7: Marketing Your Business

• Marketing on a Startup Budget – InsideCRM
  ARTICLE – Don’t let the source fool you—this page contains a LOT of links to resources for business cards, online advertising, free PR advice and strategies, promotions and advertising.
• 50 Social Site Your Businees Needs to Be On – InsideCRM
  ARTICLE – I’m telling you—don’t sleep on InsideCRM. This is another great list on the site for you to turn into a checklist of social sites that you should try and establish a presence on.
• Headline Tests – Signal vs. Noise
  ARTICLE – Jason Fried provides an informative look into how testing various headlines can dramatically increase conversions.

Supplemental Tools and Resources

Useful Tools

• Google Analytics – Duh. The definitive free software for tracking and analyzing your website traffic.
• Google Apps – Google Apps is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. Manage your business email, spreadsheets, documents and more all from a centralized console. One thing—be a hawk on password security to prevent breaches.
• WordPress – You need to be blogging. This is great, open source software to do just that. You can also remove the tech stuff and just use their hosted system at WordPress.com.
• Highrise – As an entrepreneur, you will be doing a lot of networking. The worst thing you can do is stuff all those business cards in a drawer. Highrise makes each contact a living record, capturing your actions and conversations associated with each person in real time.
• Website Grader – This useful resource instantly provides you with VALUABLE data on the optimization of your website, including your Google PageRank. This is a must use website if you plan on doing online advertising.
• Are My Sites Up? -Great tool that provides you with real-time monitoring of your site status. Useful when you can’t afford 24-hour tech support.
• Userfly -If you have users, this tool is fantastic. Userfly enables you to record and playback site usage from real users. It installs on your website with one line of code. Use this tool to see how features are being used—and more importantly—how to increase conversion on landing pages.
• Campaign Monitor -An email list management system that I use and love. It has a robust API so you can integrate with your web application to do real-time list management easily.
• MailChimp – An email management system that is popular and much like Campaign Monitor. One unique feature is their patent-pending use of A/B testing on email campaigns.
• Web Development Project Estimator - Great tool for doing granular estimation of the cost of hiring freelance developers to build your web application.
• UserVoice -Provide your customers with the ability to offer real-time feedback on your web application. Users can vote on features, allowing the most popular suggestions to float to the top.
• Get Satisfaction – Much like UserVoice but more mature, GS is a hosted support community for your application. You can choose to actively participate in the conversation or not (i.e. officially support the community, or not).
• Balsamiq – Generate wireframes of web applications using this fantastic tool. I use Balsamiq and continue to be amazed at how well it works for generating sketches of how a screen might look and function—without worrying about design.
• Jing – Jing makes it easy to produce video demonstrations of your product. Most importantly, it’s free.
• OpenX – If your business model is advertising, why not try and use this popular open source ad platform technology to keep all the revenue from ads in house?

Useful Resources

• Future of Web Apps – A great collection of archived conference videos, slideshows and podcasts from leading Web hackers and entrepreneurs.
• This Week In Startups – This podcast, hosted by Jason Calacanis, is all about exploring different issues related to creating and growing startup companies. Often there are great founders and VCs as insightful guests.
• Venture Voice – In this podcast series, Gregory Galant interviews some of the most respected Web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
• WorkHappy.net – A “killer resource for entrepreneurs”, Carson McComas provides entrepreneurs with great links and tips. Too bad they come bi-monthly at the most.
• Web Design Resources – Elementiks maintains a great list of design and development resources.
• Test Credit Card Account Numbers – You will need them. PayPal provides a good list.
• Ad Unit Guidelines – Make sure your designers know the standard sizes for website ads.

Reading Assignments

• Purple Cow – by Seth Godin
  You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice. Face it, the checklist of tired ‘P’s marketers have used for decades to get their product noticed–Pricing, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few–aren’t working anymore. There’s an exceptionally important ‘P’ that has to be added to the list. It’s Purple Cow. Seth Godin urges you to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, and everything you do, to create something truly noticeable.
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days – by Jessica Livingston
  This is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers- by Geoffrey A, Moore
  Author Geoffrey Moore makes the case that high-tech products require marketing strategies that differ from those in other industries. His chasm theory describes how high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers. This pattern, says Moore, is unique to the high-tech industry.
• Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff - by Mark Hughes
  Remember Half.com? Back in the days of the dotcom boom, the discount retail Web site drew headlines when it persuaded the town of Halfway, Ore., to change its name to Half.com for a year. The stunt helped the company gain millions of customers and position itself to be bought out by eBay for a handsome premium. Hughes, the brain behind Half.com’s marketing ploy, extols the virtues of “buzz marketing,” his name for the idea that companies can dramatically boost sales by attracting publicity and fueling widespread word-of-mouth.
• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm - by Verne Harnish
  Business guru Verne Harnish’s firm Gazelles has brought hundreds of businesses to fast-growth profitability. Now he shares entrepreneurial secrets in this must-read business primer. Harnish has discovered John D. Rockefeller’s underlying strategy. Further study uncovered three winning habits: Priorities, data and rhythm.
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing – by Alie Ries and Jack Trout
  (Old but worth the read) The premise behind this book is that in order for marketing strategies to work, they must be in tune with some quintessential force in the marketplace. Just as the laws of physics define the workings of the universe, so do successful marketing programs conform to the “22 Laws.” Each law is presented with illustrations of how it works based on actual companies and their marketing strategies.
• AdWords For Dummies – by Howie Jacobson
  What’s the good word? It’s AdWords, the marketing solution that helps turn clicks into cash by attracting the right visitors to your Web site. This book shows how to find the best search terms to help build your business, as well as how to research your market, build a direct marketing strategy, analyze ad success, and turn a tidy profit.