Announcing the Founder's Library | Hacker News Reader

Announcing the Founder's Library

swombat.com

88 pointstomh-20 comments

Excellent! Thank you, swombat.

Don't worry about tags, layout, formatting, RSS feeds, ebooks, or anything else. If people want that stuff badly enough, someone in this community will step up and do it, providing additional value and showing us what they can do.

You are already on the critical path, using your background and experience to curate all the noise out there into something really useful. Please keep doing that.

Thanks for the good word :-) it means a lot!

I would suggest that tagging these articles would add a great deal of value. The chronological list is good, but adding tags or categories of some sort would make it easier to navigate.

I've thought about this a lot, but I'm not entirely sure how to tag it in such a way as to be useful... do you have any suggestions as to the types of tags you'd like to see?

Possibly part of the problem was that I was looking at it from a "general startup" point of view (the narrowing down to early founders is recent). Perhaps with a narrower focus, tags will make sense.

Here are a few that might be useful

* Formation

* Fundraising

* Sales

* Marketing

* Getting Traction

* Failure

* Negotiation

* Hiring

* Firing

* Partnerships

I'm not entirely sure if this is possible, but how about categorizing the articles based on different stages or phases, which a startup founder has to go through, from start to going public with the startup and making it go huge. Something like that?

Indeed better than tagging. Those who know the 'stuff' might not agree but the 'step by step' is always better for novices (read me). And not to mention, 'step by step' will be a useful keyword for SEO.

You could pull in the tags for these stories from the delicious API:

http://www.delicious.com/help/api#posts_suggest

For your opinion pieces, you might have to use the original story's URL because that's more likely to have been bookmarked.

Thanks for making this.

Check out the Ask YC Archives categories for inspiration and a starting point of categories to use. I think his ordering/tagging is sensible: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Bookmarked. Thanks Swombat!

I'd like to take the chance again to pitch the idea of somebody coming up with a more useful navigation system for all this information. There's a tremendous amount of good stuff out there. Any type of organization helps, therefore this list alone makes for a great resource. Just wish we could do something better with nav.

Awesome resource for people who are, or want to be, startup founders. The OP links to the blog post. But here is the URL for the actual page: http://swombat.com/founders_library

Sweet library!

I've also started a more broad collection of articles useful to entrepreneurs at http://founderswiki.com/

If you want to collaborate in some way I'd love to talk more - lukas@fittl.com

Would be interesting to see this list imported into something like delicious (not sure where since I wouldn't trust such a resource on that site now) to get all kinds of useful features built in by default.

If you have any questions, or suggestions about how this could be made better, I'd love to hear them. The goal is really to build a collection of articles that are useful to the early startup founder.

Have you considered coordinating with the original authors to compile them into a book? It's really easy to self publish to Kindle now.

Someone has mentioned that... It would probably take a fair bit of work, and I'm not convinced the material is ready for book form yet, but it's definitely an option for the future!

Right now I definitely look at it as more of a living, evolving resource...

Let me know if you'd like help with that; I have several tools for converting web pages to ebook chapters, or, if you're so inclined, I could give you a free code for eBookBurn.com (my startup's site) and you could do it yourself.

Oh, the conversion is not problem, I can figure that one out - it's getting permission from all the authors that would take ages...

Is there an RSS feed? There is a very select group of feeds that I read daily on my iPad and this would be a great addition.

Yes, click the "follow" link on the left. It includes all the articles, but more than 2/3 are founder's library material, so...

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