My picks for founders
by Shashank Kakrecha
Zero to One — Peter Thiel
“Required reading for anyone building something new. Worth re-reading every 18 months — different parts hit differently as the company changes.”
Agency vs Freelancer vs Vibe Coding Calculator
“Compares cost and timeline across four ways to build your MVP. Useful before you commit to a route you can't easily reverse.”
Vibe Coding Production Readiness Scorer
“16-question audit that tells you whether your AI-coded app is actually ready to put in front of users — covers security, monitoring, data privacy, and UX.”
AI Startup Name Generator + Domain Checker
“Generates startup names with live domain availability across TLDs, plus a memorability score. Faster than refreshing Namecheap for an hour.”
YC Startup School — How to start a startup
“Sam Altman's playlist from the YC Startup School lectures. Densest, highest-signal startup curriculum on the internet — and it's free.”
Paul Graham — Before the Startup
“PG's lecture for people who are thinking about starting a company but haven't yet. Counterintuitive in the best way.”
Cursor — AI-first code editor
“What I write production code in every day. The agent mode is genuinely a step change.”
Vercel — Ship without DevOps
“Push to GitHub, get a URL. We deploy every Joistic MVP here — Postgres, blob storage, AI, all in one place.”
Linear — Issue tracking that doesn't suck
“The only tracker fast enough that the team actually uses it. Cycle-based, keyboard-first.”
Figma — Design where dev can read it
“Hand-off lives or dies on Figma quality. Auto-layout + variables = clean dev tickets.”
The Mom Test — book by Rob Fitzpatrick
“Read this BEFORE you talk to your first 10 customers. It will save you a year of building the wrong thing.”
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Shashank Kakrecha· Co-Founder at Joistic
We turn validated prototypes into production apps in 3–4 weeks.