Most founder advice is either too abstract to use or too specific to someone else's company. The thirty items below sit in the middle — concrete enough to act on, general enough to apply whether you run a SaaS, a restaurant, or a consulting firm.

On product

1. Make something ten people love, then ten more. Breadth is a distraction until depth is proven.
2. Talk to customers weekly — even if you think you already know.
3. Ship embarrassing early. Nobody remembers your first version; they remember your current one.
4. Say no to most feature requests. Your moat is what you say no to.
5. If your product can't explain itself in one sentence, it can't sell itself either.

On people

6. Hire slowly. Fire faster than you want to.
7. The cost of a bad hire is much higher than the cost of an empty role for two more months.
8. Your first five hires set the culture. Treat those decisions as existential.
9. Over-communicate decisions. People don't mind what you decide; they mind not understanding why.
10. Pay people fairly and brutally honestly. Surprise raises don't substitute for honest feedback.

On money

11. Cash is oxygen. Monitor it weekly, not monthly.
12. Raise less than you think you need if you can survive on it. Excess capital kills more companies than under-funding.
13. Revenue is the best investor. Customers paying you is validation no VC can replicate.
14. Cheap is not the same as lean. A good hire is always worth it; a bad one never is.
15. Every dollar has an owner. Know where each of yours went last week.

On decisions

16. Reversible decisions: move fast, even if you're unsure. Irreversible decisions: go slow, even if you're sure.
17. When stuck, pick the option that teaches you the most if you're wrong.
18. Default to action. Most "strategy" is procrastination with a powerpoint.
19. Write down your reasoning before you decide. Three months later, re-read it.
20. If two options feel equal, flip a coin — then notice how you feel about the result. That's your real preference.

On time

21. Your calendar, not your to-do list, is your real strategy.
22. One deep block per day beats five shallow ones.
23. Protect a weekly no-meetings day. Teams that don't make things on Tuesdays don't make things.
24. If it's not a hell-yes, it's a no. Opportunity is not the same as priority.
25. End the day with tomorrow's three priorities written. Your future self will thank you.

On the long game

26. Optimise for being in the game in five years. Most short-term "wins" don't survive the test.
27. Take care of your body. Founders who burn out lose their companies.
28. Find three people smarter than you and stay in touch monthly.
29. Keep a small private journal of hard decisions and their outcomes. Pattern-matching yourself is worth more than advice from strangers.
30. When in doubt, do the next right thing. The compounding of many small right actions is what building a company actually is.

The one rule behind all of these

Entrepreneurship is the sustained application of judgement under uncertainty. No list replaces the work of developing your own. Read these, keep the ones that ring true, argue with the rest, and build the business only you can build.