MicroConf

MicroConf serves founders building software companies without venture funding — a constituency with genuinely different economics from the startups most advice is written for. It runs as a conference and a continuing community, with Rob Walling, who has started six companies and invested in more than 170, as the recurring voice.

The teaching is corrective in a specific way. Its framing of validation rejects the two comfortable positions: that an idea can be proven before building, and that validation is therefore pointless. The honest target is 50 to 70% certainty, and the framework exists to reach that cheaply rather than to eliminate doubt.

The failure mode it keeps returning to is the one its founder describes from his own history — months of nights and weekends writing code without speaking to a single prospect, then launching to silence.