All of our Finding a startup idea articles

Product

EvolutionIQ Just Got Acquired for $730M — Here's Their Playbook For Building an Enduring AI Business

We sat down with the founding team for the inside story of one of the first major vertical AI exits.

The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2024

For the 12th year in a row, we rounded up 30 timeless company-building insights we published from the year before.

Starting Up

The Uncomfortable Truth: A 3X Founder's Guide to Intellectual Honesty

Crossbeam CEO and co-founder Bob Moore shares his tools for quashing biases in pursuit of the truth at every stage of company building.

Product

Replit’s Path to Product-Market Fit — The $1 Billion Side Project

Sometimes the signals of product-market fit are so strong, they can no longer be ignored. In the latest installment of our Paths to Product-Market Fit series, Amjad Masad takes us on Replit's unconventional journey from college side project to billion-dollar AI startup.

Finding a startup idea

How to Test A Business Idea: Essential Tools for Validating Before You Launch

If you're an entrepreneur who needs to learn how to validate business ideas effectively, these expert strategies help your startup concept hit the mark.

Product

GOAT’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How a Fake Sneaker Sparked a $4B Idea

GOAT co-founder and CEO Eddy Lu sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how a decade of middling entrepreneurial ideas finally culminated in the $4B idea for a sneaker marketplace.

Product

Shippo’s Path to Product-Market Fit — The Upside of Being Industry Outsiders

Shippo co-founder and CEO Laura Behrens Wu sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for a behind-the-scenes look at how she leveraged industry outsider and first-time founder status to build a billion-dollar shipping company.

Product

Merge’s Path to Product-Market Fit — The Importance of Founder-led Sales (Even for a Self-Serve Product)

Merge founder and CEO Shensi Ding sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for a behind-the-scenes look at how she and co-founder Gil Feig built and scaled a product that solved the painful headache of building and maintaining integrations.

Product

Vanta's Path to Product-Market Fit — Solve the Customer’s Problem, Then Write Code

Vanta founder and CEO Christina Cacioppo sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for an inside look at all the unconventional moves in the company’s first few years — from creating a new category to signing the first 600 customers without a proper website.

Product

Productboard’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Building a Unicorn Company with Lean Startup Principles

Productboard's founder and CEO Hubert Palan sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for a sweeping look at how he used Steve Blank's principles to build a product that tackled his own pain points as a product manager.

Product

Material Security’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Find Your Winning Idea by Selling Products That Don’t Exist Yet

Material Security co-founders Ryan Noon and Abhishek Agrawal sit down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson to explain how they whittled 25 startup ideas down to 4 and then used a pre-selling technique to find their winning idea.

Product

Zūm’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How The Student Transportation Company Found Product-Market Fit Twice

Zūm co-founder Ritu Narayan sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how her transportation company found product-market fit in both B2C and B2B.