All of our Product-market fit articles

Product

How to Build for a Market That Doesn’t Exist Yet — Braze’s Path to Product-Market Fit

The Braze founding team shares all the early moves they made to lay the path to IPO.

Product

How dbt Labs Built a $4.2B Software Business out of a Two-Person Consultancy

Tristan Handy, CEO and co-founder of dbt Labs, shares the unorthodox moves he made to transform a Philly-based consultancy into a billion-dollar SaaS powerhouse.

Product

The Pivot to Product-Market Fit: How Plaid, Clay, Lattice & Other Startups Broke Out

For many startups, the secret to finding product-market fit lies in the pivot. Here’s how these founders knew it was time to change directions.

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.

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.

Product

How to Measure Product-Market Fit

Ready to nail product-market fit? We found expert advice for creating a product with widespread demand.

Starting Up

Non-Obvious Signs of Early Startup Traction — And How to Spot Them

We gathered the most surprising anecdotes from seasoned founders about when things clicked into place.

Product

Clay’s Path to Product-Market Fit — A 7-Year 'Overnight Success'

Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for a behind-the-scenes look at how he grappled with narrowing Clay’s scope and tactics for landing on the right ICP.

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

Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business

Guillermo Rauch, raised in Buenos Aires and fascinated by computers since age 7, taught himself to code and moved to San Francisco at 18. His company, Vercel — the frontend cloud service behind open-source development framework Next.js — was recently valued at $2.5 billion.

PR & Marketing

How to Build an Iconic Brand Without Breaking the Bank — This Founder's Formula for Early Marketing

Studs co-founder Lisa Bubbers shares how they melded a strong brand with operational rigor to build a thriving business with minimal marketing expenses.

Product

Pilot’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Three-Peat Founders on Picking the Right Team and the Right Market

The founders of Pilot have started three times over, starting with Ksplice (sold to Oracle in 2011) and then Zulip (acquired by Dropbox in 2014).