All of our Product-market fit articles

Must-reads

The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2023

It’s the first week of the new year, and here on The Review we’re ushering it in with a beloved annual ritual (that we find to be much more delightful than other yearly exercises like annual planning or performance reviews).

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.

Must-reads

The 100 Best Bits of Advice from 10 Years of First Round Review

We combed The Review archives for a special compilation of the 100 very best advice published on our digital pages over the last 10 years from folks like Stewart Butterfield, Claire Hughes Johnson and Alexis Ohanian.

Product

Live Tinted’s Path to Product Market Fit — How to Build a Loyal and Passionate Community Before You Even Have a Brand

Live Tinted co-founder and CEO Deepica Mutyala sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for a behind-the-scenes look at how she built a loyal and powerful customer base long before she ever had a product to sell.

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

WorkOS’ Path to Product-Market Fit — Why Your ‘Bad’ Idea Might Actually Be the Best One

WorkOS founder/CEO Michael Grinich sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he identified a huge untapped market and built a “minimum awesome product.”

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.

Product

Labelbox's Path to PMF: Founders Need to be Contrarian and Right — Here's How

Labelbox co-founder and CEO Manu Sharma sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he prioritized idea validation and customer discovery before building Labelbox.

Product

Alma’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How to Pivot and Succeed as a Solo Non-Technical Founder

Alma founder and CEO Harry Ritter sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he tackled a huge pandemic pivot that turned his initial startup idea on its head and found product-market fit twice.