All of our Product articles

How Vercel found extreme product-market fit by focusing on simplification | Guillermo Rauch (Vercel's CEO)

Guillermo Rauch is the CEO of Vercel, a frontend-as-a-service product that was valued at $2.5b in 2021. Vercel serves customers like Uber, Notion and Zapier, and their React framework - Next.js - is used by over 500,000 developers and designers worldwide.

The business of growing and monetizing an open source product | Ashley Kramer (GitLab CMO/CSO)

Ashley Kramer is the CMO and CSO at GitLab, a publicly listed DevSecOps platform. Ashley took a unique path into her CMO role. She started out in software engineering before becoming a product leader, and eventually, a marketer.

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.

How young outsiders changed the shipping industry by finding product-market fit again and again | Laura Behrens Wu (Shippo)

Laura Behrens Wu is the Founder & CEO at Shippo, a company that has raised $100m+ and was last valued at $1b in 2021. Shippo provides an API and dashboard that makes shipping easy for e-commerce businesses, marketplaces, and platforms.

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.

A guide to building product in a post-LLM world | Ryan Glasgow and Kevin Mandich from Sprig

Sprig is an AI-powered user insights platform that has raised over $88m. Today’s discussion features two key individuals in Sprig’s journey so far: Ryan Glasgow, Sprig’s CEO and founder; and Kevin Mandich, Sprig’s Head of Machine Learning.

Product

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

An inside look at all the unconventional moves in Vanta'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.

Lessons from Loom on product strategy, organizational leadership, and cross-functional performance | Anique Drumright (COO at Loom)

Anique Drumright is the COO at Loom, a video communication tool for streamlining workflows. Loom has raised over $200M, and was last valued at $1.5B. Anique has a proven track record across product development, executive leadership, and building high-performing organizations.

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.

Lessons from Slack on decision making, product-led growth, and taking big swings — Noah Desai Weiss

Noah Desai Weiss is the Chief Product Officer of Slack, and has an accomplished track record inside and outside of the company. He started Slack’s Search, Learning, and Intelligence division, led the Self-Service (SMB) Business, and led the Expansion and Virtual HQ product area.

Lessons from Stripe on adding new products - Assessing ideas, structuring teams, and tactics for product reviews | Tara Seshan (Watershed, Stripe)

Tara Seshan is the Head of Product at Watershed, a climate platform that companies use to measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions. Before joining Watershed, Tara was Head of Product at Stripe throughout the launch of Stripe Billing and Stripe Treasury.