All of our Product articles

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.

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.

What this 3-time founding team did differently to find product-market fit faster — Jessica McKellar, CTO of Pilot

Today’s conversation is with Jessica McKellar, co-founder and CTO of Pilot, which is the largest accounting firm for startups.

How to measure product-market fit with the REV model — Artem Kroupenev

Our guest today is Artem Kroupenev, VP of Strategy at Augury. Augury is a leader in a category they helped to define known as “machine health.” The company sells products that combine hardware, AI, and SaaS within industrial manufacturing.