This week, we’re publishing the third installment in our new series on going from 0 to multiple millions in ARR. Today’s guide is all about how now-massively successful startups found their initial ICP.
0-$5M: How to Identify Your ICP — Lessons from Vanta, Clay, Retool
In the early days of building a startup, there’s a certain dopamine hit that comes from hearing:
"This product is so powerful. We could use this for all kinds of things!"
But that excitement can quickly fade into something more dangerous: Inconsistent usage. Feature creep. A tangled roadmap that tries to be everything for everyone — and ends up serving no one particularly well.
That’s exactly what happened to Clay, for example. Early users were enthusiastic, but their use cases were wildly different — from recruiters to accountants to engineers. And Clay tried to hang onto each and every one of these early customers. In turn, it caused a years-long spiral as the team kept switching who they were building for, chasing the loudest feedback and watching momentum stall again and again.
In the latest installment of our 0-$5M series with First Round Partner Meka Asonye, we dig into how now-massively successful startups finally cracked the code on their ICP. In addition to Kareem Amin, here’s who else you’ll learn from:
- Christina Cacioppo, co-founder and CEO of Vanta
- David Hsu, founder and CEO of Retool
- Waseem Daher, co-founder and CEO of Pilot
- Bryant Chou, co-founder and Chief Architect of Webflow
- Eric Berg, former Chief Product Officer at Okta
- Hubert Palan, founder and CEO of Productboard
- Mike Molinet, founder of Branch and now building Thena
Small spoiler alert here: For most of these startups, their first crack at an ICP was way off the mark. We unpack the pivotal moments that happened behind the scenes to find ICP clarity, like:
- How Vanta’s aha moment came from a single conversation with an engineer at Figma
- How Retool invalidated their initial ICP hypotheses — and found a Fortune 250 customer instead
- How Productboard used green/yellow/red scoring to rein patterns emerge
If you’re in the early stages of building — or trying to rein in a sprawling roadmap — this one’s worth the read. Because the wrong customer doesn’t just waste your time, they shape your product in all the wrong ways.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-Is your AI idea any good? A 5-question stress test
-The GAINS comp negotiation playbook.
🎙️ On the In Depth podcast:
The story of Rick Song and Persona is not the standard founder story. Rick was incredibly reluctant to leave Square and become a startup founder (his mantra at the time was "Life's too short to try new things," he joked). He set out to invalidate the idea early on, convinced that a horizontal approach to identity verification simply wouldn't work.
Rick gets candid about imposter syndrome, the evolution from engineering to commercial thinking and his vision for who we are online in an AI-dominated world.
First Round Staff