Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Building Horizontal Products

Today on The Review, we're excited to launch a brand-new series on product-market fit, spearheaded by First Round partner 

 (former VP of Product at Dropbox, Product Director at Twitter, co-founder of 

, and PM at Google and Facebook). Jackson shares more about what inspired the series in the opening note below, but if you want to dive right into our first interview with Airtable co-founder Andrew Ofstad, 

Product-market fit is one of the most important, yet elusive, concepts in company building. It’s not a clear metric you can measure or a milestone you can easily check off your to-do list. I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from "pushing" your product on people to them "pulling" it out of your hands. But the path to get there is deeply personal. One founder’s journey to product-market fit may look totally different from another’s, and yet both paths could be completely valid — which can make it difficult to discern which lessons you can draw when you’re on the outside looking in.

There’s certainly been an uptick in articles on the subject in recent years, yet surprisingly little truly useful information out there on the concrete steps it takes to find product-market fit. The recommendations that do exist either tend to be too rigid because they’re based on one person’s experience, or too broad to be actionable.

Finding PMF has been a constant theme throughout my career, so I’ve experienced this journey firsthand — taking Gmail from beta to more than 200 million users as a PM and starting my own company, 

, back in 2013. Now, as a Partner at First Round, I spend my days helping founders tackle this very challenge.

I’ve seen the quest for product-market fit take on more urgency lately, as follow-on funding becomes more difficult to secure and the pressure to hit stellar metrics has set in. So I’ve spent the better part of this year interviewing founders who’ve already cleared this hurdle to help inform the journey for earlier-stage founders. (Check out the 

 that I shared earlier this year in Lenny’s Newsletter or a few of the 

Today, I’m excited to share that I’m teaming up with the First Round Review team on a new series dedicated to telling more of these stories. We’ve already shared some fantastic 

 — and I’m excited to contribute to growing our collection of advice on this topic.

Here’s what you can expect: Every other week, I’ll share an interview with a founder so you can hear about the most pivotal moments on their path to product-market fit — from how they stumbled into their company idea to their first “aha moment” and all the nitty-gritty details in between.

I’ll be talking to dozens of founders across backgrounds, verticals, and stages to showcase the varied paths to PMF. While there’s no singular playbook or recipe to follow, I’m a firm believer that there’s a lot to learn from reverse-engineering the frameworks and tactics others relied on to hit it big. 

My hunch is that, if we collect enough stories, we can start to pull out themes, patterns and insights that can be used to better inform advice that 

I hope you’ll follow along. Feel free to share any feedback with me over on 

, or suggest guest ideas for future interviews!

With that, let’s dive into my first interview, with Airtable’s Andrew Ofstad.

 team has some stats to show for it. The low-code platform boasts a customer base of over 300,000 organizations, including the likes of Amazon, Baker Hughes, Netflix and Nike. In fact, an astonishing 80% of the Fortune 100 use Airtable. 

The low-code movement is firmly established, the company is focused on going global (

 its first international headquarters in London), and the team has raised $1.36 billion in funding, with an $11 billion valuation.

But like any polished story, if you rewind the clock back to the earliest days, the picture looks decidedly different. So many tiny details get glossed over with the passage of time and the halo of success, whether it’s the struggle of architecting the first prototype, or the challenges of figuring out the ideal customer profile. In Airtable’s case, building a big, horizontal product made that path all the more daunting. (Browse 

 to get a flavor for the wide range of use-cases this flexible product can tackle, ranging from tracking bugs and marketing campaigns, to 

 set out on what would be a “slow build.” In his current role, Ofstad spearheads the company’s long-term product bets, but today he takes us back to the beginning, tracing Airtable’s path to product-market fit. 

We dig into the nitty-gritty of how they validated the initial vision and approached the early product-building journey from private alpha to launch. From the glimmers that it was starting to catch on, to the challenges of positioning and thinking about the competition, there are tons of lessons in here for aspiring founders — especially those building horizontal products.

EXPLORING IDEAS AND VALIDATING THE VISION:

The -1 to 0 phase of company building can take many shapes. Some founding teams coalesce around a particular idea rather quickly, while others spend several months exploring completely disparate industries. For the Airtable trio, the early vision was broad, but had a clear end goal.

“The early vision was to democratize software creation. We all felt we had this crazy superpower of being able to build software, which had given us these advantages in our careers. You can have tremendous influence in an organization — even if you’re not in leadership — by building software and deploying it to people. So broadly, we were exploring how to make software creation easier for non-programmers,” says Ofstad. 

Much of that inspiration stemmed from computing history. “The early days of computing were using these arcane command lines to operate a computer. It was only through 

 and Apple’s Mac that computing was made more accessible to everyone. We wanted to do the same thing for software — to give everybody a software stack they could build useful software on top of.”

But an idea in hand isn’t enough — assessing its promise is the next critical hurdle for aspiring founders to overcome. How do you prove to yourself (and others) that it has legs? 

Taking your time here is key, Ofstad says. He advocates for what he calls a “long gestation period,” recommending that founders resist the temptation to dive into building features and shipping underbaked concepts quickly. Instead, he advises founders dive deep and hit the books to examine the problem from every angle: what’s come before you, where there’s whitespace to build in the market, and your own motivation to see it through:

 “We were a bit contrarian. At the time, it was all about the Lean Startup, getting early customer validation and failing fast. This book making the rounds called ‘

’ espoused this lean company development model, where you put out a super rough prototype to get to know the customer and quickly pivot,” he says. “We took more of a first principles approach — we didn't want to just throw spit at the wall, so we went really deep on the problem before formally breaking ground on building the product and trying to get customers.”

 “We were intellectually excited about going down that path of this general space of software creation. So we spent a lot of time doing research. It was almost like being on a sabbatical, reading all this prior art of old computing pioneers, like 

, that had flavors of software creation for everybody, and read a lot about how to visualize complex systems.”

Assess the potential and spot the openings:

 “We spent a lot of time thinking about ‘What is the market for this?’ Spreadsheets have been around forever, but most of the time, people use them to track objects: people, companies, simple tables. They're not doing modeling and number crunching, which they were invented for,” says Ofstad. “And when Howie was at Salesforce, he learned more about the enterprise software market and saw that most business applications out there are essentially just databases with views and business logic on top, and there's a lot of reinventing the wheel in vertical software. So we saw the business potential of how Salesforce — this giant platform — was more or less just a flexible database. But you had to be an advanced admin to understand how to configure and build it. We saw the potential of opening up that type of software creation to a much larger market.”

Make sure you’re dedicated to digging in: 

“We took our time early on to make sure that it was something we were committed to. If you’re going to tackle a horizontal product that’s pretty hard to market and has a lot of stuff that needs to be built to get to MVP, I'd recommend taking that time to make sure that you're super interested in the problem space and like the people you're working with. It would've been hard for us to get to that level of conviction without having that period of going deep on the problem.”

We had this long, early gestation period where we did our research on the technological challenge, the market and precedent before us. We saw that we could build a big company, but knew that it might take a long time to do, so we had to get into the right mindset.

BUILDING THE EARLY PRODUCT: SLOW-GOING ON THE PATH FROM PROTOTYPE TO LAUNCH

“The first version was trying to prove that we can make a database easy to use. It was like a prototype — a lot of smoke and mirrors. We focused 100% on the UI and the interactions. We didn't really have a backend, it was just persisting to local storage and the browser — enough to make sure we could test the interactions and get to a point where people could play with it. We wanted to put it in front of people and ask them to try to organize something and see if they could actually do it,” says Ofstad.

Product differentiation would be key to Airtable’s success, but that early version looked suspiciously like a spreadsheet. “It was a database underneath, obviously, but we co-opted the spreadsheet interface, which is familiar to most knowledge workers,” he says. “We built a lot of the same interactions, although we had typed fields, tables, and links between foreign key relationships. But for a lot of people, it just didn't click. It took us a lot of iterations and doing things like building templates to make it 

Here’s an example: “Even smaller details like fields that were colored select options helped convey that mental model that you're dealing with records, not a spreadsheet. We also always emphasized direct manipulation, making it feel like you could reach out and touch your data. When we first built attachments, it came with the drag-and-drop functionality because we wanted it to feel super interactive, so we put a lot of effort into real-time architecture.”

Despite these initial hurdles, there was still an early adopter crowd. “They were programmers or database people, more of that tinker persona who’s very structured in their thinking,” he says. “We had a friend who was a video producer and he started tracking his video productions, creating tables of his cast and crew and linking them together.”

Many founders might be tempted to cast a wider net and get more users onto the product — but Ofstad again cautions against moving too quickly here. With just pockets of those click-into-place customer moments, the Airtable team knew it would be an unusually slow path to launch. 

As you assess your own timeline, Ofstad recommends stepping back and reassessing whether a public launch will truly help you achieve your mission-critical goal in this early phase. “

We were focused on de-risking the main risk for the company as early as possible

 For us early on, that was, ‘How do we actually make this database accessible to non-programmers?

’” says Ofstad. “That meant it was all about making it easy to use, iterating on a prototype and getting lots of feedback. It seemed like launching the product publicly wouldn't really get us more data or accelerate the path to getting there.” 

Separate the concept of trying to get feedback from customers and refining the product from the concept of a public launch.

Ofstad breaks down how that principle worked in practice:

Alpha: Stay lean while you de-risk your biggest hurdle.

“Our strategy was to build a very horizontal product and then roll it out to more people over time. Very early on, we had a private alpha. It was invite-only, but you could refer other people, so that helped us get some organic growth, but not a ton,” says Ofstad. “After maybe 100 people or so, eventually we felt like we were in a good place.” This took two years, he says. “We had to build so many features to get to something useful.” 

In addition to delaying a public launch, this strategy also kept the team comparatively lean — avoiding the early-stage trap of overhiring. “This work in the alpha phase would have been really hard to parallelize. 

You can't hire a bunch of engineers to make that go faster

. It actually would've been counterproductive to try to scale it up a lot more because we needed to nail that foundation of the database. Hiring a bunch of people would have made it harder to be nimble and change the direction of that foundation,” he says.

If you’re building a similar type of product, Ofstad’s advice is to keep the feedback loop extremely tight and loosen your expectations around what your MVP “should” look like. “We'd sit down with our customers to see what they were using the product for. 

With horizontal products, you build this very generic thing and the cool part is seeing how people use it

The MVP for our product was not any one thing. With a horizontal product, you're constantly unlocking new use cases.

“As we added new features, we unlocked new use cases. It was a slow roll of adding a calendar view and then suddenly seeing people using it for marketing use cases. Or adding kanban and seeing people use it for processes and pipelines.”

Beta: Test, test, test — but push to go faster.

“Eventually we got to a spot where we felt comfortable putting it into beta and trying to get some more customers. We 

 in 2014. We kept it as beta to give us an opportunity to have a 

, and to have that beta tag on in case things didn't work right,” says Ofstad.

“In hindsight, maybe we waited a bit too long. We probably could have launched earlier and cut some features. But for the most part, we got the learning we needed and launched when we were ready. We were trying to see if it was resonating with our customers and if we could handle the potential extra traffic. Did we have the features so people won't lose data and it won’t be a big headache for us to recover it?”

FIGURING OUT GO-TO-MARKET AND ASSESSING THE COMPETITION:

“Early on, the way we approached our go-to-market was opposite of what most companies do, which is start with a super niche audience, find them, target them and expand to new markets,” he says.

We started completely horizontal with a blank-slate product, and we got more and more narrow with our focus on landing customers over time

. We started seeing organic adoption for different use cases and then we’d create hundreds of templates.”

“But it's really only been the last few years that we've gotten super targeted with our go-to-market motion,” says Ofstad. “We've since gotten much more opinionated and narrowed the aperture. Now we're mostly focused on marketing and product organizations in terms of how we initially land in a company. Part of that has just been having a much more mature executive team to help us refine this, with our CRO Seth Shaw and our CMO Archana Agrawal” (who shared her 

marketing lessons in this previous episode

But that path to figuring that out wasn’t easy. Here’s Ofstad’s advice for fellow horizontal product builders:

1. Double down on early traction (carefully).

“When you’re building a horizontal product, as soon as possible, understand where people are getting value from your product and really double down. 

You can build a horizontal product with a deep customer understanding of a specific use case

“There's a balance because you also don’t want to take the first use case that pops up, especially if it's not going to be something that will grow a lot or fit your longer-term vision of the company,” says Ofstad.

“But as soon as you see some validation where the customer is in the wheelhouse of what your broader vision is for the product, co-build the product with them. Focus on understanding the problems and generalizing those into capabilities that might solve a bunch of different use cases.”

If you build a hyper-specific app for one function, it's not going to capitalize on the broader vision you had for the product. Get data points from customers, but also pattern match that against your broader vision for the broader horizontal platform you're trying to build.

2. Blend the functional and the aspirational.

One of the biggest hurdles with a horizontal product was messaging. “Over the years, we've gotten more and more focused on how we describe the problems we solve and the use cases we're good for. But before we had product-market fit, it was hard to describe the product in the early days,” says Ofstad.

“We had a couple of messages. One was, ‘This is a way for you to build software.’ We were mostly just a database still. We hadn't built things like automations, but that's how we framed the mission. And then separately, we'd say ‘It's a spreadsheet database hybrid, or a spreadsheet with the power of a database.’ That came from the way our customers would describe us, which was, ‘It’s an easy-to-use database,’ or ‘It's a spreadsheet, plus plus.’” (We’ll note that the “Show HN” copy from 2014 read: 

Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

Those “we just went viral” product-led growth stories are never all that relatable for most startups that are still struggling to find traction. Ofstad digs deeper into Airtable’s growth trajectory:

“It happened in a lot of different S-curves. We started seeing media companies where we spread word-of-mouth. Or the head of production would go from Netflix to some other company and they'd bring the tool with them. It was very slow, and wasn’t until 2018 or so that it started to really inflect,” he says.

“That functional and industry-driven word-of-mouth growth, combined with us building new capabilities that unlocked more use cases and having the organizational maturity to expand within companies, all layered together to cause pretty solid growth in the past five years.”

But much of it came down to the nature of the product itself. “Somebody builds something in their table and they share that with people on their team to do critical work. Once people start doing work in it, it generates useful data and other people want to consume that. So people invite them to the base. We describe those internally as golden datasets, those critical datasets for a company, like a product roadmap or a marketing calendar. Once you get to that point, you get a lot of viral adoption on top of that.”

Key to figuring this out was the ability to track these metrics. “The more important thing we did is that early on we had things instrumented so we'd get a notification every time somebody signed up,” he says. “Once we started getting more adoption at larger companies, we built out these network graphs that would show how the product spread from individual to individual, and then team to team. That helped us understand the mechanics of the product and gave us an intuitive mental model of viral adoption.”

4. Think about pricing as positioning early on.

“We thought about pricing from the earliest days. Even during our alpha with our first pockets of users, we had a pricing page with a few different plans. It mostly described features we hadn't built yet, but we at least wanted to frame that this is a product we're going to charge for,” says Ofstad.

“We also chose price points from a positioning standpoint — how do we position against the value we think we'll bring to companies? 

We priced more against the Salesforces and ServiceNows of the world, as opposed to the Evernotes and Dropboxes. We did anticipate that people would build applications that power important company processes on Airtable, so we wanted to price accordingly

“The thing we didn't build for quite a while was the actual billing system to charge our customers. We actually had a place, buried in one of our settings pages, where customers could voluntarily put their credit card in, but we didn't charge them. We were amazed because some of our customers actually found this and put their credit cards in and then complained to us that they didn't get charged,” he says.

While this may seem like the ideal problem to have, Ofstad notes two factors that may be overlooked when founders hesitate over getting into pricing too early. “Our customers were worried that Airtable would disappear. So while we’re building pricing from a marketing standpoint, it was also important to convey that we were here to build a durable business,” he says.

“And I think I would be skeptical myself if I start using a product and it's not clear how they're making money. You wonder: Are they gonna sell my data? Are they going to totally price gouge later on? That transparency is actually good for the customer too, and helps build trust in the product.”

5. Keep your head pointed forward when it comes to the competition:

“We were fortunate to pick a space that didn't have a lot of competition breathing down our neck early on. Of course, we did have comparable products and substitutes that customers would use, like a spreadsheet or a project management app, but those were very different types of products,” he says. “To be honest, no-code wasn't really a thing back in 2012, and B2B productivity software wasn't super sexy — it was very much about consumer social. That afforded us a landscape where there wasn't a lot of direct competition.”

This, of course, is no longer the case. But the increase in competition doesn't faze Ofstad. Instead, here’s his philosophy: “I used to run cross country and track in high school, and my coach would always say, ‘

Don't look behind you. You'll slow down. Just keep your head pointed forward and sense what competition is doing, but don't focus on it too much, because you'll lose track of where you're going

“The best thing you can do is to have your own sense of the vision for where you want to go and to make sure you're going in that direction. But of course, you can learn a lot from other products in the ecosystem, see what cool products are launching and understand what people are using and how the consumer tastes are adjusting.”

Staying savvy on good products and trends in the broader ecosystem is super important. But that’s different than focusing on your direct competitors and getting into a myopic state of, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta build this because they did.’ That's counterproductive.

FINDING TRACTION: THE “AHA” CUSTOMER MOMENT

Product-market fit isn’t a singular moment in time — and 

. But looking back, there tends to be an “aha” moment for the founders, where it all clicks into place.

“There are a couple of different milestones that stand out. When you initially see one person getting value out of the product, like our friend using us for video production. Or when you first see a team using us and getting value out of it — we had a nonprofit that was like 10 or 15 people that started using us early on for managing all of their applicants,” he says.

But the moment that sticks with Ofstad was much more visceral. “We landed with WeWork and it grew virally within the company, going more or less wall-to-wall. When I was on this customer tour to New York — after having mostly interacted with customers over the support channel or Zoom — 

I visited WeWork. I looked around and everybody's computer monitor had Airtable open. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is actually a thing. People use it.

’ It became so much more real at that point. That was the first moment when I thought we'd actually built something that might make it.”

Sitting here in 2022, it seems safe to say they did indeed make it. But for Ofstad, the journey is far from over. 

“We're constantly trying to make the product easier to use. And that's both for the person that's building apps on top of Airtable, as well as the end-user who's using those apps. We’re obviously focusing on the enterprise more and more, on our customers who are running large departmental and company-wide processes on Airtable. So there's a lot we have to do around larger-scale, better permissions, all the things you'd expect,” he says.

“More and more, we're thinking of Airtable as a connected apps platform, and that's the category we're defining. What that means is we want to give individual teams and departments control over building and deploying their own software while at the same time, connecting to shared data sets and shared tables that help to break down silos within organizations.” (If you’d like to dive deeper into Airtable’s long-term strategy here, we recommend 

Art for Paths to Product Market Fit Series - green and red background, featuring graph and squiggly line elements (representing the long, winding journey), along with photos of Todd Jackson and Andrew Ofstad

Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit

In the first post for our new series, "Paths to Product-Market Fit," Airtable co-founder Andrew Ofstad sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the inside story of the no-code platform's long journey and the challenges they came across while building a horizontal product. 

In the first post for our new series, co-founder Andrew Ofstad shares key milestones on Airtable's path to PMF.

Maven's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Leveraging Community in the Early Days

This is the second installment in our series on product-market fit, spearheaded by First Round partner 

 (former VP of Product at Dropbox, Product Director at Twitter, co-founder of 

, and PM at Google and Facebook). Jackson shares more about what inspired the series in 

And be sure to catch up on the first installment of our Paths to Product-Market series in 

this interview with Airtable co-founder Andrew Ofstad

Plenty of successful businesses have been built by founders who weren’t their product’s core customers. But 

was created on a bedrock of founder and CEO 

’s commitment to creating better healthcare outcomes for women, for parents-to-be, and more broadly for parents — just like herself and her cohort of friends.

As Ryder entered her 30s and found herself surrounded by people starting to have kids, she got an up-close look at just how underserved this segment of the population was in the healthcare system.

It’s one of the most pivotal moments in any new parent’s life: You step out of the hospital doors, delicately strap your newborn into their carefully-chosen car seat and head home for the first time — leaving the safety of the hospital (and the expertise of its doctors and nurses) behind. “It’s such a vulnerable feeling. You leave the hospital and just think, ‘Well, what now?’” says Ryder.

“An OBGYN once said to me: ‘There are five things that need to happen when you’re starting a family. There’s getting pregnant, the actual pregnancy, the delivery, postpartum recovery — and then there’s the cost of it all. And typically two of the five things go wrong,” she says.

Pregnancy, childbirth and early parenthood form a complex, tangled web of healthcare components: fertility doctors, genetic counselors, pediatricians, doulas, lactation consultants, pelvic floor therapists and so on. “They’re all disconnected, many are not accessible through insurance, and families are expected to navigate this maze on their own to find the right team to meet their needs,” says Ryder.

To tackle this delta head-on, she founded Maven, now the largest telemedicine clinic catering to women and families. The company hit unicorn status in 2021 after 

 — making it the first female-led telemedicine startup to achieve the accolade (and along the way to building a billion-dollar company, she’s had three kids of her own). Just recently, Maven announced a 

Maven’s platform combines an expansive, specialized telehealth network of more than 30 provider types with individual care navigation to support all parents and all paths to parenthood, from fertility through pregnancy, parenting and pediatrics. 

Although Maven is a B2B company (most folks access the platform for free through their employer or payer that partners with Maven), the path to product-market fit started with a B2C community, opening up conversations and solutions for women looking for answers to their most personal questions about their health and family-planning journeys. As Ryder tells it, this consumer-first phase of the company was critical to unlocking the insights she needed to begin building a B2B product.

With sights on building a company, some founders go get industry experience — or start diving into product building and learn as they go. Ryder took a different path, taking a role with a different altitude so she could learn about many markets and zero in on where there was the most room to build.

“I had been working as a journalist, writing about finance and business for 

but I wanted to start a company. My dad was an entrepreneur, and my mom and aunt also had a business together. I grew up around it,” says Ryder. To get closer to the action, she took a job as an associate at Index Ventures at their London office in 2012 — and made a peculiar pitch in her interview loop. “I didn’t know at the time what company I wanted to start, but I knew I wanted to start something. During the interview, I made it clear that I didn’t necessarily want to climb the ladder to become a VC. I wanted to get up close and learn about starting a company, and I was willing to do whatever job they needed in the meantime while I learned the ropes,” says Ryder.

For the next two years, she drank from the firehose, learning the ins and outs of the fundraising process, picking up on what firms are looking for when they cut a check and building a network of founders and investors — many of whom would later angel invest in Ryder’s eventual idea for Maven. 

On the side, she started playing around with a few different ideas, including a vitamin subscription box tailored to folks with genetic diseases in their family, a concept that she abandoned after realizing the vast complexities that come with a physical supply-chain business. She also toyed with an idea to make ramen healthy — think a cup of noodles that’s like a shot of B12 vitamins. But her lessons from the VC world taught her to go after the largest possible market, so she expanded her scope. 

Whenever she sat down with friends to catch up over drinks, the conversation always seemed to lead back to one topic: family planning and fertility. “As my friends and I entered our 30s, it was all we could talk about at times. I had friends that had difficulty conceiving and needed fertility treatments, and others who had really complicated pregnancies or debilitating postpartum depression. There’s no one-size-fits-all experience when it comes to having a child,” says Ryder. 

And as a VC associate, Ryder was beginning to read the tea leaves that the industry was starting to shift, opening up new opportunities to increase access to high-quality care. “At Index, I saw that digital health was really in its first inning. In 2013 telehealth was beginning to gain a little bit of traction. But women’s health and family planning were still largely underserved,” she says. 

Ultimately, Ryder was looking for room to build. She’d seen up close that the most successful founders made space to pivot and iterate away from their original vision. “Healthcare is an incredibly complex problem. But it’s also a huge industry, which means there’s room to pivot around until you find product-market fit if your first idea doesn’t hit,” she says.

Pivoting is key to creating a lasting business. Don’t choose a problem that’s so narrow that you don’t have the space to explore other ideas.

Still working in venture and living in London, Ryder hopped across the pond to conduct a few focus groups in the U.S., assembling a group of around 50 women to go deep on the problem. “I wanted to really validate whether or not this was just a problem my friends were experiencing or if it was a universal problem,” she says. 

Far too often, folks building companies in fields that they’re the target audience for skip this step, instead jumping straight to building. But extensive problem validation is critical, even if you’ve got a super strong hunch and some anecdotal feedback to support your hypothesis.

To fortify her footing, Ryder facilitated discussions with cohorts of 10-15 women around all things pregnancy and family planning. “I asked tons of questions about how they related to their health care. A key theme that arose was access — whether it was problems around lack of access to specialists through insurance, limited time to access mental health care for postpartum depression with a newborn at home or financial barriers to fertility treatments,” she says. “You’d hear stories about a woman needing to see a pelvic floor specialist after giving birth, but no appointments were open for three months with a doctor in their network. It was clear through these conversations that this was a much wider problem than just my group of friends,” she says. 

Women are asked to be the Chief Medical Officers of their homes. I wanted to give them a team of experts at their fingertips.

Don’t shy away from competition early on.

To further assess the existing landscape, Ryder also brought would-be competitors into the focus group circles. “There were a couple of telehealth companies and wellness communities that existed at that time, so I put them up on the screen just to get the focus group’s reactions,” she says.

“We had just talked about these problems in the healthcare field, and these were the companies trying to tackle some of those challenges. What did they think of the value prop? I vividly remember one of the women saying she thought it looked like a real estate company,” says Ryder. “The first wave of digital health companies seemed to over-index on regulatory compliance and speaking to providers. They weren’t tech companies building delightful customer experiences. That’s when I knew there was a huge opportunity.”

Ryder had thrown a dart and felt like she hit a bullseye on the problem. She was still working full-time at Index, but knew she was nearing the inflection point where she needed to focus 100% of her energy on Maven. “In December 2013 I went to lunch with Kevin Johnson, an Index partner who was focused on biotech and softly pitched him my idea for a women’s virtual health clinic. He bought in and wrote a $50,000 check,” says Ryder.

This was a signal that it was time to focus on Maven full-time, and start assembling the early team. But rather than over-rotate on finding the person with the most stacked credentials, she focused on mission alignment. “We didn’t look like a traditional founding team. I see other founders who obsess over getting folks on board with dazzling resumes. But I wanted people who would run through walls to achieve our goal,” says Ryder.

Startups are incredibly hard work and they require grit. The thing that gets you through those tough moments is a deep commitment and belief in the mission and solving the problem.

So she looked for the early team in some unconventional nooks and crannies:

“The first person I called was my friend 

A couple of years back she had pitched me an idea for a mocktail for pregnant women, so I knew she was interested in working in a similar space. She agreed to be our first employee on a part-time basis as our Director of Editorial and Community,” says Ryder. While not the conventional first startup hire, Ryder had the conviction that content was going to play a huge role in the paradigm shift that was required to get folks comfortable using telehealth solutions. 

Non-technical founders often fret about how to find the technical talent they need to bring their visions to life. Ryder’s counsel is to get creative and stay persistent with putting yourself out there. To find her founding front-end engineer, she canvassed engineering meetups, where she met her next hire. “I basically walked up to everyone there and asked if they were an engineer and whether they were interested in healthcare. And 

 was the first person who said yes. We went and had lunch together and I told her about the company and the mission, and she agreed to do some work on the side,” she says.

•Put on your founder hat — even off the clock. 

, crossed paths with Ryder in unlikely fashion. “I was attending my best friend’s wedding and knew Zach was going to be in attendance, and that he was a top-notch engineer. I switched the seating cards so that I ended up sitting next to Zach and basically pitched him on the idea of joining Maven for the entire wedding,” she says. 

BUILDING THE MVP AND FUNDRAISING: LEVERAGING COMMUNITY TO EXPAND ON THE EARLY VISION

Tapping into her network of investors and entrepreneurs, Ryder admits that assembling the company’s early fundraising efforts were unusually smooth sailing, eventually closing a $1.2M friends and family round. 

Ryder and her husband then moved back stateside to start building a digital health clinic specifically for women’s and family health, where folks could access specialists for their unique needs, not just a one-size-fits-all solution the healthcare system was dishing out. 

They started tackling the process of getting connected to providers who would eventually join the digital clinic, building a web-based practitioner onboarding assessment to screen potential leads and vet quality. “Getting the first couple dozen providers to sign on was pretty easy. Women’s health is so underserved — we have the highest maternal death rate in the developed world. The believers were excited to join our mission,” she says. 

To expand beyond those early evangelists, though, Ryder had to get creative. 

She combed insurance company websites for provider addresses and sent them marketing postcards with the tagline, “Do you want to revolutionize women’s health?”

 which directed them to the provider webpage with the screener questions. 

Inspired by the focus group conversations, Ryder also started building a B2C community where folks could connect with one another.

 “I wanted to create a digital community where women could continue to have these conversations, ask questions and help one another tackle the tangled web of our healthcare system. This approach would also help us continue to prove out our concept as we were thinking about raising money,” she says. 

They spun up a low-lift digital community within a few months and launched in beta, with the goal to eventually convert these community members to digital clinic patients, once the telemedicine platform was built. 

Ryder remembers the exact moment she felt like the digital community was catching on. “A community member asked a simple question, and we had four different provider types answering to add their input — an OB-GYN, a doula, a midwife and a nutritionist. Oftentimes, the answers to fertility and parenting questions aren’t black and white. It was incredible to see so many different perspectives represented in a community forum,” she says.  

As the community continued to pick up speed, building out the digital clinic required more capital, so Ryder set her sights on raising more money from institutional investors to start getting the company off the ground. But on the next leg of her fundraising journey, she faced a much sharper incline. “Back in 2013 and 2014, very few VC firms had female investors on their teams. And most men at the time just weren’t buying into our core belief — and our data — that this was a universal problem. They thought women’s health was niche and cringed when we would bring up things like pelvic floor therapy,” she said. 

But stories from Maven’s customers — women underserved by the healthcare system — kept her pushing forward after doors kept slamming shut. After 40 rejections, Maven’s Series A round was eventually led by Lauren Brueggen, a mom of three from a small B2B fund who believed in the problem. Since then, most of Maven’s additional rounds have been led by female investors. 

And as they continued building out the MVP for the digital clinic, Ryder and her team tapped back into the consumer community for feedback. “We knew eventually the economics for Maven relied on selling to employers, but we wanted to learn as much as possible from consumers. 

Even if you’re building a B2B product, find a way to get that direct line to your customers in the early days.

Eventually, Maven launched the virtual clinic in April 2015 with 300 providers. And while Ryder and the team set their sights on a flood of traffic and booked appointments on launch day, that wasn’t quite what happened. 

“At the time, we were one of the first apps to be built with Swift, an iOS programming language that Apple developed. Talking to folks on the Apple side, they were definitely winking that they would feature us in the App Store on our launch day. I remember writing to all the providers that they should prepare to open up their schedules because there was going to be a huge influx of patients coming from this Apple feature,” says Ryder. “But Apple didn’t actually end up featuring Maven. I think on launch day we got one doula appointment from someone who had 

It turned out that changing consumer behavior when telemedicine was just entering the parlance was a tricky needle to thread. “This was 2015. Talking to a doctor over FaceTime was much newer and weirder at the time,” says Ryder. 

Her advice to other founders? Don’t get deterred, and do the things that don’t scale. To generate more user signups, the Maven team encouraged providers to jump into the consumer Maven community and answer questions that folks were posing to the group, which pushed some of those community users to sign up for the digital clinic and access more expertise. Ryder and team also pounded the pavement. “We would stand in a park and try to sign consumers up with field marketing. We’d hire a bunch of interns to go canvas the city and try to get eight appointments. We set up a table at the New York Marathon. It was a grind,” remembers Ryder.

Make sure your early team is really mission-driven and ready for the bumps — because there will always be bumps.

Maven also started making the push towards their ultimate goal: selling to employers. Ryder tailored the pitch accordingly. “Employers are in the best position to buy — they want happy and healthy employees and they want women to come back to work after having babies. So I was going around to different employers and speaking their language about how Maven could help them cut their high healthcare costs and provide a compelling benefit that stands out from competitors,” she says. 

The company’s initial pitch to employers was centered on its first enterprise offering, Maven Maternity. The value prop was that by offering Maven as a free benefit, their employees could have safer, healthier pregnancies and deliveries with access to the specialists they need — thus smoothing the path to a happier and healthier return to work. They would also have support during key areas of maternity that were absent in the care model: like supporting women through miscarriage, and during the postpartum period. 

The first corporation that signed on was the Clinton Foundation, with Snap following shortly after. By 2017, Maven launched its second enterprise offering, Maven Fertility. This product covered all pathways to parenthood, including surrogacy, adoption, egg freezing, and IVF/IUI. It was another key area of the family care model that was underserved by the current system of care, and Maven’s product supported both couples suffering from infertility as well as providing equitable support to LGBTQ+ community looking to start families.  

In retrospect, the path to product-market fit for Maven was a story of the power of networks. From the initial idea coming from conversations amongst friends, to her earliest employees and first checks, there were multiple personal touchpoints that drastically impacted the company’s trajectory. Even the name Maven was solidified when Ryder emailed a list of 10 name ideas to her closest friends, who voted for their favorites. 

Fast forward to today and the Maven platform now has more than 2,000 doctors, caretakers and specialists spanning 30+ specialties and 350+ subspecialties in its network and has 15 million lives under management. Most customers access Maven through their employer, including more than half of the Fortune 15, and the company sells to health plans as well, recently inking a partnership with Blue Shield of California and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. 

As for what’s next, once again the power of Maven’s community roots is influencing the company’s direction and they’ve recently added services and specialists for menopause, based on conversations and interest in Maven’s digital health community. They are continuing to expand their global offering as well. Maven now covers nearly 1 million lives outside of the US, and they continue to see massive global demand for equitable family-building financial support and care.

Photo of Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder and First Round Partner Todd Jackson

Maven's Path to Product-Market Fit

In the second post for our new series, "Paths to Product-Market Fit," Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the inside story of the first female-led telemedicine startup to achieve unicorn status.

Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder unpacks the key milestones on the journey to product-market fit.

Retool’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Getting to 100 Happy Customers, Faster

This is the third installment in our series on product-market fit, spearheaded by First Round partner 

And be sure to catch up on the first two installments of our Paths to Product-Market series in 

this interview with Maven founder Kate Ryder.

We touch technology every day — from the ride-share service we call to get to work, to the credit card we swipe to purchase food, to the fitness app we use for our favorite workout.

But rarely do we pause to think about what’s happening on the backend. Whirring in the background of any operation — whether it’s a two-person startup or a Fortune 500 company — is a complex network of internal software that keeps everything running smoothly. 

Without internal tools, like admin dashboards and customer support apps, companies can’t sustainably scale, serve their users or optimize their products. In other words, they can never achieve operational excellence. This, in essence, is what 

’s mission is: to help companies build the high-quality internal tools they need to grow quickly and effectively. 

While Retool has hundreds of customers today and continues to grow at an impressive rate, it wasn’t always clear that his company was going to succeed. Hsu had to overcome many hurdles — from ignoring the naysayers who told him to abandon his idea to sending out thousands of cold emails — to get to where he is today. 

But to understand the full journey, we have to rewind to Hsu’s Oxford days.   

A natural-born tinkerer and thinker, Hsu attended Oxford to pursue a dual degree in Computer Science and Philosophy. During his time there, he worked on five to 10 different side projects with his friends. But no matter what he was trying to build, he always ran into the same hurdle: internal tools. 

“We were spending probably half of our time on internal tools. And as lazy engineers, we were like, ‘There has to be a faster way of doing all this stuff.’ So that's where the core idea for Retool came from.”