First Round Capital

Most people describe finding PMF as an art, not a science. We're here to change that. Introducing PMF Method. After 20 years and 500+ investments in pre-product-market fit companies, we've drawn on our data and worked with some of the world's most iconic enterprise founders, distilling what they did in their first 6 months into a free 14-week intensive experience that helps sales-led B2B founders build epic companies. In tactical sessions, we help early founders discover what customers really want, build the right v1 product, and close your first sales — all while keeping 100% of your equity. You'll work alongside a tight group of other builders at your same stage, and get to learn from the hard-earned insights from founders of $1B+ B2B companies, like Vanta's Christina Cacioppo, Looker's lloyd tabb, Plaid's Zachary Perret, Ironclad's Jason Boehmig, Lattice's Jack Altman, and Verkada's Filip Kaliszan. The Summer 2024 session of PMF Method runs from 5/29 to 8/28. Any early founder working on a new B2B SaaS company is welcome to apply — just get your application in by 5/7 (or tag a founder friend below!) More details, FAQs, and application link in the comments below 👇

The In Depth podcast by First Round Capital is perhaps one of the top three product strategy podcasts, along with Lenny Rachitsky's podcast and Unsolicited Feedback by Reforge. I recently read the episode featuring Adam Nash co-founder and CEO at Daffy, in conversation with Brett Berson of First Round Capital. Adam shared refreshing takes on product management/development, drawing from his experience at companies like LinkedIn, eBay, and his current venture. Here are 3 of my favorite snippets and the link to the episode 👇

There are probably 20 good pieces written on product management for every 1 written on analytics. I'm not sure why that is, because there is incredible leverage in getting your analytics org right at every stage of growth. Jessica Lachs wrote the best new thing on analytics in a long time: 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐎𝐫𝐠 𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐒𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 — 𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐚 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐚𝐭 𝐃𝐨𝐨𝐫𝐃𝐚𝐬𝐡. Full essay is below - it is well worth the read.

If you’ve only got a handful of early customers, analytics might feel like a future problem. But before you know it, you’ve got thousands of users and reams of data, and you’re in desperate need of some dedicated analytics help to make sense of it all. In this guide, long-time DoorDash VP of Analytics and startup adviser Jessica Lachs explains how to build a data org from the ground up — just like she did at DoorDash. She offers a detailed framework for how to structure the team at each stage of a startup’s lifecycle with examples from her years at DoorDash, from making the first few hires herself to leading a 300-person global org. Link to the full article in the comments.

“There’s a tendency when you’re early to be like, 'We’re just missing this one thing…' That actually masks the signs of PMF. When the need is large enough, people will buy your product and wait for you to build the rest of the features. That’s actually the main indicator that you have a product that’s worthwhile.” - Kareem Amin, co-founder of Clay. In the latest installment of our Paths to PMF series, Amin walks us through the past seven years of building Clay, unspooling every lesson he’s learned in maintaining focus, the different challenges of building a horizontal product with a specific customer in mind, and the importance of founder psychology in startups. Read here: https://lnkd.in/gZMjqApz

I read this post by First Round Capital yesterday and shared it with a client, but I read it again and realized there are some amazing stories and nuggets in here and wanted to share here. Definitely one of the best up and coming, finding PMF stories I've read in a while. I don't know the team at Clay, but they've been getting a lot of hype from the sales world. I used their product in a trial and you quickly started to understand the hype. My key takeaways: - Persistence, persistence, persistence. As the title suggests, it took them a long time to get to where they are. I remember Spenser, CEO/cofounder at Amplitude telling me that his number one goal when starting his company was to work at it for at least two years, if not longer, since that was a key indicator of success for a lot of startups - Mental health tips. I can't stress this one enough. As someone who has experienced his own fair share of mental health issues and witnessed them around me, these are all amazing tips and some that I actively practice today. - How to focus on the right problem when you have such big ambitions for your product AND get it right. Definitely worth the read!! https://lnkd.in/gKzTNVeE

Malleability is a startup’s greatest weapon — but like all strengths, it’s a double-edged sword. I like this framing from Clay co-founder Kareem Amin, that there's a time and a place for it: "You can be malleable when you're defining what the product is, but once you’ve taken a pass at that, you need to harden it when you try to go out to market. You can’t be changing the value prop or even the product itself from meeting to meeting." This is a mistake I see a lot of early-stage founders making, and it's a pitfall that Clay ran into early on, too. The team has been on 🔥 for the past 18 months, but it’s no overnight success story. They’ve been quietly plugging away to land on the right messaging and product — for almost 6 years before breaking out. "We were being too malleable when we were trying to sell Clay early on, which made it even harder to separate the signal from the noise. A prospect can say, 'Oh, could you guys do that?', or 'Are you guys this?' And then you can become that, quite easily. What I’ve learned is that you have to know when to be malleable. When you narrow the scope, it feels claustrophobic. Why are we doing something that’s smaller when we could be doing something bigger? Eventually, we realized that by narrowing down our scope, we were actually increasing our value." More positioning and ICP wisdom from Kareem on The Review today (link to the story in the comments)

If you just looked at the headlines, you'd see that Clay has 10Xed YoY for 2 years, raised at a $500M valuation, grown to 100K users, etc. etc. It's crazy impressive breakout growth in a short amount of time — but below the surface, there's a lot more to the story, of course. Very few startups talk truly openly about the struggle of finding PMF, about how long it actually took them, about the doubts and uncertainties along the way. Clay co-founder Kareem Amin is the rare exception. As he shares on The Review today, it's been a long exercise in patience, focus, and thoughtful deliberation to get to the milestones they've shared today. Those traits shine through in Clay's culture, product, and in Kareem's introspection about what he's learned in the past 7 years. Biased, but I think it makes for an interesting read (article in the comments).

An insane example of the importance of nailing marketing positioning. Same product, new message, very different results. (Something us Product Marketers know too well) 2020 - Clay was struggling with growth. Their audience and message was too broad. 2024 - Clay narrowed their target audience and their message. They just raised $62M with the traction.

The reality is that this “overnight success” was 7 years in the making, as this timeline shows... What’s even more impressive is that this explosion in growth largely took place in the past 18 months or so. (As recently as spring 2022, Clay was still close to $0 in revenue.) Congrats Kareem Amin