A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital)

Finding product market fit is the single most important thing that your startup does in the first three years. And it's just underexplored and it's just underexplained as a topic. You've been working on a product market fit framework. We've published dozens of articles on the first round review, and we have found a very consistent set of patterns, demand, satisfaction, and efficiency. But the interesting thing Is that you don't go for all three of them from the very beginning. There's essentially four levels of product market fit. Nascent, developing, strong, extreme. Roughly 60% are never gonna get past L2. These four P is essentially what you should try to change if you're stuck. You've got the persona. The problem, the promise, and the product. Lattice kept the first one but changed the others. Vanta changed all four. This is where it starts to get fun. Today my guest is Todd Jackson. Todd is a partner at the legendary VC firm First Round Capital.

I rarely have VCs on this podcast. But as Todd shares at the top of this episode, Todd is a very special VC. Prior to moving into Venture, he has product lead for Gmail for four years. He's product manager of Facebook's newsfeed, photos and groups. Including leading a major redesign of the newsfeed. He's also director of product management at Twitter.

and VP of product and design at Dropbox. He's also a founder and sold his company to Twitter. This episode is a very different and special kind of episode. Todd and the team at FirstRound have spent the last year looking at all of their data and the journeys of the hundreds of startups that they've worked with over the years. And through that, have put together a very practical and very actionable framework to help founders find product market fit.

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