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

(instrumental music plays) Finding product market fit is the single most important thing that your startup does in the first three years. And it's just under-explored and it's just under-explained 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 Ps 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.

Hearing level three tells me level two is basically your pivot from, "I'm just grinding, selling, pitching."

This is where it starts to get fun.

(instrumental music plays) 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 was product lead for Gmail for four years. He was product manager of Facebook's news feed, photos and groups, including leading a major redesign of the news feed. 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 First Round 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. They're turning this framework into a three-month program for founders. And in this conversation, Todd shares an exclusive peek into the program, in particular the stages of product market fit. We talk about how to know which stage you're in, what to do if you're stuck in that stage, and also what you can change in order to get unstuck. If you're a founder or building a new product within a company and feeling like you're not making as much progress as you'd hope, you will find tremendous value in this conversation. With that, I bring you Todd Jackson, after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. And hundreds of other companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently launched AuthKit, a complete authentication and user management service. It's essentially a modern alternative to Auth0, but with better pricing and more flexible APIs. AuthKit's design is stunning out of the box, and you can also fully customize it to fit your app's brand. It's an effortless experience from your first user all the way to your largest enterprise customer. Best of all, AuthKit is free for any developer up to one million users. Check it out at workos.com/lenny to learn more. That's workos.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. Todd, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.