Todd Jackson

Big @firstround news today! We’re launching Product-Market Fit Method (a free intensive 14-week experience for early founders building epic B2B SaaS companies) and publishing the first session on our internal framework for all to read (with benchmarks, Looker's real data, and tactical advice from iconic enterprise founders). Even though finding product-market fit is the single most important thing for a startup, it’s still underexplored and seen as more art than science. We wanted to change that. I’ve personally talked to hundreds of founders about this topic, digging into what they did in the first 6-9 months of company building. (We’ve published dozens of those interviews on The Review in our “Paths to PMF” series.) This video previews some of what we learned — thanks to @christinacaci, @zachperret, @lloydtabb, @jboehmig, & @jaltma for sharing their lessons! In addition to that research, we’ve also drawn from our own 20 years of data and 500+ pre-PMF investments. What emerged was a very consistent set of patterns for sales-led B2B companies — the basis for our new framework and PMF Method’s 8 tactical sessions. In the program, we help early founders discover what customers really want, build the right v1 product, and close their first enterprise sales. We ran a beta version late last year with a tight-knit group of founders (ex Stripe, Plaid, Airbnb, Twitter, Greenhouse, Grammarly) and the feedback was great — my personal favorite was: "I feel like I shaved 12 months off the time it would take us to get to PMF.” Here are a few key dates and details: - The Summer 2024 session of PMF Method runs 5/29 - 8/28. - Application deadline is 11:59 PDT May 7th. - Any early founder working on a new B2B SaaS company is welcome to apply. Bonus points if you’re technical, have a clear product idea but haven’t raised yet and are <12 months into working full time on your idea. - PMF Method is 100% free. It costs you $0 and we own 0% of your company. Like with The First Round Review and Angel Track, our mindset is to openly share knowledge that we’ve put hundreds of hours of work into curating with the broader startup community, and give it away for free. That’s why we’ve also published our framework, so every builder can use this resource, even if they don’t do the program (it’s linked in the next post). Check out the links below for more details. Can’t wait to read applications!

This is gonna be 🔥

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Wow. Gumloop has gone from a side project out of a Vancouver bedroom to an AI platform that now automates daily workflows at companies like Shopify, Ramp & Instacart, and a new $50M Series B led by @benchmark (all in ~2+ years!!). It’s been a wild journey for the team, and I feel incredibly fortunate that @firstround led their 2024 seed round. If you tried it a while ago and still think of @Gumloop as just drag-and-drop workflows, I’d *strongly* recommend giving it another shot, as the product has evolved in massive ways. They’ve now added their agent builder, Gumloop Agents (lets anyone at a company build/deploy AI agents across workspaces in minutes) and Gumstack (a separate security product that lets IT teams monitor/control how agents use company data across the org). As a user of theirs said to me recently, ever since Gumstack launched, “Gumloop *IS* Gumloop for Enterprise.” As they’ve built out their product, the Gumloop team has stayed super focused on making it maximally useful to everyone – not just technical folks. IMO, this is a big part of why teams are getting hooked, and usage spreads wall-to-wall, instead of getting stuck in one department. @MaxBrodeurUrbas, @rbehal1729, and their entire team (who are all amazing btw) have been obsessed with this from day 1 and truly stay embedded with their customers, flying to their offices, running hundreds of workshops, shipping features same-day, and personally answering thousands of questions in customer Slack channels. They’re hiring across the board right now, more info below!

This is going to be killer

Our team is growing. If you're a talented, high-conviction individual who supports our mission to build the web for its second user, we'd love to hear from you. - Research - AI/ML - DevRel - Deployed Engineer - Frontend - Backend - Infrastructure jobs.ashbyhq.com/parallel

Profound tells brands where their AI visibility is lacking. Parallel gives them the web research tools to actually fix it. Awesome to see Profound move to @p0.

So excited to partner with @thejamescad and @dbabbs. @tryprofound and @p0 are each building key pieces of a web built for AIs - super special to have Profound Agents use our APIs

It’s a special privilege to be able to partner with companies building on the frontier. Because of this deep partnership with the team at @harvey, AI agents can now search and access content on the web that hasn’t been indexed by search engines built for humans.

Web search infrastructure for AI is quietly becoming one of the most important layers in the stack. Great new collab between @p0 and Harvey. @paraga, @travers00 and the Parallel team built a specialized index of hard-to-reach international legal domains across 60+ countries to surface data that’s previously been effectively invisible to AI, at a scale that's difficult to pull off ("Parallel is solving it for us at a scale we couldn't build in-house.") parallel.ai/blog/case-stud…

@prashant_hq 🤣

@tjack the kanye of agents.

Claude Cowork alternates between blowing my mind and driving me absolutely nuts

@jlgolson 💯

@tjack It’s because it’s SO good in SO many ways, that when it fucks up in really obvious, stupid situations it’s extra super duper enraging. Especially when ten minutes ago it did that same thing just fine.

Most of it seems like buggy behavior. e.g. Can't find the skills file that it literally just told me it saved. Loses context when you bounce across tabs. Etc. But also things that are more just weird about the mental model of what it can access, commands sometimes work / sometimes don't, etc. And obviously crazy that it only runs locally on my computer (when it's awake) and I can't get back to things from another computer.

@tjack Is there a specific category of tasks where it is driving you nuts?

@grinich @burkaygur Huge congrats Michael!! 🙌

Mozilla 🤝 @p0

@jgreze 🍿

Feeling very close to the level of PMF where I have to become a LinkedIn and X influencer. Unclear whether I have it in me.

@a_khomyakov @firstround @jameshonsa 💯

@tjack @firstround @jameshonsa the timing question is so underrated here – seen teams hire FDEs way too early when they're still figuring out product-market fit and the role just doesn't have enough scope yet

Hype for hiring FDEs is at an all-time high...but it's not the right move for every startup. Great new guide on @firstround Review from AI founders who've been in these roles and scaled these functions in their previous lives (folks like @jameshonsa who built out Ironclad's version of FDEs and is now up to something really interesting with Genera). review.firstround.com/so-you-want-to…

@intrater Love it John

@tjack Been thinking about this a lot for my kids. Where I landed was to pair on something fun and explain how it works along the way. madebymiller.games

My middle school CS teacher emailed me yesterday asking what I think she should be teaching her students right now. I'm trying to give her a good answer, but I'm honestly not sure. I think they should try all the vibecoding tools...but is it actually still useful to learn how to code by hand? I could argue it both ways. Does anyone have thoughts on this?

@duncanmapes Great point. HyperCard for me 😃

@tjack Need to hook them on “building stuff”. The tools will change. I coded my first website with MS front page for crying out loud.