SPRING 2025
March 30th - April 2nd
FALL 2025
Dates to be announced
Join a free, intensive 4-day experience designed for exceptional B2B founders early in building epic companies. Uncover what customers really need, build the right V1 product, and close your first commercial contracts.
Join a free, intensive 4-day experience designed for exceptional B2B founders early in building epic companies. Uncover what customers really need, build the right V1 product, and close your first commercial contracts.
Most people describe finding product-market fit as an art, not a science. But when it comes to sales-led B2B, we’ve reverse engineered a method to find it. After two decades of pre-product-market fit investments and hundreds of founder interviews, we’ve created a series of tactical sessions for taking a straighter path to PMF.
- Unearth what customers are truly willing to pay for
Stop asking questions that get the answers you want to hear. Learn proven techniques to get to the truth of what customers really need — and what they’ll buy.
- Build a product that can become a big business
Validate that your product insight has a credible path to at least $100M in ARR within ~8 years by examining the dynamics of the market, not just its size or growth potential.
- Land your first enterprise contracts
Sign your first few design partners, iterate with them and begin to build what can become a repeatable go-to-market approach.
- Find your people
Building a company is lonely. There’s no cure like working alongside a tight group of other top 1% B2B founders at your same stage.
- Get hard-earned insights from founders of $1B+ B2B companies
Learn from founders who are where you want to be. They'll reveal inflection points and share the tactics they used to get unstuck along their paths to product-market fit.
[ Sonoma ]Session 01
Levels of PMFBuild a foundational understanding of our product-market fit framework including the four levels of PMF, from nascent to extreme — with detailed examples of companies that worked and those that didn’t.
READ MORE
[ Sonoma ]Session 02
Customer Discovery & the 4PsEveryone says talk to customers, but most founders just listen for what they want to hear. Learn proven techniques for “dollar driven discovery” and develop your “4Ps” hypothesis: persona, problem, promise, product.
[ Sonoma ]Session 03
Market SelectionToo many founders focus on the house they’re building — not the neighborhood it’s in. Determine whether your chosen market can support a viable venture-scale business with a credible path to at least $100M in ARR.
[ Sonoma ]Session 04
Founder-Led SalesMany technical founders are great at building a product but less great at selling it. We’ll dive into outreach tactics to feed the top of your funnel and show you how to move customers through it. Land your first design partners and begin to build repeatable revenue.
[ San Francisco ]Session 05
PositioningGain clarity on how to talk about your product in plain English: who it’s for, what it is, and what makes it unique and desirable relative to what your target persona already knows.
[ San Francisco ]Session 06
Product Iteration & PivotsLearn how to think about early product iteration to build a successful MVP. We’ll go over specific success metrics to look for, how to know when the product is “good enough,” and what signs point to a pivot.
Beyond the retreat
MEET THE TEAM
At First Round, we've been investing in pre-product-market fit companies for 20 years. We backed Square, Notion, Together, Verkada and Looker when they were just a couple of founders still figuring out how to build something customers needed.
