summer 2024
may 29 - august 28
application deadline
may 7, 2024
Introducing PMF Method, a free 14-week intensive experience designed to help exceptional B2B founders build epic companies. Uncover what customers really need, build the right V1 product, and close your first commercial contracts.
Introducing PMF Method, a free 14-week intensive experience designed to help exceptional B2B founders build 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. We’ve worked with some of the world’s most iconic enterprise founders and turned what they did in their first six months into 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 County ]Session 01
Levels of PMFBuild a foundational understanding of our product-market fit framework including the four levels of PMF, from nascent to extreme.
READ MORE
[ Sonoma County ]Session 02
Discovery & the 4PsEveryone says talk to customers, but most founders just listen for what they want to hear. Develop your company hypothesis with the “4Ps” — persona, problem, promise, product — then use it to validate what you know and de-risk what you don’t.
[ Sonoma County ]Session 03
Market ValidationToo 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.
[ San Francisco ]Session 04
Customer Discovery FeedbackAvoid a bloated product with a bunch of less than useful features. We’ll connect you with 5+ potential customers, review your customer calls with an emphasis on dollar-driven discovery, and help you dig in to get to the kernel of truth.
[ 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
Design PartnersLand your first design partners by covering how to approach partnerships, think about pricing, and tactically build agreements so you can expand design partners into true commercial contracts.
[ San Francisco ]Session 07
Product IterationLearn 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.
[ San Francisco ]Session 08
Founder-Led SalesMany technical founders are great at building product and less great at selling it. But sales is a very learnable skill. We’ll dive into warm and cold outreach tactics to feed the top of your funnel and show you how to move customers through it.
[ San Francisco ]Session 09
FinaleAs the culmination of all your work, you’ll start to evangelize what you’re doing with a trusted group of builders, angels and customers.
Beyond the sessions
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.
