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

**Todd Jackson** (0:00)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:08)
You've been working on a product market fit framework.

**Todd Jackson** (0:11)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:22)
There's essentially four levels of product market fit, nascent, developing, strong, extreme.

**Todd Jackson** (0:27)
Roughly 60% are never gonna get past L2.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:29)
These four P's is essentially what you should try to change if you're stuck.

**Todd Jackson** (0:34)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:41)
Curing level three tells me level two, it's basically your pivot from, I'm just grinding, selling, pitching.

**Todd Jackson** (0:47)
This is where it starts to get fun.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:53)
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 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 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, I don't 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.
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