All of our First-time founders articles

Starting Up

Is Your Startup Idea Any Good? Borrow These Validation Tactics from the Founders of Linear, Mercury and More

Founders share the unconventional ways they found conviction in their startup ideas.

Starting Up

To Learn a New Market, Start by Building Your Product — Tactics From a Twitter PM Turned Healthcare Founder

Color co-founder and CEO Othman Laraki built a billion-dollar company in an industry he had zero professional experience in. Here, he shares four product-building tactics that helped him learn the healthcare industry.

Product

The Story Behind Owner’s Pivots to a Billion-Dollar Business

Owner co-founder and CEO Adam Guild shares his unique entrepreneurial journey, featuring a six-figure Minecraft server, his mom's failing dog grooming business and a 180-degree pandemic pivot.

In Depth

How rejecting conventional wisdom grew Sentry to a $3 billion company | David Cramer (Co-founder and CPO)

David Cramer is a self-taught engineer who dropped out of high school in 9th grade and managed a Burger King. He worked hard and rejected conventional wisdom to co-found Sentry, the leading open-source error monitoring tool used by over 90,000 companies.

Product

How to Build for a Market That Doesn’t Exist Yet — Braze’s Path to Product-Market Fit

The Braze founding team shares all the early moves they made to lay the path to IPO.

Starting Up

Thinking About Taking the Founder Leap? Here’s How to Prep for the Emotional Gauntlet

How to start building your emotional toolkit for the founder journey ahead, with advice from psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt.

Product

From Weekend Project to Fortune 10 Adoption — Reducto's Path to Product-Market Fit

Adit Abraham, co-founder and CEO of Reducto, shares how he closed millions in ARR and a Fortune 10 customer with no sales hires.

Product

How dbt Labs Built a $4.2B Software Business out of a Two-Person Consultancy

Tristan Handy, CEO and co-founder of dbt Labs, shares the unorthodox moves he made to transform a Philly-based consultancy into a billion-dollar SaaS powerhouse.

Starting Up

You’re Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead

Founders are responsible for figuring out how their business is going to grow. Use these tactics — specifically designed for founders — to uncover your most impactful growth levers.

In Depth

Scrappy tactics and a huge post-COVID pivot | Owner’s unconventional journey to product-market fit | Adam Guild (Co-founder and CEO of Owner)

Adam Guild is the co-founder and CEO at Owner, an online food ordering system for independent restaurants.

Must-reads

The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2024

For the 12th year in a row, we rounded up 30 timeless company-building insights we published from the year before.

In Depth

How to find and pull startup growth levers | Matt Lerner (Founder and CEO at SYSTM, Author of Growth Levers)

Matt Lerner, Founder/CEO of SYSTM and author of Growth Levers, has helped 200+ seed-stage startups scale up to 100x. He was an early growth leader at PayPal, a partner at 500 Startups, and guest lecturer at Stanford Business School.