Building a Growth Framework Towards a $100 Million Product — Brian Balfour

First Round Capital’s PMF framework consists of four levels: nascent, developing, strong, extreme

1. Level one: Nascent product-market fit. Likely a pre-seed or seed-stage company. The goal in this stage is to find three to five customers with a problem worth solving, engage with them, deliver a solution, and validate that solution. [examples: Vanta, L

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Invest in product, and build something customers love,  Define your ideal buyer persona,  Come up with your acquisition strategy // build your flywheel,  Determine your payment model,  Drive towards efficiency

The Four Fits ModelThis model serves as a tool to define the most important questions and hypotheses you have to answer when thinking from first principles about your growth strategy.Market-Product Fit: What problem are you solving? Whom does it solve for? And what are potential solutions?Product-Channel Fit: What are one or two distribution and ac... See more

- Get the product right then focus on growth - get your team to think in terms of fact and hypothesis. " - Growth isn’t just spending money it’s figuring out how to create a flywheel that will generate word of mouth marketing. - Get your shortlist about your first users and learn everything about them and begin to market.

The second most consistent pattern across these companies was an inseparable alignment between the product roadmap and the growth engine. Surviving in B2C is all about finding an efficient (aka cheap) growth channel.

Since this essay is targeting at startups, I’m going to mostly focus on the first few stages of the framework and the skills that it implies for your new hire. If you look at each stage, they roughly imply a different set of problems you are trying to face – first, finding product/market fit and building the initial “atomic network” — a stable set ... See more